February 2020 - Wright Business Technologies

Successful Companies Have This One Thing In Common

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.” Clichés are clichés for a reason—they’re usually true. And that is certainly the case with this one.

Even the brightest among us rarely gets something right on the first try. The Wright Brothers tested over two hundred different types of wings before finding the right fit for their glider—the early model for what would eventually become the blueprint for the modern-day airplane. Thomas Edison conducted at least 2,000 different experiments before his pioneering bamboo lamp was ready for mass production. Author J.K. Rowling’s epic best-selling Harry Potter series was rejected by 12 different publishers before one finally took a chance on her.

What if the Wright brothers had given up on finding the right wings? What if Edison had stopped after the 500th experiment? What if Rowling decided she couldn’t publish Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone after her first rejection letter?

No matter the industry, one thing successful individuals and companies seem to have in common is a willingness to fail. And then, to try again. With how the technology industry is today, this willingness to get it wrong until you get it right has never been more crucial.

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Technology is Changing

Technology is constantly changing. It isn’t like learning the piano, where you can take lessons for a period of time, learn the basics, and then know that every time you sit down to play, the same keys will make the same sound. With the wave of rapid changes in technology, it would be more like learning a few notes, knowing that tomorrow those keys will play something different, and you will need to learn the notes all over again.

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We don’t say this to discourage you. In fact, this rapidly changing industry creates more opportunities than closed doors. If systems are always changing and updating, you don’t have to be an expert at a certain software to use it. You don’t need a degree in computer science to experiment. If everything is changing, everyone is trying to keep up and, therefore, anyone can learn.

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If you want your business to succeed, you have to implement the technology that will support its growth, and if you want to understand the latest technology, you have to do what Wright, Edison, and Rowling did. Experiment and try until you get it right.

Many of the concerns we hear from new clients center around the fear that they won’t know how to utilize or implement the new technology we’re suggesting. As with anything new, there is a learning curve, but with new technology, it’s more a matter of getting to know one system than all underlying systems. You don’t have to be a programmer. You just have to be curious. Or as Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has reportedly said, experiment: “If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.” This is something worth listening to from the CEO of a company that started out selling books online and eventually invented the Amazon Echo, the best-selling smart home device in the U.S.

Amazon didn’t make this leap by keeping it safe and not trying new things. They were willing to experiment—even if that meant conducting over 2,000 experiments on the same device—in order to learn and get it right.

When it comes to technology for your company, you don’t have to get it right the first time. Try something new and, as this technology writer says, “Click all the buttons.”

If you need some inspiration, FastCompany recently released a list of the 50 most innovative companies to work for in the U.S. The following ranking companies have uniquely cultivated innovation-friendly environments:

3M, a manufacturing conglomerate in Maplewood, Minnesota, encourages its employees to spend 15% of their work time on outside projects to help keep the creative juices flowing.

Activision Blizzard - Top 100 Companies to work for

Activision Blizzard, a video-game publisher in Santa Monica, California, conducts a semiannual innovation challenge, where employees team up and work on solving a problem the company is currently facing using a $5,000 budget.

Amazon encourages any of its employees who have a big innovation idea to implement it via their “working backward” process, where they work on their pitch, a mock press release and get feedback from other departments before actually building their project. This is how Amazon Prime started.

How could you encourage innovation at your company?

How could you implement it for yourself?

What is holding you back from new technology?

Do you need to keep clicking the buttons, keep experimenting, keep trying?

Remember, if this statement is true: If at first we don’t succeed, try, try, try again. Then this must also be true: If you’ve succeeded, you’ve tried, again and again.

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What is Enterprise IT Infrastructure and IT Infrastructure Management?

When most people envision “infrastructure,” they think of highways, bridges, railroads, and other forms of physical transportation infrastructure crucial for modern life. Imagine, for example, life without roads. Or, imagine living in a city with no sewage infrastructure, no indoor plumbing, and no electrical lines to bring electrical power from the power plant to your home. Infrastructure is what makes modern life possible. It is the underlying physical framework of society and consists of the fundamental facilities, equipment, and systems necessary to allow advanced societies to function.

However, infrastructure isn’t only about roads, telephone lines, and cell phone towers. Information technology (IT) also requires infrastructure to operate in the form of IT infrastructure.

Broadly defined, information technology (IT) infrastructure is simply the sum of all the components, such as personal computers, servers, and networks, that form the basis of and are required to run a business’s IT services. Typically, IT infrastructure refers to hardware, software, and network components. The term can encompass all of the technology that makes business possible in the modern era.

