Where to Focus Your IT Investment in 2023

With each year come new tech trends, IT business dos and don’ts, challenges, and opportunities. But what is important about these is recognising what is applicable to your business and how it will be practically applied in day-to-day operations. Here’s a breakdown of where businesses are focussing their tech investment strategy to deliver real-world results over 2023 and beyond.

Hybrid and remote work solutions

Around 70% of Aussies who worked remotely in the last year or two want to continue to do so – and 61% of workers say their role can be performed productively at home, with 81% preferring a hybrid solution. Even more importantly, over one-third of employees say they would quit if remote or hybrid working wasn’t allowed! This is one of the most important mindset changes businesses must accommodate in 2023 and moving forward, especially as global surveys have shown that it doesn’t negatively impact productivity.

Key to this is implementing the right tech solutions that support collaboration, remote worker cyber security, and communication. Top solutions include cloud services, project management platforms, video conferencing, and unified communication tools.?

Lean digitisation

It’s no good piling every digital technology into your organisation. Solutions must be bespoke, fully-integrated with operations, user-friendly, and offer strategic value. Lean methodologies have been around for a long time now but haven’t been widely or effectively applied to digital systems. It’s now becoming a critical process as organisations look to optimise continuous improvement, get real-time data to inform decisions and process improvements, and become proactive, agile tech-driven businesses.

The first step is to perform a digital transformation audit to identify opportunities, pinpoint areas of waste, and form the foundation for best-fit solutions. This helps develop a more effective IT investment strategy, align it properly with business goals, and hit key targets for customer experience, employee, and process efficiency, problem-solving, and decision-making.

Consolidation of tech services

Just like being flooded with multiple technologies, it doesn’t help a business progress if it’s flooded with tech vendors and service suppliers. As digital becomes integral to all operations, so it’s important to consolidate services and vendors – ideally under one provider. This eliminates the confusion and loss of productive time spent tracking down the right vendor for the right issue, as well as reducing IT costs by bringing all your IT needs under one supplier for a predictable monthly cost and elimination of overspending for multiple similar services.

In 2023, businesses are looking for managed IT service providers who can do it all. Whether you need to develop an IT strategy, design, and implement new infrastructure, get IT support, or implement software, they should be able to handle it all. This is also important for businesses who need skills or services to supplement an in-house team. Using a single provider, you can fill in services on an as needed basis, pivoting your IT team to core tasks, and creating a strong relationship where the teams know and respect each other, and work together.

Eliminate time-wasting processes with automation

Automation is nothing new, but it is making huge inroads into everyday business processes. This is set to expand in 2023 as organisations draw heavier and heavier data loads, move operations online, and implement lean policies.

Again, automation is not about eliminating team members, but rather eliminating the tasks that don’t require human intervention. This takes a heavy burden off staff shoulders and allows people to work on tasks that only a person can do. It also creates space for your staff to upskill themselves, discover new opportunities to contribute to the company, and increases that all-important job satisfaction that both attracts and retains top talent.

In practice, automation can transform any business. It is used to:

• Onboard new clients or suppliers, trigger marketing content and tracking information, and respond to enquiries
• Create and share reports, pulling data in real-time to dashboards for management and stakeholders
• Assess new applicants, run skills tests, and onboard new employees
• Run credit approval processes, compliance checks, and financial product applications and approvals
• Solve IT security issues and trigger alerts for serious breaches to team members
• Go paperless to meet sustainability goals
• Manage warehousing, logistics, and supply chain issues
• Detect manufacturing issues, run predictive maintenance alerts, and eliminate waste
• And much more

At Otto IT, we’re all about finding the best real-world applications for technology to fit your business. From small start-ups to large organisations, we work with businesses in all sectors to develop comprehensive IT solutions that work with your company to give you that essential edge.

Take a look at our latest blog to find out more about the tech trends in 2023! Read it here.?