Top 5 Things You Need to Look for When You Need IT Consulting

30 September 2019

It’s not always ideal to call your antivirus tech support line when you’re experiencing problems with your system. Especially when you’re in the 11th most populous state, the minutes you’re spending on the phone is costing you resources. And the problem is likely well beyond their scope.

It’s just one of the several factors why New Jersey firms use IT consulting firms to fix a business concern. Whether it is because the business needs an objective insight or because it cannot deal with the situation internally, consultants provide a solution to resolve the crisis without costing a fortune.

But how do you tell which IT consulting NJ is suitable for your business? What are you supposed to look for when seeking professional advice?

Before you grant third parties entry to your valuable data, check out the top 5 things you need to look for when you need IT consulting NJ.

Experience

Ensure that the firm has experience with businesses of your type and size. An IT consultant who operates with Fortune 500 companies can have a challenging time with small and medium enterprises. So when planning on contracting an IT consultant, make sure that the team has experience partnering with businesses not just in your sector but also in your size.

Track Record of Success

Check who they already worked with and make sure they have a successful track record. Many consulting firms may be impressive at pitching, but they do not have proven success. It is essential to talk about the firm’s previous projects with a concern comparable to yours.

It would be great if the companies you’re evaluating can connect you to previous customers who can validate a successful partnership.

Support

Choose advisors and team supervisors who have access to up-to-date instruction, industry standards, and innovative project management techniques. Do your prospective IT consulting companies provide in-depth training? Are their support readily available?

Identify and resolve issues.

Once you hire an external IT consultant, you likely understand the particular issues that you would like to address. However, a thoroughly efficient consultant can innovate and go beyond the boundaries of your concern to detect and solve the problems you have not yet discovered. You want to have a consultant who dares to advise you if you’re mistaken and to find out what you’re lacking. They should also be able to guide you to the right course, even if it is the opposite of your original vision.

Team player

Even though you hire a consultant as an external contractor, they will need to function within your group. Communication can be in person, via email, or video meetings, so both speaking and writing skills are essential. Consulting firms need the capacity to protect their perspective, but they also have to acknowledge if others have a better idea.

Choosing the appropriate IT consulting company can be a challenging task. But with this list, you’ll be prepared to find your potential IT consultants in no time!

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Dos and Don’ts of Marketing for Technology Companies

