10 Techniques for Improving Enterprise IT Performance 

X Ways to Improve Your Enterprise IT Performance

Enterprise IT performance affects almost every aspect of your business, directly impacting your productivity, employee morale, customer service, and security. With better systems, better practices, and more consistent operability, your technological infrastructure will be capable of supporting your team in reaching their full potential.

So what are the best techniques for improving enterprise IT performance? How can you boost this important variable?

Techniques for Improving Enterprise IT Performance

These are some of the best strategies and approaches for improving your enterprise IT performance:

1. Define performance. Before we get any further, it's important to take a step back and question your own definition of IT performance. There are some generally “good” signs that your IT infrastructure is working well, but different organizations are going to have different objectives. Is your highest priority uptime? Are you more interested in perfecting security? Which KPIs are you going to track and which ones are most important to your organization? Until you define these important parameters, your enterprise IT optimization isn't going to mean much; you won't have any objective goals to guide your progress or tell you when you succeeded.
2. Communicate your goals. Your next step is to communicate those goals to the rest of your organization. The head of your IT department and leaders within that department should all know what your biggest priorities are as well as the path to achieve them. Only when you get your entire team on the same page will you be able to unlock your true potential here.
3. Practice network optimization. You can begin to build a more reliable, efficient network by practicing network optimization. There are several techniques that can help you here, including proper load balancing, QoS prioritization, payload compression, SD-WAN leveraging, and the incorporation of better hardware (replacing or upgrading elements of your network as needed). Good network performance monitoring software can help you here, but if you want to take things a step further, consider investing in network management as a service.
4. Invest in tools. There are thousands of tools on the market that have the potential to approve your enterprise IT performance. The exact tools you need are going to depend on your current infrastructure, your objectives, and your budget. Investing in better network observability and monitoring software, for example, could help you gain more transparency into how your network is running. Better tools for automating various IT responsibilities could save you a ton of time – which leads us to our next point.
5. Automate everything you can. It’s hard to overstate the value of automation in improving enterprise IT performance. Automating a process is not just about saving manual time and saving money. It's also about improving consistency. Generally, the more you can automate within your IT department, the smoother and more efficiently it's going to run.
6. Experiment with different strategies. Don't lock yourself into any one strategy or approach. There are many different philosophies on how to manage enterprise IT performance and many different ground-level tactics designed to improve that performance. You won't know what works best for your organization until you actually experiment with them, so step out of your comfort zone and strive to try new things regularly.
7. Empower your team members. Even though your IT department is going to be leaning heavily on automation and core technologies, the human members of your department still play an important role. Accordingly, you should empower your team members to be autonomous and decisive, adopting an entrepreneurial mindset for their positions while remaining true to your high-level objectives.
8. Optimize for retention. IT staffing shortages have the potential to cripple your entire department if you aren't careful. Incorporating more automation and more efficient workflows can help you significantly, but it's also important to optimize for employee retention. How do you make sure your employee morale remains high enough that people are incentivized to stay with you?
9. Collect feedback. Establish an employee feedback loop. You're probably already giving feedback to your employees, but are they giving feedback to you and your department? Ask your employees how they feel about working here, ask them if they have any recommendations for how the department could be improved, and ask them for any ideas they've had for how to optimize IT performance even further.
10. Seek external support. Improving enterprise IT performance is difficult no matter the size of your organization or what your starting point is. But it always gets easier when you seek external support. If you reach a dead end, or if you aren't sure how to optimize your performance any further, your best course of action may be reaching out to a third party enterprise IT professional and signing up for their services.

The Value of Ongoing Improvements

Enterprise IT performance isn't something that remains stagnant and consistent by itself; it's constantly changing in response to inputs and environmental conditions. Similarly, you shouldn't remain complacent with your enterprise IT performance just because you incorporated a few new strategic changes. Instead, you should strive to be as flexible and as ever changing as the world around you. 

Adopting a mentality of continuous improvement will help you continue to make positive changes for your IT performance indefinitely. With each new strategy, and each iterative step forward, your organization will be more secure, more efficient, and more productive.