Many enterprise technology-managed services providers (MSPs) miss crucial aspects of connectivity lifecycle management, leading to fragmented and inefficient IT experiences.
This oversight leaves multi-location enterprises grappling with piecemeal solutions and escalating costs, neglecting critical elements—like seamless implementation and complete lifecycle optimization.
This article unpacks every element of a comprehensive approach needed to streamline processes and reduce costs. Let’s explore the essential pillars that define effective enterprise telecom management.
1. Strategic advisory and planning
Efficient planning is vital for multi-location enterprises as they have a wider range of unique needs.
Companies with 20 or more locations worldwide face extraordinary challenges, such as keeping the total number of providers at a minimum while finding cost-effective solutions for locations that don’t have coverage under the primary network of providers. In-house teams spend countless hours trying to learn by doing as they struggle to cope without industry experience navigating these nuances.
Enterprise connectivity advisory and planning requires a strategy harmonizing diverse requirements across various locations, ensuring a cohesive and efficient approach to ongoing lifecycle management.
2. Sourcing and negotiation
Key aspects of enterprise technology management are negotiating the lowest rates and finding the best quality of service. Experienced managed service providers save more expenses than in-house teams via their extensive client portfolios, long standing industry experience and partnerships.
Choosing experienced managed service providers for sourcing and negotiating enterprise connectivity technology capitalizes on their strength of numbers and experience. A managed service provider's sizable client base lets them negotiate more aggressively. They also have more leverage due to the volume of new business they bring to vendors.
Like travel agents, managed service providers access the most competitive rates and terms from the best connectivity vendors through preexisting relationships with an expansive global network of vendors.
This combination makes finding the most appropriate provider for any location easy and leads to substantial cost savings for multi-location enterprises.
3. Implementation and project management
Effective implementation and project management are critical yet one of the most overlooked aspects by managed service providers. This gap is particularly problematic when small teams manage resource-intensive upgrades and projects.
For instance, upgrading from an old legacy system or rolling out a new connectivity solution for multi-location companies becomes a massive job for in-house teams. In fact, McKinsey reports only 20-30 percent of industries use cloud technology regularly and at scale.
While enterprise teams understand they need to upgrade, the absence of implementation support from piecemeal approaches leads companies into a vicious cycle of technical debt in legacy systems.
Technical debt is the “tax” a company pays on any development to redress existing technology issues, and it accounts for about 40 percent of IT balance sheets, according to McKinsey. The longer companies go without transitioning to new technology, the more costs they incur maintaining outdated legacy systems.
Since in-house teams lack the expertise and resources to manage transitions smoothly, it underscores the need for experienced professionals who offer implementation and project management within their scope of work.
4. Ongoing IT support
Exceptional support and management are essential to modern enterprise technology management. This necessity becomes evident when considering the limitations of outdated support methods, such as tracking trouble tickets manually.
For instance, when enterprises use spreadsheets to track support issues across multiple global locations, it’s time-consuming and doesn’t give a clear view of the current IT workload. Likewise, when updates depend on manual input from staff, it increases the likelihood of human error and fails to provide a synchronized, all-encompassing view of support issues across all locations.
Outdated manual approaches to IT support and tracking hinder the ability to spot granular details like cost issues by location, which is crucial for identifying problematic patterns before they spread.
Reliable third-party partners for ongoing support and management are imperative to accuracy, efficiency, and a holistic approach to technology management within an enterprise.
5. Expense management services
When enterprises have numerous locations worldwide, each incurs separate technology-related expenses. A single missed invoice or billing error at one location can quickly multiply, leading to significant financial discrepancies across the enterprise.
This situation highlights the helpfulness of comprehensive technology expense management, which validates expenses, resolves disputes and implements automated billing processes to prevent such errors. However, a provider's helpfulness relies on providing a clear overview of IT expenses across all locations for billing, inventory, and contract management.
The capacity to catch these issues early and at a granular level is vital to prevent a cascade of financial inaccuracies where multiple locations amplify the risk of errors.
6. Complete technology lifecycle optimization
Experts identify areas where technology is underutilized, outdated, or redundant by considering the entire tech lifecycle.
When a global enterprise evaluates its full spectrum of connectivity services, from initial deployment to ongoing management, it uncovers numerous opportunities for savings and efficiency.
For instance, from planning to implementation to management, enterprises can consolidate from 20 providers per office to eight by optimizing a full range of services. Nobody wants to pay 20-40 percent more than necessary because they aren’t properly bundling services.
Furthermore, complete technology lifecycle optimization ensures the infrastructure never falls behind and continues to evolve with the company’s long-term goals.
Conclusion: Advantage supports the full scope of technology management
In examining the pillars of enterprise technology management, we've uncovered the critical areas often overlooked by many providers—especially implementation challenges to the intricacies of complete lifecycle optimization.
While some providers might lead you to believe that fewer pillars are sufficient to cover this topic, it's clear how vital a complete approach is for the success of multi-location businesses. Fortunately, Advantage stands out by covering every pillar of service of an enterprise's technology needs.
Contact Advantage today to discover how your company can benefit from a holistic approach to technology management, transcending the limitations often set by others in the field.