Marketing is essential to the success of any business – and that includes technology companies. According to The CMO Survey, tech companies spend 15% of their total budget on marketing. Second, to Consumer Packaged Goods industry, the tech sector has one of the highest budget allocations for marketing. In fact, tech giant Samsung is considered the second largest advertising spender worldwide with a total $9.2 billion advertising spending. This underlines the importance of marketing in the technology industry. When you don’t run an effective marketing campaign, you’re doomed to fail -- no matter how impressive your solution is. Unfortunately, a lot of tech companies, especially startups, still fail to recognize this fact. While some technology companies have marketing plans, many of these are ineffective. We’ve seen a lot of tech companies come and go. And many of those companies that failed didn’t give marketing the right attention it deserves. To these companies, hindsight is an amazing but useless thing! The good news is that you don’t have to commit the same missteps of these failing (or failed) tech companies. They are avoidable – and you can learn HOW to avoid them. Here are some do’s and don’ts of running an effective marketing for a technology company. DO: Be bold and interesting When a tech company grows, their marketing strategies tend to stagnate and settle with the ‘usual campaigns’ that may have worked for them in the past. But the problem is that the competition is ever evolving. As such, your marketing strategies need to stay bold, interesting and exciting too. Always remember that the moment you settle with formulaic marketing techniques, you become less competitive. Don’t wait to become irrelevant. Study your market, know where it’s headed and be ahead of the pack. DON’T: Set up and just wait for visitors So you’ve built a website, social media networks and added some content. But it shouldn’t end there. Don’t expect people to find and visit your page. You have to invest in promoting and marketing your online presence. Great content, social media presence and effective SEO for technology companies are vital to connecting with your customers. DO: Focus on your company instead of customers Perhaps the cliché, “the customer is always right” also means “the customer is king!” Unfortunately, not all tech companies realize this. Marketing campaigns of many tech companies focus so much on their products or services, but never really about their customers. But the fact is that customers only care about their problems, needs, and goals. They’d only want to know if you offer a solution to their problem. To engage their interest, talk about how you can help them and in the language they understand. Effective marketing talks about how you can solve a problem, and once you get their interest, you can then brag about your product’s features. DON’T: Spend too much or too little For your marketing campaign to be effective, it needs to be funded adequately. According to U.S. Small Business Administration, a company should devote at least 7 to 8 percent of your gross revenues for marketing and advertising. This underlines the importance of marketing. You will spend on various marketing channels, and maintain a good marketing and sales team. Scrimping on your marketing budget can do more harm than good to your tech company. A 2016 Gartner Survey shows that budget allocations for marketing continue to increase, climbing to 12% of the company budget. The tech industry is a very competitive one and there is a need to keep abreast with competition. However, this doesn’t mean you can spend all of your revenue on your marketing. You don’t want to pour in your budget on failing or badly-managed marketing techniques. Evaluate each of the marketing strategies you employ and see which one gives you the most ROI. Study your target audience and know how to engage them better. DO: Delegate to experts Maybe you’re a great developer or an experienced CEO, but that doesn’t make you a good marketing person or a salesman. This is a common mistake of many tech companies. While you can give your inputs and ideas, you should give your marketing team the flexibility to create an effective marketing campaign. Pick people who have the credentials to run your company’s marketing. DON’T: Ignore your online presence A lot of tech companies tend to ignore their website and social media channels soon after launching them. It’s a huge mistake! Launching a website or social channels is not a one-off thing. It needs a sustained marketing effort to get your website work for you. Consider your website as an investment and as a vital part of your marketing strategy. You’ll need the help of agencies providing continuous website development to ensure that your website remains up-to-date, functional and effective. Keep your web presence active and relevant - it’s an important part of your branding. DO: Focus your marketing efforts In an effort to get a wide audience, some tech companies create an unclear persona and a scattered, complicated marketing campaign. As a result, they end up wasting their budget. While you want to reach as much audience as possible, launching a marketing campaign without proper targeting can both costly and wasteful. You need a targeted and focused marketing. Know your product or service and engage a specific market segment, particularly those with the highest chances of conversion. Do your research and discover where your target audience is. Take note that not everyone is a potential customer – focus on channels that bring you the best results. For example, if you are marketing a tech solution for gamers, you will have the best returns if you place your ads on a gamers’ forum instead of a woodworkers’ forum. DO: Build a strong organic relationship Nowadays, it’s very easy to buy traffic or page visits from dodgy merchants. But the problem is that these numbers mean nothing to your business. Sadly, this remains one of the most common mistakes of many tech companies. In an attempt to boost their online presence in an instant, some companies resort to devious digital marketing schemes that promise to increase their web presence overnight. This is a major and wasteful misstep you should never do. Your marketing campaign should focus on building your product. Letting people know what solutions you offer, engaging your audience and building strong organic relationships. Invest your time and efforts into marketing strategies with good returns – and you’re on the right track. Read More: Social Media Marketing role in Technology. Importance of Flexibility with Business Technology. Securing Mobile App Development with Blockchain Technology.

