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How does your IT team deliver services today? You wouldn’t be alone if you said your employees are occupied with the chore equivalent of IT work—they’re focused on run tasks or other activities that are crucial to maintaining workforce productivity and network availability, but don’t really move the organization forward. Though the day-to-day needs of the company are satisfied, it’s probably not the most efficient way to use your team members’ time. It’s also not how new innovations are developed and deployed. If you’re one of the many companies whose IT groups are bogged down with chores and falling behind on strategic efforts, it’s time to look at your talent with fresh eyes.

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Your team has probably done things the same way for years. It makes envisioning a new approach difficult. Knowing that many workflows are entrenched, what would it take to shift your thinking on where your talent can deliver better value? A look at the current environment might be a good motivator.

Today’s marketplace is more competitive than ever. To keep pace—and to get ahead—forward-looking companies are starting to think differently about their existing skill base. If employees’ time is constantly consumed doing run tasks or fighting fires, they may intend to be proactive in their efforts, but in reality it means they are not doing one of two things:

• They’re not working on new projects, the kind that grow and transform the organization.
• They’re not spending time with the business to really understand what the needs are.

Either way, IT ends up in a bubble, focused on their own issues and missing the really important work. Instead, your team needs to be having conversations with different business leaders to identify inefficiencies, risks and opportunities. Regardless of the vertical, different parts of the organization are sure to have different requirements from the same technology—it could be the voice system, or storage, or different application requirements. If the majority of your staff is putting out fires, they’re never going to have the time to focus on delivering real value back to those business units, and the investments you’ve already made will show meager returns and lackluster performance.

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For IT business leaders, looking at the needs of the company into the future will likely take a bit of soul searching. Is your existing workforce capable of having those types of conversations and understanding what those business needs are to drive value? Does their expertise and experience give them the tools to spot opportunities and align IT’s efforts with the organization’s strategic goals?

But what if they are ready to tackle higher-value work? How can you facilitate that? What can you do to shift daily tasks out of their way?

Managed services is one solution organizations are increasingly adopting to transition their internal teams toward a more efficient, more effective working strategy. By partnering with an experienced managed services provider, IT leaders can take advantage of resources that help to free up internal talent to focus on more fruitful activities. If your existing workforce could be doing more, it’s time to consider where managed services can give you the support you need to move your business forward.

• managed services, 
• MSP, 
• transformation