10 Tips to Transform Your IT Department

Transformation is a common focus of IT departments across all industries and business types. Whether it’s transforming systems, data, or people, there are a few key tips to keep in mind when working toward your goal of making your IT department more impactful and efficient.

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10 Tips to Transform Your IT Department

1. Remove silos: Streamline decision-making and other functions of the business to bridge the gap across departments. In time, this will build a leaner, savvier, and more competitive organization.
2. Prioritize innovation: Take risks and test new strategies. By implementing new technologies across the company to support overall strategic objectives, you can drive lasting results, stay ahead of the competition, and contribute to broader business goals.
3. Own the data strategy: As departments become more data-driven, seek data specialists and invest in analytics platforms, IT must lead the way. Adopt your own technologies and best practices and use data to garner actionable insights.
4. Integrate technology and business: Combine data from operational and financial solutions across the IT department to quickly identify important insights, such as true costs for business services.
5. Hire an analytics team: Data analytics skills are in high demand. Organizations with fully-developed analytics teams that have a data-driven culture will continue to be top performers.
6. Embrace the changing tech landscape: Eliminate the phrase, “This is how we’ve always done it.” Bring in new solutions, challenge your teams to regularly adopt new, innovative applications to spark creativity, and solve problems from a fresh perspective.
7. Automate, automate, automate: Competitive advantage will come from how you invest in solutions to analyze your data. Eliminate the “build vs. buy” mentality, and implement a robotic process automation (RPA) solution to save time and resources while enhancing overall operating efficiency.
8. Cut operating costs where possible: To achieve smarter spending decisions and a leaner, more effective IT department, cut costs while investing in digital transformation. Be strategic about where you invest across the IT portfolio to deliver optimal business results.
9. Demonstrate your leadership: Raise your visibility across the enterprise by clearly communicating the value of IT services and developing thought leadership through newsletters, articles or speaking at industry events.
10. Eliminate jargon: Communicate with users across the business in clear, non-technical terms. Eliminate tech jargon and acronyms. Use end-user oriented metrics—such as customer satisfaction—to communicate how IT has been delivering value to employees.

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