Five Questions to Help You Audit Your Technology Solutions Providers in 2022
Get the Most out of Your Tech in 2022
January 3, 2022
The new year is a great time to re-assess your digital/cloud service providers to ensure that your technology solutions are ready for what 2022 brings. As your needs evolve, sometimes your solutions need to adjust as well. It’s easy to forget to check in with your solutions providers, and as a result, you may be paying for services you no longer need or even missing out on new tools that could make your workday easier and improve your bottom line.
Does my Solutions Provider Know What my Current Goals Are?
Your targets are likely to change, year to year or even quarter to quarter. For example, over the past two years, many organizations are increasingly shifting to remote work. As a result, you may benefit from migrating certain workloads to the Cloud or by converting analog content to a digital format. Many companies are finding that centralizing content access and shifting away from per-seat licensing for their applications is a good move. The key is that when you’re making big changes, you need to also take a good look at your technology solutions and ensure they are still aligned. If your solutions providers are not in step with the shifting goals, you may be overpaying for features you don’t need, or possibly worse, paying for effective features you aren’t using.
Am I Receiving a Return on my Investment?
This is sometimes a challenging question to answer. Some technology solutions provide clear cost savings right at adoption. Business suite software is a great example of this. Swapping to a competitor may provide immediate savings in the form of cheaper licenses or broader functionality that allows you to eliminate more than one vendor. However, not every technology solution is so easy to quantify. Some solutions have a higher cost upfront (such as cloud migration) but come with long-term savings over multiple years. Similarly, some tools or services improve efficiency, saving you valuable (and expensive) man-hours. It can be harder to track time savings or second-hand benefits, but it’s worth the effort. Getting a good picture of your ROI is often a collaborative exercise that requires data from both your organization and your solutions provider. You should not be afraid to dig deep and ask your technology partners to walk you through how your solutions are being used and share any metrics they may have.
How is my Solutions Provider Addressing Industry Challenges?
For this question, we recommend getting a little more specific. Your needs will vary, but it’s important to make sure your solutions provider is ahead of upcoming compliance challenges or industry changes. Let’s say that you are planning to migrate all of your customers to a new digital environment in order to comply with new privacy laws. In that situation, it makes sense to confirm that your cloud environment is ready for the increased demand. This is a conversation you should have with your cloud provider (or managed service provider) before you begin the shift. You will want to make sure your provider is keeping track of major industry shifts and is using the latest and most secure tools to deliver their solutions.
What is my Preferred Communication Strategy Moving Forward?
Is your solutions provider effectively communicating regulatory changes and updates to their solution? If not you may want to ask: why? Ideally, your solutions provider will be checking in with you from time to time using an account management team to ensure your solution is working as intended and that your needs are being met. However, sometimes it makes sense to get the ball rolling on your end. Ultimately, you want to establish a sensible communication strategy with your provider moving forward. For many people already downing in emails, no news is considered good news, but for others, they can feel blindsided by new features or changes that weren’t effectively communicated. The type of communication strategy you prefer is a great conversation point when auditing your solutions provider. Do you feel you’re getting too many emails? Not enough? Let them know how often you want to be contacted and in what ways. You may choose to set up more frequent quarterly checks in’s or instead stick with a yearly assessment to audit the health of your account.
It’s easy to get trapped in an “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” mindset. However, scheduled maintenance is a necessity for your technology solutions. In the same way that a yearly medical checkup or an oil change can help you identify hidden problems with your health or your car, a yearly account audit can help you identify inefficiencies; or opportunities for your business. This may be as simple as meeting with key players and getting feedback on the solutions you’re currently using to identify which ones are working and which ones need to be addressed.
Sign Up for a DOMA Health Check
We want to ensure we are delivering solutions that meet your needs and exceed your expectations. If you already have an account with us, we’d like to help you audit your DOMA solution to ensure you are set to make the most of 2022. You can schedule an account health check here. This 20-30 minute account health assessment will help us determine if you are having any challenges with your current solutions that need to be addressed. We can also share some cost-saving solutions that synergize well with what you’re already doing. However, the goal of this call is to get a sense of how we can serve you better, not on what we can sell you, so the focus is on making sure you have the right strategies in place to help you tackle your industry challenges. We can help you set up additional training if needed or guide you to the next step on your digital transformation journey.
About DOMA- Powered by Tech, Driven by People
DOMA Technologies (DOMA) is a software development and digital transformation company whose mission is to change customer lives by lightening their workload through faster and more targeted access to their data. Since 2000, our team of 200+ experts has helped businesses navigate all aspects of the digital world. We are a dedicated strategic partner for the federal government and private sector clients at every stage of their unique digital transformation journey.
Author:
Danielle Wethington
Director of Communications
Remote Work with the Cloud
Learn more about digital transformation.
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