Every organization has business objectives (BO). These objectives can focus on numerous areas across the company and be related to almost anything within the organization:
Identifying core objectives is important for the ongoing success of organizations. Objectives help keep organizations focused on what is deemed important for the future, which, of course, differs for each organization. By focusing on company BOs as closely as possible and practical, organizations are more likely to achieve their goals.
“That’s great,” you may be thinking, “but what does this have to do with infrastructure management (IM)?” I’m glad you asked.
Organizations may well have specific objectives around their network and cloud infrastructures. However, the reality is that objectives solely focused on infrastructure management are probably not really business objectives. Let’s look at two possible objectives:
Each of the objectives makes sense at some level. Migrating from on-prem to cloud makes sense in many scenarios (and we will assume it does in this fictional example). Similarly, if you can reduce cloud expenses – without adversely affecting things elsewhere – what’s not to like?
The problem is that these objectives are incredibly narrow in focus, and BOs should be much broader.
Business Objectives Can’t Be Too NarrowWhile reducing cloud spend by 25% sounds good, focusing on your cloud spend is too narrow at a high level. An organization focused on increasing margins will almost always be better off.
Let’s say reducing your cloud spend improves margins by 2%, but increasing the marketing budget generates significant new sales that increase margins by 5%? With a narrow focus, you would have realized a 2% margin increase, and that’s it. With a broader focus on margins, achieving the objective you would more than double your results – a much better outcome. And before you say “what if you did both?” consider this. The impact of a higher customer count could eliminate the viability of cutting your cloud spend by 25%!
So, we know that we need BOs that aren’t too narrowly focused. Let’s look at how ITIM can actually help an organization achieve these broad objectives. Here are a few scenarios that include some of the ways ITIM helps businesses achieve each one:
What does ITIM have to do with sales? Plenty. If your infrastructure is not working correctly, people can’t do their jobs. Network infrastructures are critical to all business operations, and ensuring everything is working and accessible is key to achieving BOs. A system outage or performance issues toward the end of your biggest quarter may impact your ability to close deals. ITIM definitely helps by pinpointing issues in a timely manner and providing the necessary information to fix the problem.
What does IM have to do with operating margins? Possibly even more than with sales! IT can look at numerous things to improve margins, though within specific areas. IT isn’t going to tell you how to manufacture widgets for less, but they might be able to give you information on the performance of your existing manufacturer. How many clouds are enough (or too many)? What are the implications and potential cost savings of consolidating on a single cloud? ITIM tools are well suited to provide significant information on all these questions and more.
Some of these are organization dependent. If you are selling widgets that are made elsewhere and are designed to be thrown away, you probably have different customer retention needs than an organization that is selling software as a service. However, ITIM tools are critical to many customer retention issues. Being able to monitor your on-premises and cloud environments in near real time enables you to address issues faster. Having the information about an outage available to you will speed up recovery times. Knowing exactly what systems are impacted (and which ones only look impacted) allows employees to focus their efforts where needed.
As these examples show, ITIM software can be critical to helping your organization achieve its objectives. Whether it is ensuring employees are able to access the resources they need, customers can get the information they need when they need it, or something else completely, your ITIM tool should be used to help organizations reach their objectives. For more on achieving business objectives with the help of ITIM tools, check out our On-Demand Webinar, Leveraging ITIM to Better Support Business Objectives or schedule a Netreo demo today!
