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The fear of having an IT project fail can be a strong deterrent for many, despite the expected business advantages to be gained. 

With the digital transformation well underway, IT projects are what set's many businesses apart of their competitors. Whether it be for internal efficiencies through streamlined business processes, or establishing a desirable point of difference in the customers eye.  

If it's your first time taking on an IT project, or you have been doing this for years, in this article we offer our 4 tried and tested methods for ensuring a successful outcome. 

These days, there’s a persistent drive for organisations of every type to be innovative. It’s implied every time you hear the term ‘digital disruption’ or ‘digital transformation’. But just what does it mean to be innovative – and is it really necessary for your business?

It’s easy to answer the first part of that question.

‘Innovative’ simply means ‘something new’ and there are multiple opportunities within most businesses to do just that (new processes, experiences, features, customers, products and services, and business models.)

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In turn, most of these opportunities can be partially or fully enabled by readily available technology. More on that in a moment.

With all the advances in technology over the last three decades, the discovery of blockchain technology has arguably been one of the greatest, and most disruptive discoveries yet. 

Blockchain is inherently difficult to comprehend, because to understand blockchain technology, we need to adopt a new understanding of certain technologies and terms... but that's where we come in! 

Due to the hype, and prevalence blockchain technology is set to play in our future, we want to demystify what it is, and how it will affect business. 

These days, software is everywhere and just about every business relies on software developed specifically for that organisation. You might find yourself in a position where it’s necessary to commission and control the production of some code – a task which can appear Sisyphean because you don’t know much about the process.

Think digital transformation, the go-to phrase in recent years, is a new development? Think again. Properly speaking, digitisation began when the first computers were switched on in businesses; machines like UNIVAC 1, Leo and perhaps even Colossus (they really gave those early room-sized devices cool names).

There’s a lot of concern around the automation of work and the implication this process might have on employment… your employment, specifically. While the natural response might be to try and stop automation to save your job, we all know what happened with the Luddites. Sure, they may have won one or two battles (in unpleasant fashion – smashing ‘the machines’) but they most certainly did not win the war. That’s why we have mechanisation on a massive scale today – mechanisation which, truth be told, makes our lives enormously more convenient.

Instead of attempting the impossible and holding back the new tsunami of automation, a better way is to look at how automation can work for you, rather than against you.

In other words, it’s time to automate everything that can be automated; whatever remains is where you actually create value. It may be a generalisation, but those aspects of your work which are not easily done by a machine is probably where your competitive advantage lies.

Outsourcing some or all of your IT service requirements is a great way to improve focus on core business operations, benefit from reduced costs and access to more powerful, more capable technology on-demand. 

But, how do your shop for an Outsourced IT provider? Do you compile a list from google, send through an email requesting the price,then choose the most economical provider? Because they are all the same, all they do is fix IT issues, right? 

WRONG. 

It’s probably one of the most exciting additions to Microsoft’s stable of offerings since Office 365 came out, but what can Power BI do for your business? Before getting to that pressing question, let’s have a quick look at what it has done for some other companies.

If you’ve heard of Power BI, there are probably two pressing questions you have: One: what exactly is it? and two: Is it suitable for my business?

To the first question. Power BI is a cloud-based business analytics service from Microsoft. It enables anyone to visualise and analyse data with greater speed, efficiency and understanding. It connects users to a broad range of data through easy-to-use dashboards, interactive reports, and visualisations that bring data to life. This is Microsoft’s official definition, by the way.

Let’s move on then, to the reasons why this powerful tool set could be ideal in your business.

Sometimes, the tried and true gets tired, outdated, and inefficient.

Recently, we have come to this conclusion with our account management monthly client reporting model, and decided to leverage the power of dashboards to shave countless hours off our reporting model, provide increased transparency, and allow us to give more value to our clients during our monthly meetings.... And least we forget, reduce our environmental footprint!

Curious to get an inside glimpse as to how we’re moving to a paperless reporting system? Here’s the inside scoop!