Nearly every organization reaches a point where they have an ambitious technology or business goal – whether it is adopting new platforms or processes or optimizing existing ones – but lack the time, resources, or expertise to achieve that goal.
In these situations, leveraging the expertise of an IT consulting firm is extremely beneficial and can dramatically improve the scalability, efficiency, performance, and competitiveness of your organization.
Things to know about IT Consulting:
- What is IT Consulting?
- What Do IT Consultants Do?
- IT Consultants’ Areas of Expertise
- When Should You Hire an IT Consulting Firm?
- Why Should You Hire a Technology Consultant Over a Permanent Hire?
- What are the Benefits of IT Consulting Services?
What is IT Consulting?
IT consulting services, also referred to as technology consulting, are strategic, architectural, implementation, and optimization services provided to organizations looking for support with their business and technology initiatives and processes.
IT consulting companies have expertise in areas including cloud computing, digital transformation, data analytics, and cloud computing.
What Do IT Consultants Do?
IT consultants begin by conducting a discovery phase and partnering with key stakeholders, including leadership teams and program managers, to understand the organization’s needs, goals, business challenges, and opportunities. They then develop a strategy and roadmap to achieve your desired state.
Due to their extensive experience and technical knowledge, IT consultants are skilled in recommending the right methodologies, technologies, tools, providers, and platforms that will set organizations up for the greatest success and maximize the return on their investment.
Along with providing the technical expertise needed for successful implementation, technology consultants also help manage and support internal talent through their community of practice, building their skills and knowledge to ensure long-term sustainability of the solution.
IT Consultants’ Areas of Expertise
IT consultants provide expertise across a wide spectrum of areas, the most common being:
- Application development & modernization: By modernizing and refactoring your platforms and applications, you can get more value out of your software, making it easier to maintain with improved security and reduced operating costs.
- Digital transformation: Leverage evolving technology, strategic tooling, and smart automation to accelerate your business workflows, boost efficiency, and improve overall operations.
- Data & analytics: Implement integrated, modern data platforms and solutions that reduce silos, increase self-service analytic capabilities, empower decision-makers with powerful insights, and provide data democratization across your entire enterprise.
- Cloud strategy: Migrate your digital assets to the cloud, optimize cloud resources, and reduce costs by leveraging best practices across leading cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.
- Automation: Automate low-value or time-intensive business processes to reduce costs while improving efficiency and quality across your organizations.
- DevOps: Transform your culture, tools, standards, and processes to enable your teams to release the right products faster, more efficiently, and with fewer defects.
- Customer experience: Integrate digital strategies, business processes, and analytical insights to create a customer experience strategy that positions you to attract and retain customers, exciting them across every touchpoint.
- Application security: Use the latest development tools and practices to better block threats before release while integrating advanced analytics to help detect emerging threats.
When Should You Hire an IT Consulting Firm?
To succeed in today’s business environment, you need to leverage new technologies, stay agile and efficient, and consistently deliver high-quality products and services to meet the demands of your customers. IT consulting firms have the industry knowledge and skills to help you achieve those goals.
Technology consultants can support your teams at any part of their journey, whether first embarking on a project or optimizing existing platforms and workflows.
New technology projects
It is often beneficial to seek the help of an IT consulting firm when your organization is planning to tackle a significant technology project in the data, digital, or cloud space. Examples of this include:
- Migrating your data and digital assets from a private cloud to a public cloud or between public cloud providers
- Adopting DevOps
- Implementing and configuring a new CRM platform
- Accelerating workflows and processes through smart automation
- Developing a mobile app to support a new customer loyalty program
Attempting to achieve a major technology initiative requires the right skills, experience, and strategy. If your organization lacks these, it can result in wasted time, investment, and resources.
Optimizing processes and platforms
IT consultants can also help your business to optimize existing processes, workflows, tools, and platforms. Examples of when their expertise is beneficial are:
- When you have massive volumes of data but are struggling to tap into the full value of this data, reduce silos, and derive business insights
- When you are noticing trends in declining user engagement and conversions, or you see indicators for increasing market share but are unsure how to capture it
- If you want to optimize your existing cloud environment to tighten security, reduce costs, and take advantage of efficiency and scalability opportunities
- When you aren’t sure of exactly what your customers’ needs are and how to meet them
- When your team is seeking greater efficiency to deliver true value faster, better, and more affordably
- If your organization is struggling to stay ahead of the latest security threats or is out of compliance and at risk of fines or expensive litigation
Why Should You Hire a Technology Consultant Over a Permanent Hire?
IT consultants bring outside ideas and deep experience in providing an array of data solutions for organizations across numerous industries. They have “been there, solved that” and can quickly remove roadblocks every company eventually encounters.
They have also been exposed to diverse solutions, platforms, perspectives, learning styles, and business environments, which makes them well-equipped to operate successfully in your organization’s specific environment.
When your organization employs a consultant with a high level of technical expertise and experience, that individual knows the optimal approach to solving your business challenges and is able to hit the ground running to achieve it, maximizing the value of your organization’s investment.
Beyond this, one of the most significant advantages of hiring consultants is their focus on immediate positive impact and value delivered. In comparison, permanent hires require far more time to get acclimated and onboarded.
Last, but certainly not least, if you leverage consultants correctly, you can empower and inspire your internal resources to build their skills so they can maintain and grow the solutions you have implemented.
What are the Benefits of IT Consulting Services?
Turning to technology consultants for support can enable your organization to realize impactful benefits. These benefits vary depending on the type of technology solution implemented, but include:
- Improved efficiency
- Faster project delivery
- Reduced costs & total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Tightened security
- Greater scalability
- Improved processes
- Enhanced employee & customer satisfaction
- Sustained change adoption
How AIM Consulting Can Help You Accomplish Your Technology Goals
AIM Consulting offers technology solutions and services to help your organization tackle your most challenging projects. We are experts in technology, proficient in managing high-performing teams, and passionate about empowering our clients’ growth and success.
Let’s build the future together.
Learn more about specific areas of IT consulting:
- Agile Consulting: How Can It Help Your Business?
- Cloud Migration Consulting: How Can It Help Your Business?
- Customer Experience Consulting: How Can It Help Your Business?
- Data Analytics Consulting: How Can It Help Your Business?
- Data Engineering Consulting: How Can It Help Your Business?
- DevOps Consulting: How Can It Help Your Business?
- Digital Transformation Consulting: How Can It Help Your Business?
- Organizational Change Management Consulting: How Can It Help Your Business?
- Product Development Consulting: How Can It Help Your Business?
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