Market View 05

Stas Daszkiewicz

Senior Director IT

Market View 05

Stas

Daszkiewicz

Senior Director IT

The top priority for any self-respecting IT professional should be giving their colleagues a flawless experience across all tools and systems.

Are cloud based solutions just a trend?

Cloud based solutions are the future, there’s no doubt about that. Building and maintaining your own data centre to hold applications no longer makes sense. It is simply too costly and complex, and there is no ability to make quick changes when required. With cloud-based software and storage, it becomes much simpler to manage and integrate your systems when required. Automation tools, such as Zapier, take care of integrating systems for you in a very smooth way, so you no longer have to muck about with pieces of custom code that require heavy upkeep.

But whether it’s cloud based or physically on-premise, the top priority for any self-respecting IT professional should be giving their colleagues a flawless experience across all tools and systems. Your colleagues should be able to perform their jobs without friction, moving seamlessly through systems as required. Allow your colleagues to work in as few systems as possible, whilst providing as much insight and data from these as you can.

How should businesses approach acquiring new cloud based systems?

When it comes to defining a proper cloud strategy, the best place to start is your colleagues. Sit down with stakeholders across the organisation, from sales all the way through to customer support and success, to get a good understanding of the problems they currently face. Alongside this, aim to understand any new initiatives they want to undertake and what they hope to accomplish over the coming years. This insight then allows you to shop around for tools that you know will directly benefit the working lives of your colleagues.

Your goal should then be to figure out how the least amount of new tools can accomplish the largest amount of stakeholder requirements. Many solutions have moved beyond being a single-point solution now, so one piece of software may help you to achieve multiple requirements. As well as helping you to reduce the total number of tools required, you can also achieve a higher ROI per tool this way too!

Figure out how the least amount of new tools can accomplish the largest amount of stakeholder requirements.

We look at open source and believe firmly that technology should be an open source based system. We don’t want to tie people down to a specific technology or methodology.

What can IT managers do to stay up-to-date with the latest tools?

Staying up-to-date with the latest technologies and trends can seem like a daunting task. But over the years, I’ve picked up a few simple methods that have helped to keep me in the loop with what’s going on in the industry. The first is to make sure that you understand any new developments and features with the current tools that you’re using. We’ve all been guilty of ducking a call with the Customer Success Manager from a tool in our tech stack before, but they are worth keeping in the diary as you never know what you might be missing out on! Secondly, talk to your friends and peers from other companies about the tools they are using and what’s working well for them. If you can offer the same insight back about your current tools, then it becomes a win-win for both parties. Finally, if you are Venture Capitalist backed, make sure to speak directly with your VCs from time to time. They normally have their hands involved with lots of different companies, some of which could well be technology start-ups, so can be a very useful resource to find new tools.

Sisense embeds analytics seamlessly into any workflow. From retail to life sciences to manufacturing, their solutions power customer experiences by increasing user adoption and supporting smart, quick business moves. With Sisense, business leaders can better understand their world and gain the necessary knowledge to take action in it.