5 Core Pillars Of Cloud FinOps

The current dynamic business environment requires companies to take a structured, proactive approach to manage, monitoring and predicting their cloud service costs. Doing so will help them to meet their financial goals. Cloud FinOps is a cultural shift and operational framework that brings finance, business, and technology together to accelerate business value realization and drive financial accountability through the cloud. At its heart, cloud FinOps enables businesses to understand the challenges and complexities of cloud information technology (IT) financial management. The core purpose of cloud FinOps is to optimize the business value generated from cloud services. It involves various techniques, like free credits, least-priced services, negotiating costs, and more. 5 Core Pillars of Cloud FinOps You need to know the core principles of the cloud FinOps design to successfully implement it. These design principles help build a cost-conscious, self-governing culture while fostering business agility and financial accountability in the cloud. The following are some key pillars of Cloud FinOps: 1. Enablement and Accountability This principle focuses on creating lean or centralized cross-functional teams. These teams may include application owners, architecture, operations, finance, and engineering. Establishing these teams enhances governance and sets guidelines for managing cloud expenditure. 2. Cost Optimization This principle requires stakeholders to identify the main cost-optimization drivers in the cloud environment. It is a continuous, iterative process that offers a consistent solution to managing cloud usage most cost-effectively. The following are the three common optimization areas: Architecture Pricing Resource 3. Realization and Measurement This principle involves creating core key performance indicators (KPIs), and business-value metrics will be utilized to evaluate the success of the transformation. In most cases, customers begin with a series of cost-optimization metrics. Afterward, business value or unit economics measurements, like cost per customer served or transaction. 4. Forecasting and Planning Proper cloud estimates and planning require the company to fully understand its cost drivers, assign cloud expenditure, and benchmark efficiency. Doing so ensures minimal deviations between the actual and forecasted costs. 5. Accelerators and Tools As you would expect, cloud FinOps requires you to employ proper accelerators and relevant tools. Doing so ensures effective monitoring and management of cloud spending. These tools may include: Automation scripts that set budget alerts and account guardrails Reporting dashboard for tracking value and managing cloud spend Cost management tools for analyzing real-time cost and billing data. How Do Cloud FinOps Work? This operational framework involves a three-step lifecycle to ensure teams remain focused on and organized to deliver business value and attain financial accountability. These steps include: Informing Optimizing Operation 1. Informing This stage involves informing the company about all cloud-related costs. It happens by providing 100% visibility and assigning cloud costs to relevant business units. Here, the goal is to let every team understand their cloud spending. Also, it involves benchmarking against the company’s internal objectives, like budgets and forecasts. Companies can visualize areas they’re attaining business value and where they do not, helping them determine their progress. 2. Optimizing Once members know the organization’s goals, costs, and achieved business value, they proceed to optimize costs. This step involves providing recommendations and actionable insights to the different teams. Here, companies cut off unnecessary services that increase their cloud spending. Also, they automate rightsizing of different resources and maximize the utilization of the available resources. As a result, it significantly reduces cloud expenditure. 3. Operation Once all costs are optimized, it’s time to architect the cloud environment to achieve and maintain minimal cloud spending. The company creates governance policies that help attain technological, business, and financial goals. The primary objective here is to achieve measurable goals and continual improvement. 4 Benefits Of Cloud FinOps: Adopting cloud FinOps best processes and practices helps enterprises achieve various high-level benefits, such as: 1. Cost Efficiency Cloud FinOps enable you to attain cost efficiency thanks to advanced tools and accelerators. These tools help you identify areas of optimization, track and optimize cloud spending, and hold every team responsible, reducing unnecessary cloud costs. 2. Positive Cultural Shift By holding every cloud consumer responsible and making their data on cloud usage and spending available, cloud FinOps helps optimize cloud consumption. As a result, it helps create a beneficial culture for all cloud-consuming parties. 3. Reduces Uninformed Decisions Uninformed decisions can be extremely costly. Without proper tracking of cloud spending and resources, your company may be spending significant resources on the cloud. Fortunately, cloud FinOps products provide real-time granular reports and insights, helping leaders to: Get service-level cloud utilization Track underutilized or idle resources Compare the business cloud resource usage by time Figure out business areas that need more resources. With such data, leaders are aware of which areas need what resources. Also, they are informed about their decisions’ financial implications. 4. Unifies the Company’s Ecosystem Every company often has a frustrating, complex, and invisible culture split between finance, IT, and DevOps teams. Requests, approvals, and processes vary from department to department, though they aim to achieve a common goal. Also, technical terms and jargon may not be understood by other teams. What’s more, the finance team often loses control of cloud infrastructure procurement when the cloud engineering team steps into the process. How does Cloud FinOps help in this case? Well, cloud FinOps help every team stay updated about their cloud costs depending upon their responsibilities. For instance, while the finance team views the cost reports and data, the engineering team can access the processor usage information. As a result, it leads to streamlined, effective, and unified operations. Challenges Of FinOps Although cloud FinOps is a great approach, it has its shortcomings. Many teams end up experiencing barriers to attaining business value. Some key challenges include: Difficulty understanding cloud costs One cannot trade off creativity and innovation for low cloud costs The DevOps teams may not exhaustively understand the financial processes Final Thoughts The cloud FinOps framework can significantly transform your company in all aspects. This operational framework enables you to optimize your company’s financial wellness while driving business value. However, to achieve the best results, you need to adopt the best practices and understand the principles and dynamics of this approach. Read Also: Top cloud security controls you should be using Hosted Mail Service That Runs on the Cloud Oracle & The Cloud: A Dream Team

