IT has become pervasive and its importance cannot be questioned anymore. Every business, these days, directly or indirectly depends upon IT. Regardless of the size or nature of the business, an IT Consultant impacts most of the aspects, if not all. We have seen examples in the past, of businesses resisting technological advancements or shaking hands with them. Without a doubt, those who resisted have now become a part of academic case studies only. On the other hand, the firms which embraced the technological transformation witnessed the horizons of success and boom.
The Role of Information Technology in Business:
Information Technology is serving businesses in different departments like marketing, finance, manufacturing, supply chain, human resource management, sales, data management, enterprise resource management, and whatnot! It is facilitating in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the business processes through improved communication, simplifying processes and cost-saving. This in turn leads to developing and sustaining competitive advantage.
2020 has been a transformational year, thanks to Covid 19. It has emphasized the importance of IT like never before. Many businesses which were completely or partially offline earlier have gone online. Education has majorly become e-learning and trends in E-commerce have dramatically changed. The reason that the global economic structure has not collapsed completely during this pandemic is probably that IT supported it. Hence the need for IT reliance is going to increase, and it’s not coming back.
Why hire IT Consultants?
In spite of all the excitement that the IT tools and techniques offer, it is not easy to master them all when you do not have a relevant background. As the IT solutions are vast and it is not advisable to hire an expert for everything, hiring external IT Consultants offers you to acquire a win-win position.
What do IT Consultants bring onboard?
When you hire IT consulting companies, you get knowledge, experience, expertise, specialized and customized IT solutions tailored to your business problems. Your problems become their headache and they bring the best solutions to your table without any hassle at your end.
Benefits of partnering with external IT Consultants:
External IT Consultants can be highly beneficial from different angles. Let’s have a look at the benefits of hiring external IT Consulting companies.
Cost Saving: Apparently hiring an IT consulting company from an external source looks expensive. If we analyze it in the real sense, keeping expert IT employees in the company, paying them salaries and benefits, providing them with workspace and the required IT resources actually turns out to be more expensive. Hence external IT Consultant is your gateway to cost saving.
Specialized knowledge: When you hire external IT Consultants, they bring in a pool of specialized knowledge tailored to solve your business problems through technology. They have profound knowledge about the tools and techniques available to handle all the operations. They can also develop customized tools to suit your specific business needs.
Peace of mind: Hiring IT experts is just like going to a medical practitioner and getting yourself checked. You have the peace of mind that you are in safe hands. He has the specialized knowledge to diagnose health problems, if any, and recommend the required medication. Since you lack the medical knowledge, you go to the doctor and rely on him. Similarly, if you lack technical knowledge, there is no harm to hire an IT Consultant and make good use of his expertise keeping your mental peace in place.
Focus on your core function: When you do not have to worry about diversions like IT solutions, you can concentrate fully on your core business function. When you can give your hundred percent to your core business function, with Information Technology backing you at its full potential, your business is bound to flourish.
A third person perspective: While bringing external parties to your business can ask for conflict management, it can interestingly bring a third person perspective to your business. Just because you do something in a specific manner or you’ve done something in a specific manner all your life doesn’t mean it cannot be done in a better way. Sometimes a little input, a little improvement can take you a long way.
Increased security: Where IT has brought a lot of facilitation to the business world, it has also made us more vulnerable due to security concerns. Only an IT expert or a team of IT experts who specialize in cyber security can lower the security risk so you do not have to worry about it. Cyber security is not only a concern for large scale businesses. Small businesses are equally at stake at the hands of cyber thefts. The last year witnessed a security breach in 50% of the SMEs. Hence it is imperative to have your security assessment and measures in place to combat any such situation.
Employee retention: Sounds irrelevant? Read ahead. Usually in small and medium businesses, employees have to do what they are not supposed to do. For example, an accountant looking after the administrative issues or marketing manager looking after the networking concerns. Such overlaps make the employees demotivated as they cannot focus on their core functions. IT Consultants can identify and rectify such inefficiencies and this results in improved employee retention.
Strengthened business strategy: Since IT is considered to be a support system, it does not have much participation in corporate decision making. We often overlook the fact that IT professionals can enlighten us with insight, tools, statistics and knowledge to be integrated into the strategic decisions. This gap is usually bridged by taking an IT Consultant onboard.
For every single reason against hiring an IT Consultant, you will have two in favour of hiring one. So, if you’re not after defying logic, you will end up partnering with one.