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How to Properly Assess Your Technology Needs

How to Properly Assess Your Technology Needs
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Nothing lasts forever, especially not the technology that a business relies on to function. Between typical wear and tear and the always-improving trajectory that the technology industry follows, you will likely need to actively evaluate your needs and what you resultantly need to obtain. Today, we’ll walk you through how this technology assessment should be shaped.


What Should your Assessment Focus On?
As you go about evaluating your technology, you need to consider how it has (and is projected to) affect your business. Looking to the past, anticipating the future, and being aware of the present where your technology is concerned will allow you to make better choices as you move forward.

The Past
For example, take the lesson that philosopher George Santayana coined: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This is more or less a fancier way of saying that, if someone never learns from the mistakes they’ve made before, they’re going to keep making the same mistakes. This is why your technology assessment needs to consider the decisions you have made, and if the results were as you expected.

Were your investments into certain solutions ultimately worth it? Did that new process you implemented see any success, or was it even actually adopted by your workforce? Looking at your past decisions and their outcomes will help you make more informed decisions with a better chance of benefiting your company.

The Present
Of course, there will be other signs of issues around you at any time, so it is equally important to evaluate your technology’s efficacy in the given moment. Are your employees able to use the tools at their disposal to properly and successfully do their jobs? If not, what is the root cause of their difficulties? Where do they see the solutions just being insufficient or problematic?

This insight will allow you to reevaluate if your investments are getting as much mileage as they need to be, and therefore will give you a better idea of how your business’ needs should be prioritized moving forward.

The Future
Speaking of moving forward, you need to do something with all the insights you’ve collected from your analysis of the past and present. Making informed decisions based on what you anticipate the future to hold in technological innovations will allow you to center your solutions around your anticipated needs. While this isn’t an exact science, it is better to at least try to predict an outcome than it is to be blindsided by something you could have seen coming.

Benefits of a Technology Assessment
Running a comprehensive assessment of the technology that you leverage in your business’ operations can provide you with various advantages that you might not have access to otherwise. First of all, an assessment is an excellent way to identify any problems your technology may be suffering, as well as to zero in on your business’ needs, as was discussed above. As a result, a technology assessment also serves as an excellent means of narrowing down possible solutions to these deficits. This enables you to select the solutions that are right for you, reducing the costs incurred by deploying solutions that aren’t a good fit.

How Technology Should Be Assessed
Just as trying to sweep a mess out of a carpet is much less effective than using a vacuum cleaner, just giving your needs a quick once-over before making a change or electing not to will not provide your business with any benefits.

Instead, try a more in-depth method to maximize your returns.

  • Study Workflows - Are your employees encountering problems in their workflow? Ask them what improvements would be welcome and compare their suggestions with the growth plan you have projected for your future. Will their suggestions be compatible with the growth plan you’ve established?
  • Analyze Technology in Place - Working again with your employees, establish what strengths and (more importantly) weaknesses your current solutions exhibit that could influence your workflow. A comprehensive understanding of your business technology will help with the next step.
  • Explore Alternative Approaches - Before you charge ahead and take a chunk out of your finances, take the time to brainstorm other resolutions to your IT concerns and deficits. If a slight tweak to the process can resolve the problem, or more effectively using the solutions you have on hand is all it will take to fix it, wouldn’t you say that’s a better option than making huge, expensive changes?
  • Take Stock of Your Resources - If it happens that you do need a new system or solution, it helps to know what you have going in and have your priorities lined up. If a new solution is too expensive, or your team is resistant to change, blindly implementing it all at once could open you up to problems.

Once these steps are completed, you should be much more prepared to make a decision concerning your technology. Need some more help? Infradapt is here with the expertise to assist you in assessing your IT. Give us a call at 800.394.2301 for more information.

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Tip of the Week: Keeping Track of Your Inventory

Tip of the Week: Keeping Track of Your Inventory

Regardless of your organization’s size, there is more than likely a large amount of information technology to keep track of and maintain. As is usually the case when so many moving parts and variables are involved, the task of keeping them organized can quickly become difficult and stressful. This week, we’ll give you a few tips on how a proper inventory can help your business stay apprised of its IT resources.


What Can an Inventory Do?
At its core, an inventory serves the purpose of keeping track of the assets and resources a business has in its possession. This spans from how many cases of burger patties a fast food franchise has to how much water a hydroponic plant has in reserve. Not only does this assist the business with ensuring that it always has the resources necessary to operate, it also assists with insurance claims. By keeping you up-to-date on what you have, an inventory serves as a documented resource that can support your claims if the need arises - such as after a disaster event or theft.

Furthermore, a detailed and up-to-date inventory record can help you to identify how old your resources are, allowing you to prioritize when it needs to be refreshed and/or replaced.

As one would imagine, these are all important factors to consider when technology is involved. In light of this, it becomes especially important to develop and enforce a unified and direct system as a standard during the inventorying process.

What Your Inventory Needs to Account For
As you create this system, you need to make sure it addresses the five key details included in a comprehensive inventory record.

1. What is it that you have?
Of course, the whole point of an inventory is to identify the resources you have on hand. Given the long, detailed names that many technology components have (in addition to the many details a piece of hardware or software will have that need to be addressed), it may make the most sense to develop a shorthand that easily and efficiently communicates what exactly it is that your business has in its possession.

For example, if you utilize differently-sized hard drives for different tasks and purposes, you will likely have a stash of these hard drives squirrelled away for later use. Rather than writing out a comprehensive list, creating an internal shorthand will make the task of inventorying these components much easier.

