Build success by fostering strong culture, investing in people and infrastructure, prioritizing cybersecurity, and planning strategically.
Amid relentless technological advancement and emerging challenges, what strategies and principles can help ensure your company’s success while protecting it from potential threats as it grows?
Invest in people and a culture that promotes ownership and innovation. No matter how great your strategy is, it will not overcome a poor culture. It’s critical that you understand that having the right people – those who care about the success of your company – is the best way to ensure continued success going forward. If people truly care, they will plan and make any necessary adjustments because they see the company’s success as their success. This principle applies not only to IT but to every aspect of business. Having people you can trust is crucial to creating and sustaining a great company.
Part of having a robust culture is cultivating an environment where every team member feels a sense of ownership and is encouraged to innovate – where individuals take pride in their work and have the freedom and autonomy to make decisions, provided they align with the company’s values and standards. When people feel a sense of ownership, they are more inclined to innovate and implement improvements, as they are more invested in the success or failure of their work.
Conversely, nobody likes to be micromanaged. It restricts freedom, making individuals feel constantly monitored and unable to work, think, or act independently.
Create redundancies and shared workloads/responsibilities. Avoid depending on a single employee, consultant, or contractor. Without failsafe and backup plans for your IT systems, you risk significant issues that can disrupt your company’s productivity.
One approach to achieving this is by establishing a decentralized work team. This means distributing tasks among team members and ensuring backups for key processes. There’s a saying in IT, “Two is one and one is none,” which implies that if you only have one of something, you effectively have none when it comes to hardware, systems, processes, and other resources in your business.
Collaborate with your clients. Whether your clients are external or internal, such as an IT team within a company, it’s crucial to understand how to best support them. An internal services group (IT, HR, finance, marketing, legal, etc.) exists to support their internal clients. Embracing this mindset will help your team become a trusted resource to the employees they work with, allowing your support team to gain a deeper understanding of business challenges and implement solutions for improvement.
One way to achieve this is by establishing regular feedback contact points with the groups you work with across the company. These can take the form of meetings, emails, or phone calls. The key to ensuring they stay connected is consistency.
Invest in critical infrastructure. This includes all the systems and hardware your company requires to remain operational and profitable. It’s essential to identify these components, assess their current condition, and create a plan to address any issues, ensuring your company’s continued operation and growth.
Companies that invest in the right infrastructure and stay ahead of the curve can gain a significant competitive advantage, eliminating the need to play catch-up with those who neglect maintenance and proactive measures.
Proactively invest in information security. Immediately begin developing a plan to safeguard your company and employees from cybersecurity threats and attacks. If your organization lacks in-house expertise, seek out a reliable consultant who can create a comprehensive strategy for managing information and cybersecurity risks. Do not postpone this, as the era of “security by obscurity” is over; no one is immune simply because they are smaller or less visible. Cyber attackers are now targeting businesses of all sizes, and it only takes one major attack to cause severe damage to your business.
Implement proactive measures by ensuring your team is regularly trained and updated on the latest cybersecurity best practices and potential threats to avoid. You can either appoint someone within your organization to manage this program or hire an external expert to oversee it for you.
Plan for the good and bad times. To ensure the long-term health of your organization, it is essential to have succession planning, disaster recovery, and business continuity planning in place.
Succession planning means keeping an up-to-date plan for the key roles on your team. If one of these positions becomes vacant, it’s important to know who will step in to take over their duties and responsibilities.
Disaster recovery involves having a well-defined process and planned steps to recover from various types of disasters. Without an updated plan, your business could be severely impacted in the event of an unforeseen emergency or disaster.
Continuity planning entails creating a strategy to ensure your business remains operational during an outage or other disruptions. This plan outlines the steps or alternative measures you will take to maintain normal business operations.
In conclusion, take the time to think strategically about your business. By doing so, you can avoid constantly being in reaction mode and instead create competitive advantages through thoughtful planning and the implementation of wise solutions and changes to better position your business.
Matt Gross serves as chief information officer for Garver. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