Process Mining and Data Privacy – Key Points to Remember

The global pandemic of 2020 was challenging for frontline workers, the public, and businesses. Besides a dwindling economy, governments and organizations suffered various setbacks, including exponential data thefts. Security incidents became more costly and harder to contain for the latter due to a drastic operational shift. As per experts, the cost of a data breach reached a record high, shelling $4.24 million per incident on average from affected ventures. As more businesses migrate to the digital world, data security becomes a reason for severe migraine for owners. Keeping the incidents and the present situation in mind, the European Union introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for improved data privacy controls for EU citizens. GDPR requires a thorough evaluation of every software application before its implementation to prevent possible data breaches and loss of customers, employees, and corporate data. Automatically, business process management solutions, like process mining, RPA, automated process discovery, and others, fall under the tight scrutiny of GDPR data privacy guidelines. Process Mining in Business Process Management – A Brief Overview Process mining is an intelligent technology solution enabling owners to build a reliable visual map of business processes elaborating how every task within a process is executed. It captures employee-software system interactions and converts data into event logs. This provides an overview of end-to-end processes. Process mining tools provide task and process insights to evaluate task executions for scaling improvement opportunities. These insights also support informed decision-making pertaining to process efficiencies and complexities. Process mining bridges the gap between traditional model-based processes and data-centric processes for further analysis. There are three basic types of process mining; namely, process discovery to discover a process model capturing the behavior in an event log (collection of events), conformance checking for identifying commonalities and discrepancies between a process model and an event log, and process re-engineering to improve a process model using event logs. In a human-centric process, each event comprises a case identifier, an activity name, a timestamp, and optional attributes such as resources or costs. Usually, a case identifier refers to individuals and includes much personal data. And herein lies the significance of improving data security. The Importance of Data Security in Process Mining Automated process mining relies heavily on enterprise data and captures confidential information about the company or the clients. Data collected during the mining of processes are categorized under the following datasets: Key identifiers: These datasets contain unique information identifying individuals, such as their full names and social security numbers. Quasi-identifiers: These datasets are considered indirect identification of individuals—for example, gender, age, and postal code. Sensitive attributes: Information related to salary, payment, financial statements, and others are private and sensitive for individuals or companies. Insensitive attributes: These datasets contain general or non-risky information not covered by the other features. Given the confidential and sensitive nature of the above-mentioned data, attention to cybersecurity in process mining has gained momentum recently. Also, third parties can offer the latter; therefore, choosing providers with secure products and processes is equally crucial. Any breach in data security can prove costly for the company owners and tarnish customer/client/partner relationships. But the shared responsibility of protecting critical information should rest upon employees. After all, it is said that the usual source of security incidents are current employees and, in certain instances, ex-workers. Respective teams, while handling information, should protect sensitive data at every step of task execution. In order to achieve the same, decisions regarding data transparency and usage should be made aforehand. Most specifically, such decisions involve the type of data used, data extraction methods, data accessibility, data protection, and compliance requirements. On the other hand, process mining can be leveraged to detect silent internal attacks on data. It can quickly identify abnormal behavior in the company’s internal network and indicate apparent security breaches. Therefore, data is integral to process mining, and the security of which should be the core objective of software applications and associated teams. Key Privacy Metrics in Process Mining In order to evaluate the privacy of specific data, owners should decide on particular metrics for measurement. These privacy metrics tally the security level of each data in terms of disclosure and are broadly categorized under the following sub-heads: Bounded knowledge: Data is restricted with specific rules to avoid disclosing confidential information. Need to know: The unnecessary data is eliminated from the system to prevent any breach. This metric controls data access. Protected from disclosure: Data confidentiality is observed during data mining using the classification method. Data quality metrics: These metrics measure the loss of information/benefit, while the complexity criteria validate the efficiency and scalability of different techniques within this scope. Process Mining and Data Capture – Key Points to Consider Since process mining extracts granular data at the process level, care is taken to ensure that any new process doesn’t come into conflict with personal data policies. Owners should also ascertain that software solutions for mining processes comply with the specific data security requirements. Therefore, people involved with the entire system must consider a few data capture points. Access to raw data: The process mining team requires access to corporate data to understand what’s most important for analysis. Here, the company can choose and grant access to specific datasets for further research. Choose the right strategy: Besides mining processes for raw insights, the team also translates the raw data into broad terms and updates it into dashboards. Later on, the respective team can decide what features to focus on. Filter: Occasionally, the company tracks information that doesn’t require further analysis for specific processes. In this case, the data can simply be omitted from the system. Datasets that are sensitive or do not directly impact the business analysis outcome are deleted to maintain the focus only on valid and relevant data. Pseudonymization: Encrypting the information to protect the confidentiality of sensitive information prevents users from correlating them to real data specific, like specific names, addresses, or other PII data. For instance, if the company wishes to maintain secrecy about employees directly involved with process-related tasks can follow this approach. Here, the case identifier’s name is replaced with numbers. Anonymization: This is similar to pseudonymization, where the names are replaced with unique pseudonyms instead of numbers. Hence, unauthorized users cannot identify individuals’ names or confidential information about them from the available data. Conclusion Besides handling data in bulk daily, enterprises using online systems leave behind their digital footprints. These footprints are valuable data captured by process mining to examine how employees execute each process and sub-tasks. Needless to say, mining for such insights is done with the company’s best interests in mind, namely, to optimize operations and resources and derive maximum value. However, such datasets carry sensitive information of various interested parties, any breach of which can prove highly hazardous for all. Therefore, data is the primary source for process miners to carry out their objectives, but the company must ensure the data is handled with care. Hence, data security is a significant factor in process mining. Have A Look :- How to Get Copy of a Divorce Decree 7 Secrets To Make Your Baby Fall Asleep Faster All That You Need To Keep In Mind Before Selling On Facebook

Top 5 Things You Need to Look for When You Need IT Consulting

Experience

Track Record of Success

Support

Identify and resolve issues.

Team player

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Content Rally

Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.

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Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.

Leave a Reply

Popular

Follow Us

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