Optimal Investment, Not Minimal Investment
It's important to remember that you are looking to optimise spending, which only sometimes translates to minimising expenditures. In other words, you need to lower IT costs without reducing the quality of the service you provide to customers. The dollars you invest in your equipment and infrastructure must be actively making you money in return, so you must spend wisely.
To achieve this:
- Start by identifying your key operational needs.
- Hold discussions and interviews between management and personnel in different areas of your company.
- Examine support tickets and analyse customer satisfaction data.
- Look at other datasets, such as server performance and usage levels across your IT infrastructure.
Collating this quantitative and qualitative data together will indicate areas where your IT infrastructure can be improved.
Armed with a better understanding of your needs, you can implement informed investment decisions, purchasing hardware and software systems that meet your organisation's specific needs.
Realistic Planning for Scaling
Many businesses aim to grow, but this idea of "growth" is too imprecise. Optimising your IT spending will require a more accurate "north star" of where your business is heading. Historical data will help you to understand this — how has your revenue grown in recent years, how many new customers and clients have you acquired, and how has your IT infrastructure and team grown in this time? Cross-referencing this data with your current operational strategy will help you predict growth over the coming years.
Next, consider operational capacity. How much do you have in reserve, and how many more clients can you serve with your existing teams and infrastructure? Scaling effectively means expanding your operational capacity to meet the growing needs of your business. Examining your current growth trajectory and understanding your capacity limits will help you develop a realistic strategy for scaling, which you can then use to inform your investment in IT infrastructure.
Deploying Automated In-House Tools
There are other ways you can expand the capacity of your teams and optimise your IT spending. One way is to harness the advantages of automation. Many of the tasks your teams are handling manually can now be automated, reducing the workload for your personnel.
For example, data entry tasks tend to be time-consuming for human teams, and the monotony of the process leads to increased instances of human error. An automated system can complete this kind of task quickly and easily, eliminating the mistakes that come from manual inputs. Investing in automated IT infrastructure can help your business save money while freeing up considerable working hours focused on other operational aspects.
Supporting Human Interaction with AI and ML
Automation can go beyond your in-house teams and extend to your customers and clients. While clients will still value the support from your human personnel, this will not always be necessary. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools can be highly effective for lower-level queries- or for troubleshooting common problems.
Investing in chatbot technology is a great way to optimise your IT spending. Modern chatbots are highly advanced and can utilise AI and ML to recognise customer intentions while using natural language processing (NLP) to converse with clients. Many of your client service requests can be handled this way, freeing up personnel and resources to provide close support for customers who really need it.
Make the Smart Investments You Need to Optimise IT Spending
With a better understanding of your operational needs over the coming years, it's possible to make shrewd investments in your IT. Reach out to our team to discover more about our IT infrastructure and how you can get more for your money.
