A successful IT environment is many things – namely, complex, multi-faceted, and impacts various levels of your day-to-day business operations. As technology touches every level of your organization, it’s crucial your people and processes align with your technologies. IT Assessments are fact-based and holistic approaches to identifying areas for improvement and efficiency within your IT department.
To put it more simply, an IT Assessment answers the question of whether technology services meet the requirements and expectations of your business. You can think of it as an annual health check-up. By performing an IT Assessment, you are likely to uncover opportunities for improvement and risks you never would have been aware of prior.
What is an IT Assessment?
An IT Assessment provides both qualitative and quantitative measurements of IT performance. It provides key insights regarding your staff, your organization, your business alignment, user communication, and risk management. An IT Assessment delivers more than just metrics; it provides valuable industry best practices, root cause analysis, and subject matter expertise to pinpoint actionable results through prioritized recommendations. An IT Assessment equips you with the foundation you need for planning upgrades, migrations, or modifications within your business’s current technology environment.
With this wealth of information, your organization can enhance operations, streamline productivity, unlock tighter system security with reduced risk, and reach greater strides towards revenue goals. The methods applied during the IT Assessment foster a strengthened and collaborative environment where direct dialog, simplified reporting, productive meetings, and clear responsibility and accountability encourage active participation resulting in consensus-based results.
Understanding your IT infrastructure’s strengths and weaknesses will help your team identify what is needed to make changes and continue to grow. The consensus-based results of an IT Assessment include prioritized recommendations and next steps for both IT and non-IT management.
What Should You Expect?
Interviews conducted during an IT Assessment provide user, IT, and executive management perceptions giving insight on where to start making improvements. Multiple interviews conducted across many layers within your organization provide qualitative data giving you better understanding of user, executive, and IT expectations. The consensus built around these expectations forms the basis for deliverables moving forward, including “quick wins”.
Technology is constantly changing, bringing plenty of benefits, and increased risks. The recommendations presented from an IT Assessment help reduce those risks and increase the benefits.
Why Do You Need One?
IT Assessments provide answers to current issues, and the results have a lasting impact on the growth and continuity of your business. An IT Assessment evaluates more than just IT productivity, an IT Assessment also looks at technology’s contribution to the longevity, growth, and prosperity of your organization.
Whether you are experiencing unexpected challenges to your business, recovering from outages, having difficulty meeting regulatory and compliance needs, or struggling to provide remote access for all business functions, an IT Assessment will benefit your organization and the people you serve. When increased demands are placed on IT, you may not be able to implement new initiatives and meet the ever-changing needs dependent on constantly updated technology. After an IT Assessment, areas for improvement are identified and traced to a multitude of systematic, underlying issues.
Interested in Learning More about IT Assessments?
Harvard Partners understands IT Assessments are more than just a series of metrics on a scorecard. We measure performance in four areas: IT Alignment, IT Processes, IT Technologies, and IT Operations. Our core areas of study were developed from observing high-performance IT organizations excel in all four of these disciplines.
To learn more about the difference Harvard Partners can make, get in touch with one of our IT experts today to share your business goals and challenges. Visit our website at www.harvardpartners.com for more information.