So, if a company were to have 7 spare hard drives, 1 blue hard disk drive with a 5 terabyte capacity, 3 red solid state drives with 10 terabytes each, 2 black hard disk drives with 10 terabytes each, and one purple hard disk drive with a capacity of 5 terabytes, using shorthand might simplify that list into:

  • 1 HDD - BLUE - 1TB
  • 3 SSD - RED - 10TB
  • 2 HDD - BLACK - 10TB
  • 1 HDD - PURPLE - 10TB

2. Where is it stored?
This consideration is especially important if a company has more than one location or stores their supplies in more than one spot in the building. Your inventory record needs to keep track of where a given component is kept so it may be found quickly if need be. Make sure you mark the building it is in, as well as the room and where specifically in that room it is kept. This adds a little more information to your shorthand list:

  • 1 HDD - BLUE - 1TB (MAIN LOCATION/BASEMENT/SHELF A)
  • 3 SSD - RED - 10TB (MAIN LOCATION/BASEMENT/SHELF E)
  • 2 HDD - BLACK - 10TB (SAT-OFFICE1/ROOM4/SHELF B)
  • 1 HDD - PURPLE - 10TB (SAT-OFFICE2/ROOM2/SHELF D)

3. Additional Details to Include
Finally, there are other pieces of information you should use your inventory process to track. To assist with potential insurance needs and monitoring your solutions for a refresh, it helps to add the date that the technology was acquired, as well as how much it cost to acquire it. As a result, your list becomes:

  • 1 HDD - BLUE - 1TB (MAIN LOCATION/BASEMENT/SHELF A) - $95 (May 9, 2017)
  • 3 SSD - RED - 1TB (MAIN LOCATION/BASEMENT/SHELF E) - $250 (June 30, 2017)
  • 2 HDD - BLACK - 1.5TB (SAT-OFFICE1/ROOM4/SHELF B) - $160 (August 18, 2017)
  • 1 HDD - PURPLE - 10TB (SAT-OFFICE2/ROOM2/SHELF D) - $355 (February 2, 2018)

Other Considerations for Your Inventory
Maintaining an up-to-date set of totals for your inventory is an essential process. After all, what’s the point of keeping track of your inventory if it isn’t going to be accurate anyway? This means that, in addition to ensuring that you start off with the right numbers, you need some sort of system to help you keep a running total. Whether this system is manually keeping totals on a clipboard, updating a spreadsheet, or leveraging asset management, is up to you.

Reach out to us here at Infradapt by calling 800.394.2301 to see how we can help. In the meantime, keep checking back for more helpful tips and tricks.

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Have You Built an IT Strategy that Fits Your Business?

Have You Built an IT Strategy that Fits Your Business?

A business that relies on its technology to function needs to do more than make sure that this technology is able to sustain them. This technology should also be primed to help management and staff achieve their business goals.


An IT strategy is a plan that an organization uses to map out how technology should be leveraged and invested in. As a written document, it provides a guide that helps to organize the numerous considerations that an organization needs to take into account as they go about their business processes.

Developing an IT Strategy
Because of this, any complete IT strategy needs to include a variety of different considerations. This means it resembles a blueprint of your IT’s role in the rest of your business that gives your technology a trajectory to follow in the foreseeable future. To accomplish this, any IT strategy should include some reference to the following:

A Departmental Overview
It is important that your IT strategy acknowledges the department that will need to execute it. By identifying the motivating force behind your IT department and assigning objectives to it, you can get a better grasp on the nature of your company and its internal IT resources.

Record of Existing Resources
A key component of developing an effective IT strategy is to maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date record of any and all resources that your current IT has. This includes the pieces that make up your infrastructure, as well as what your IT department has to offer in terms of abilities and skills.

Future Focus
Your IT strategy also needs to account for changes that will most certainly come in the industry. This means it should include information on current budgets and initiatives, as well as spending forecasts, anticipated industry changes, and future projects.

SWOT Analysis
As you document your IT strategy, you should include an evaluation of your current IT’s strengths and weaknesses. This will help you to prioritize different elements in your strategy to make up for potential deficits. In addition, hypothesizing what opportunities you may encounter as IT solutions and processes advance, and anticipating the threats you may encounter as well.

Putting Your IT Strategy in Action
Once these considerations have been made, it’s time to turn your focus to actually enacting your IT strategy. Before you do anything else, you need to assess where your IT stands currently and establish the difference between where it is now and where you want it to be. Benchmarking and identifying the right key performance indicators will help to show you where your biggest IT deficits lie.

As a result, you can identify which of your short and long-term goals will be most useful to strive towards with this particular shift in your IT strategy. However, both you and your technology should be prepared to adjust to a sudden change in your IT strategy and the approach that your strategy informs.

The Importance of an IT Strategy
As the technology that a business leverages has become increasingly impactful upon that business’ success, it has become clear that business needs to have a strategy in mind to optimize it and improve their operations. Otherwise, that business may fall behind another that pays more attention to their technology solutions.

If needed, Infradapt can assist you in creating an IT strategy for your business, supporting you every step of the way. Give us a call at 800.394.2301 for more information.

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Are You Intrigued By the Tech of CES 2018?

Are You Intrigued By the Tech of CES 2018?

CES 2018 introduced the world to some downright interesting (and some absurd) electronics. The Consumer Electronics Show gives the technology industry just the outlet to showcase the best and brightest of what manufacturers have to offer. Here are some of the more interesting highlights from Las Vegas, Nevada.

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Blockchain is for More Than Cryptocurrency

Blockchain is for More Than Cryptocurrency

If you’ve heard of blockchain recently, there’s a pretty good chance it was in reference to cryptocurrency. With Bitcoin reaching record levels in December, the idea of using blockchain technology to develop digital currency was on a lot of people’s minds. However, the blockchain has a variety of other practical uses.

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