If your company has more than one help desk or more than one version of the same business application, your company may be operating at reduced efficiency. In order for your company to grow successfully, IT infrastructure and IT management must be upgraded. Unfortunately, these upgrade themselves can cause duplications and problems within your organization. In this guide, we’ll tell you what it takes to succeed and four steps to efficiency consolidate your IT.

Succeeding with IT Consolidation

Although every company needs to grow in order to survive, when new IT infrastructure is added that either duplicates the function of a preexisting platform or impedes workflow, you’re headed in the wrong direction.

As you set out on the journey of IT consolidation, you need to have a plan. Start by assessing your current IT and see what their true value is to your organization. Next you need to shut down anything that isn’t meeting your company’s needs. With the resources you have left, consolidate and modernize them and then find a solution that allows important people within your organization to easily navigate between critical and valuable resources across the platform.

Asses Your Current Technology

In this step, you will quantify the true business value of your IT systems whether these are related to helpdesk management or user experience. As the critical first step in IT consolidation, you need to know which resources can and should be consolidated. Try to assess these in dollars or another similar measure that allows you to see each program from a business point-of-view. During this step seek input from IT and business stakeholders to incorporate all perspectives. While this might be the most intensive step in your consolidation strategy, it is vital to successfully moving forward and growing your business.

Shut Down Low-Value Items

When you encounter IT products or services that are providing minimal value to your company compared to the other pieces of your IT infrastructure, it is imperative that you shut them down or retire them. By ranking the value each piece of technology provides to your business, the decision should be pretty clear as to which are providing the least value. During this step you need your IT and business teams to cooperate and support the programs that are providing the most value to your business.

Find The Best Consolidation Platform for You

Now that you have determined which applications you will consolidate and which you will retire, you need to determine which to consolidate first. This decision can be made by looking at which applications are at the top of the value list. The following list will help you determine what to look for in your next platform to most effectively consolidate your IT.

• Seek a platform that supports both your business and IT service management functions.
• Find a platform that the IT team already approves of for quick onboarding and adaption.
• With cloud-based solutions saving you money and server space, seek a platform on the cloud to increase your business efficiency and value.
• The platform should be modern and easily connect to your current applications and information sources.
• The platform should unite the business side and the IT side seamlessly without needing to have either directly intervene.
• Look for a platform with proven security and compliance to keep your data safe.

With these points in mind, narrow down your list of platforms and start planning for the consolidation phase.

Choose Your Consolidation Platform and Execute

Since you’ve narrowed down your choices to a short list, contact each vendor and ask specific questions to determine which fits your organization best. While interviewing candidates for your IT consolidation efforts, consider asking these questions before deciding.

• Is the vendor offering a cloud-based solution at the cutting-edge of technology to support my business in the future?
• How do platform upgrades work? Will my system need to shut down in order for the vendor’s technology to update?
• Is the solution customizable to each person who uses it thus reducing training time and solving specific business problems?

Growing Your Business with IT Consolidation

As your business makes a determined effort to reduce the use of wasteful resources and consolidate valuable business and technology applications onto a single platform, your business will experience stream-lined efficiency and productivity. While redundancies and maintenance costs can really hurt your business’s bottom line, proper consolidation will ultimately give you more money to work with.

When IT’s relevance and support of your business grows, your business has a larger foundation to expand from. By spending the time and energy to honestly assess your businesses needs and look for a better platform, your company can experience more growth and efficiency.

EKI-Digital has worked with businesses of all sizes, and in various industries to help them benefit by designing, and rationalizing technology as a tool to improve how their businesses performance and self fund other business critical initiatives. If you would like to learn more about this service please contact us at info@eki-digital.com.

Questions about IT consolidation? Please share them with us in the comments.