The business landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years, and Kevin Howell, CEO of Howell Technology Group (HTG) and a Fellow of the British Computer Society, takes a look at how IT partners have transformed into being real business allies in driving growth.
“Businesses have had a lot of change and challenges thrown at them over the past couple of years as they have coped with switching to permanent hybrid working as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, experienced huge increases in raw materials and energy prices they struggle to pass on to their customers, while also seeing a tight labour market forcing wages ever higher” says Kevin.
“To tackle these challenges businesses are being forced to automate more of their back office processes, outsource work to partners, offer remote working for many roles and move more business towards ecommerce and online platforms. To help them do that they are appointing a new breed of trusted and strategic IT partners who are experts at the digital transformation journey.
Our role now is actually that of a business advisor, looking at business goals, constraints, and changing markets to help clients along a digital transformation journey that will deliver better customer service, drive innovation, and support staff and stakeholders in the long term.
Here at HTG our mission is to help businesses with that journey to the cloud, while helping to always keep businesses secure and available. Many of our clients are heavy IT users, working in the financial services sector, social housing and wider professional services sector.
They value our 25 years of industry experience and see our strategy and roadmap work as being essential starting points for change. It’s seen us develop services such as Northstar, which uses tools including our free Modern Workplace assessment to review every detail of a company’s infrastructure, benchmark a business against the three stages of IT, and establish a plan that lines up with business goals.
We’re driven by client need, so for example if they identify that cost is an issue, we look at whether they should be looking at switching to an on-premise data centre model; do they have legacy on-premise security services that are no longer fit for purpose in a hybrid cloud world; could they be making savings on third party services, or streamlining licences and reducing support costs. An in-depth analysis by our team can illuminate murky corners which if they are not causing a problem yet, are likely to be costing money and will almost certainly hold the business back in the future.
Cybersecurity continues to be one of the top three business risks we identify, as cyber attacks increase in their sophistication and frequency. No organisation is immune from the threat, and as secure cloud experts we help clients place much more emphasis on prevention, through highly proactive security assessments and monitoring using the latest industry tools.
We look at every client with fresh eyes and a thoughtful approach, working towards delivering a flexible, scaleable and secure modern workplace environment. And our approach is paying off. A healthy client retention rate has seen us recently double the size of our headquarters in Hebburn, to accommodate growing staff numbers. We live in interesting times, as the old saying goes, and we are more than up for the challenge of helping clients succeed against difficult odds, because when they do, so do we.”