Are you faced with a familiar scenario, the conundrum of spend it or lose it?
You were allocated an IT budget for this financial year and if you don’t use all of it the budget will be reduced next year and yet you have plans. Plans to support your remote and mobile workers, plans to enable better collaboration and team-working, plans to support business processes that have fundamentally changed since everyone left the office. These plans have been on hold and have lain dormant during lockdown and while tears have spilt over tiers, you have been unable to resource the new initiatives.
So how do you put the budget to good use, right now, getting you ready for 2021?
In most instances, despite advances in AI, IoT, robotics and automation, these are unlikely candidates and far more practical is updating existing applications or modernising IT infrastructure. These activities will ensure that existing technologies continue to run efficiently. Maintaining and updating your current infrastructure may not seem exciting, however, enhancing core legacy systems is an effective use of budgets while you prepare for the latest and best in 2021.
Studies show that investing in the latest technology secures long-term growth and business agility and brings a competitive edge. But when you have just £20K left to spend in the short-term, now is the time that small improvements to support the new ways of working can mean survival in the current climate.
Now is the time to implement those software patches, install the upgrades, and do a maintenance overhaul to ensure core systems are running as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Adding resources to improve and automate business processes is also a cost-effective way to see improvements in the flow of data through the business. And the end results, such as custom reports and business insight provided by some additional BI tools is an easy and demonstrable win. All of these little wins are within your £20K budget reach.
The next step is to invite quotes for 2021 plans to migrate to the cloud, investigate the disruptive technologies and see if they can deliver greater business value over the long term.
The status quo may not seem very cutting edge, but the challenges we have all faced this year bring a cautionary approach to radical change and investing in shoring up and maintaining existing systems get you ready for more innovative decisions in 2021.