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Categories : Insights & Trends, Technology Assessment

Bluewave | August 5, 2022

Planning for Uncertainty: Are You Ready for the Next “Big One”?

Running an organization would sure be a lot easier if we could anticipate everything that will happen in the future. The COVID-19 pandemic and its ensuing economic and business disruptions have been a profound reminder that, in addition to the everyday uncertainties organizations face (key staff quitting suddenly, statistically improbable systems failures, etc.), there are periodic major disruptions that no one can see coming—future-defining unpredictable events. Let’s explore how Bluewave can help you by planning for uncertainty.

How can companies prepare for something like Covid when no one knows when it’s coming or what it will look like? For IT leaders, the key is planning for uncertainty by building a resilient organization and technology stack. Let’s focus on communications and telecom preparedness. As we know from the shift to work-from-home, telecom and collaboration solutions were the key to workforce continuity during Covid. In adapting to Covid, organizations discovered three primary reasons why it’s hard to be prepared for major shifts:

  1. IT organizations often don’t have a holistic view or blueprint of their technology.
  2. IT organizations are not constantly optimizing their solutions—meeting objectives, reviewing vendor agreements, and monitoring for better alternatives.
  3. IT organizations are support-focused or project-focused. If telecom and communications services are running OK, optimization for effectiveness and costs is not a priority when there are limited or non-dedicated resources.

This is a chronic condition throughout the industry that Bluewave is helping to fix. Our Technology Lifecycle Management process is designed to give companies the visibility, agility, and flexibility they need to better weather routine and catastrophic unknowns.

Key components of preparedness:

1. Gain Visibility

  • Any type of planning starts with an in-depth understanding of current projects and initiatives as well as having clear insights into what assets and services are in place today.
  • Analyze all vendor contracts and ensure that terms, conditions, and optional cancellations scenarios are clearly understood (specifically ETF fees, auto renewal classes, or renewal for discount opportunities).

How Bluewave Can Help: The first step in our Lifecycle Management process is to help clients obtain this deep understanding not only of their current initiatives, assets, and services, but also of their vendor contracts. Understanding terms, conditions, and optional cancellations scenarios (specifically ETF fees, auto renewal clauses, or renewal for discount opportunities) is critical to building uncertainty-weathering resilience. We do this through our proven Technology Assessment process, which includes a guaranteed 2x return on investment, making it an easy first step for IT leaders to take.

2. Align Priorities

  • Ensure that everything that is being worked on within IT aligns to a macro business goal. Another pitfall of being engaged in daily firefighting is that IT initiatives, assets, and services can gradually drift away from business goals unless they are diligently and proactively aligned.
  • Clearly describe how a project’s efforts are going to directly deliver macro business goals.
  • Consider realigning resources so IT’s time and effort are relevant to the broader organizational priorities. Always quantify the risk to the business’s macro priorities if a specific project is scaled down, paused, or outright sunset.

How Bluewave Can Help: Bluewave’s Solutions Architecture and Transformation team can help quantify ROIs and align the IT projects with your business objectives.

3. Drive Agility

  • Identify opportunities where scalable, outcome-based services (such as XCaaS, managed cloud, managed security services, etc.) can reduce operational risk and costs in the event of headcount reduction or in the event of growth outpacing internal support.
  • Consolidate vendor relationships to drive deeper partnership beyond commercial contracts. It’s important to be working with vendors you know and trust. When dealing with partner-status vendors, creative solutions and long-range mutual support (hallmarks of resilience) are much more likely.

How Bluewave Can Help: Again, our Technology Assessment can help decrease wasted spend and free up existing budget allocation so that mid-cycle reductions can be absorbed without impacting projects.

Let’s get started

If you’re ready to start building better resilience to uncertain events, whether they’re of the big global variety or the mundane operational variety, Bluewave’s Telecom Assessment is a great place to start. Once we’ve taken a deep look into your current environment, the path toward resilience will start to look more certain. Let’s get started by planning for uncertainty in your tech stack.

Let’s Get Started

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