Enterprise IT Infrastructure Examples

In the context of a company, IT infrastructure is often referred to as “enterprise IT infrastructure”. This refers exclusively to the physical devices, software, and networks required to run a business or enterprise. For example, the IT infrastructure of a company may include physical servers, high-speed internet connections, cloud computing processes, as well as personal computing devices and enterprise software.

Common examples of what constitutes enterprise IT infrastructure include:

Physical servers
Data centers
Personal computers
Enterprise software
Communication devices & equipment
Internet connection
Network components
Cloud systems
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems

Why Does IT Infrastructure Matter?

Enterprise IT Infrastructure - Managed IT Services

Today’s businesses rely heavily on IT services to meet client expectations and business goals. More importantly, enterprises with efficient and well-run IT infrastructure are able to realize a real and tangible competitive advantage over companies that are slow to adapt to changing IT norms and consumer expectations. For example, companies and organizations that were first able to collect and also parse internet data gained a significant leg up compared to their competitors. Netflix, for example, which has a user base of over 100 million subscribers, was able to leverage their exclusive access to a vast reservoir of user data to generate a better user experience and inform the development of future content. While Netflix is now facing stiffer competition as other content providers start to catch up, they still remain the industry leader thanks to the initial investment they made in the infrastructure necessary to mine Big Data.

Failing to invest in IT infrastructure can have hugely negative results. For example, nearly half of all consumers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less. Websites that take longer than 2 seconds to load experience a dramatic dropoff in page views and, ultimately, sales conversions. That’s a big deal if you're a consumer-facing business. That’s also a big problem if you are a business that sells to other businesses as well. Each one second of delay on a B2B website can slash sales conversions by as much as 7 percent. It is absolutely essential for enterprises to have an efficient and reliable backbone of IT infrastructure in order to support their core business functions.

Reasons to invest in efficient and reliable IT infrastructure:

Provides a tangible competitive advantage
Avoid lost sales conversions
Meet consumer expectations
Deliver better services or products
Maintain and enhance productivity
Enhanced enterprise cybersecurity
Reduced business lag time
Minimize downtime & disruptions

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Enterprise IT Infrastructure Management

Like physical infrastructure such as bridges, IT infrastructure also requires careful maintenance and monitoring to ensure peak efficient performance. Not to be confused with IT Management, IT Infrastructure Management (ITIM) refers exclusively to the monitoring, maintenance, and overall management of the underlying systems necessary for your IT services to run smoothly. Yes, ITIM often entails the physical maintenance and repair of physical devices and equipment, such as cables, computers, and hard drives. However, ITIM is much deeper and more involved than rebooting buggy software from time to time. In fact, ITIM is actually highly involved and will continue to grow more and more complex as technology, and the infrastructure necessary to support advanced technologies, continues to advance by leaps and bounds.

At its core Infrastructure Management (ITIM) is about integrating all your disparate bits and pieces of IT into a comprehensive whole that works toward your business goals. That means everything from servers to mobile devices should be part of an integrated and secure system dedicated to running your business.

In reality, this is actually quite difficult to achieve. Legacy software, cybersecurity loopholes, and disparate operating systems, just to name a few issues, can often throw a wrench in a business’s IT infrastructure. Even something as basic as interoperability between MAC devices and PC devices can result in severe business delays and extensive technical workarounds. ITIM is all about planning ahead and avoiding those potential problems. It encompasses long term IT strategy as well as the more mundane day-to-day tasks such as infrastructure maintenance and monitoring. With a strong ITIM strategy in place, businesses can hope to minimize tech-driven downtime, maintain a competitive advantage over their rivals, and boost productivity and profit.

IT Infrastructure Management (ITIM) includes:

Hardware & software maintenance (i.e. servicing, updating, etc.)
Asset lifecycle planning
Data storage capacity and planning
Networks management and monitoring
Physical asset strategy
Virtual asset strategy
Data protection and security
Connectivity management
Communication systems management

Managed IT Services Provider (Third-Party Managed IT Infrastructure)

Due to the complexity of modern IT infrastructure, efficient and effective management can be quite difficult. Even small businesses often rely on extensive IT services and infrastructure in order to function, such as IoT-capable devices, CRM software, and real-time point of sale loyalty rewards systems. Medium and large businesses have even more complex IT services pipelines and infrastructure. Add to that multiple office locations, remote employees, cloud systems, off-site servers, and new technologies, such as 5G, which require new infrastructure, and it becomes quite clear that many businesses need help managing all the various parts and pieces.

Integrating all these separate systems and chunks of IT infrastructure into a single, unified, and efficient engine for business growth isn’t easy. That’s where third-party Managed IT Services providers (MSPs) come in. MSPs provide expert IT services and infrastructure management where and when it is needed. MSPs help companies to manage their IT infrastructure efficiently and cost-effectively, allowing enterprises to focus on their core business demands.