Strategic IT Planning
Your Strategic Business Plan is only as good as the subordinate plans required to execute the strategy -- People and Personnel, Capital Budgets, Competitive Analysis, Customer Needs Assessment, Technology Plan, and others. The Strategic IT Plan should encompass identifying technologies needed for your business plans, recognizing any new technologies relevant to your business or industry, tracking the useful life of your current technology investments, and the necessary capital requirements to support these. Servers, desktop computers, laptops, network devices, and telephone systems have an expected useful life.
IT Budget Planning
To ensure that your business or organization is prepared to implement your strategic planning for the next 1 to 5 years, you need to consider how your technology needs will impact financial requirements of the strategic business plan. SandStorm IT has worked with many organizations to provide expertise on computer equipment and software end of life, growth projections, upcoming technologies, and many more. Servers, desktop computers, laptops, network devices, and telephone systems have an expected useful life. If you don't consider this in your strategic and capital planning, you may encounter significant costs you didn't anticipate and at a time you can least afford them. Our abilities to provide insights, expertise, and extensive experience can help you create a successful and reasonable technology component to your strategic business plan.
3rd Party Software Evaluations / Assessments
When considering the need to automate business processes with the use of application specific software, you can get overwhelmed by all of the "glitter and sparkle" of the marketing materials. You really need a trusted partner to, first, identify and document the business processes and other requirements you need automated, and then identify the list of providers who can potentially deliver the best solution for those needs. Keep in mind that software business and industry experts say you can expect to pay at least twice the acquisition price of pre-packaged, Commercial-off-the-shell (COTS) software just to have the software customized to fit your specific needs and implemented within your business. So, the total costs of a major software application implementation (including the original software purchase) can exceed 300% of what you may have originally been told. At SandStorm IT, we can help you wade through the marketing speak and understand exactly what the software will do for you (or not do, as the case may be). We can also offer custom software solutions with a fixed price upfront for your specific requirements and needs.
"Go Between" Support
Technology people can sometimes use a foreign vocabulary with their customers. At SandStorm IT, we avoid "tech-speak" whenever possible. We promise to explain everything in more common terms so you can clearly understand what we're doing. This can also be a trusted and valuable service to serve as "go-between" support for your other technology providers. We can intervene on your behalf and make sure whatever issue or question arises, is dealt with to your satisfaction and understanding.