Increasing business efficiency and productivity with IT support and Managed IT Services

What Is IT Support

IT Support is the process of outsourcing IT services, Microsoft 365 support, to managed services provider. IT services like managed cloud support, digital marketing, SharePoint consultancy and Azure can be managed by efficient MSPs IT technicians. This process can be delivered with onsite IT services or remote IT support depending on the location of the business. This business can be a retail, accounting firm, small business or law firms or financial services.

Business Process

Business process is business activity in the real world. Let say we have business with a vacancy. To fill the vacancy, we have a hiring process. We start by advertising the job, we conduct interviews to find the most suitable candidate. The business makes a decision and we sign the contract. In a few days new guy turns up at work.

Let’s take an example of accounting process. We have vendors and get invoiced for our purchase. First thing we do is check if its valid. We go back to the vendor to check if it can be proven. The invoice is approved by the business. Finally, we write a check and send it to the vendor.

Business Process mapping with IT

Every day during the course of business there are thousands of business IT operations that follow some process or another. In a large organization there are so many its almost impossible to keep track of this workflow. In the old days this was all done on paper. Many people were required to write it all down.

Thankfully now we have technology to do everything for us. Technology allows us to be productive, fast and efficient. You can call this age as information technology age. Regardless of the tech, the notion behind it all remains the same. We keep track of all the business processes happening in the real world with IT.

As in the first scenario, when a new person is recruited, we keep track of their details. We check their resume; we onboard them and they get their electronic employee ID. We input their tax number in the system, we set a salary in the cloud-based payroll system. We update all our servers with user logins and desktop.

All of this IT activity generates a lot of data, in all areas of business. Business areas like employee activity, email, payroll, HR, accounting, IT services for business is generating data on a daily basis. This vast amount of data that is being generated is a digital footprint of business activity. We can capture, store it, analyse and do amazing things with it. We can do so with databases and software.

The software allows us to study our activities in a number of ways, it allows up to capture data, retrieve it, edit it, run reports and manipulate it. So, the role of software is a means to create and maintain data and keep track of business activities.

Even large organizations suffer with their businesses processes which causes lack of productivity and loss in efficiency. A large part of this is lack of documentation, it is hard to create, keep it updated and be able to actually use it.

Process Documentation

Having no documentation is a really big problem. Without it you have no clue about your business processes. For start you can’t improve your processes without having any idea of it. Documentation is a map of where you are and where you want to be in the future, your IT strateg. The documentation forms the plan for your IT strategy. Without documentation you can’t show people what their responsibilities are and how their job interlinks with others.

What if you could map out your business processes and there was no ambiguity about the duties of the employees? Business process maps can be hosted online in the cloud. Employees can access the process maps that applied to them and click on them. This will allow them to pull up the whole process chain.

The employees can see all the associated forms and documentation relevant for that process. That way your business can have a single source for all business information. Similarly, trained employees could capture the existing processes, map them online and keep them updated in the cloud so other employees can use them.

This way your business can be more efficient, avoid costs and increase productivity. This allows for greater customer experience and staff disruptions. Simple processes that can be automated not take as long.

As before software can be used to study processes and create documentation which can be used by employees. Studying businesses processes to find which tasks can be automated, outsourced IT providers, website design or managed it service firms instead of wasting staff resources.

Mapping your processes with software and putting it in a database or store gives you a detailed and interactive set of process maps in a single documentation store. This store is then searchable, updated and can be used by employees. It acts as library for future processes to build on. It allows provides employees with templates for policy checklists and more.