Partner Article

A rapidly changing market requires agility and focus

Strong optimism points to substantial growth for property and construction

Nearly six years after the onset of the global financial crisis, the UK economy is predicted to grow past its pre-recession level. According to the latest Business Trends report by accountants and business advisers BDO LLP, growth in the second half of 2014 will be fuelled by markedly strong optimism and hiring intentions across all sectors of the economy.

This is great news, especially for one sector that suffered enormously during the recession - property and construction. More recently the housing market has undergone a startling turnaround. In 2013 house prices rose at a pace not seen since the economic crisis. Government initiatives helped to kick-start sales following a moribund few years and at last banks are now showing a renewed appetite to lend.

New construction and rising prices should bring more homes, both new and old, to the market in 2014, helping inventory return to traditional levels. In the recent Budget Chancellor George Osborne also confirmed plans to extend the first phase of Help to Buy to the end of the decade. This scheme is aimed at increasing the supply of newly-built homes with the second phase of the scheme designed to help those with a regular income but little in savings to get on the housing ladder. The extension of Help to Buy should be welcomed as it will continue to support growth.

Gearing up to take advantage of a growth market?

With growth now firmly in the sights of many property and construction companies how do they position themselves for success?

In order to achieve growth property and construction companies need to be thinking about whether their IT set up is delivering what the organisation needs now and in the future. Key questions to ask the business include:

• Are you happy with the IT service you currently receive?

• Is it easy to scale the IT infrastructure up or down?

• Is it simple to provision, manage and use IT for staff across multiple offices?

• Can you easily start up a new short-term project and then close it down quickly and efficiently when it comes to an end?

• Can you quickly open up new offices in disparate locations?

• Are you concerned how your current IT infrastructure would cope if you made an acquisition?

• Are your IT costs predictable? For example, are there a lot of lumps or spikes in your IT budget?

Today, any business going into a growth phase needs to be able answer yes to the majority of these questions. If you found that you answered no to more than one of these, you probably don’t have the right IT set up to enable you to take advantage of the upturn.

Living the IT dream

So how do organisations set their IT up to enable them to say yes to all of the above questions?

Cultivating a flexible and scalable IT environment that meets the needs of the business and can cope with the natural peaks and troughs of what is a very project-oriented industry will be key.

In this increasingly mobile world property and construction companies also need to enable their employees to work from anywhere whilst also offering a quality IT service to the business. However at the same time they need to be able to focus on running their business and not get bogged down in IT. Predictable and transparent IT costs are essential as IT budgets are not getting any bigger and most IT departments are tasked with doing more with less.

Utopia for many companies would be to turn on their IT like a service. In this scenario the Head of IT and other IT folk take on a more strategic role for the business, adding value and innovating to bring new IT projects to the various lines of business, while the day-to-day, more mundane tasks are all delivered as a service. In this situation the organisation doesn’t have to own any IT assets. It simply turns its requirements up and down per user per month.

What does an IT-as-a-Service environment look like?

In order to get close to this dream many organisations are looking to move to a virtualised environment and/or they are moving a lot of their IT into the cloud and often into a managed service set up - in other words they are moving to an IT-as-a-Service model.

Virtualising and/or clouding the IT infrastructure makes it incredibly easy to flex the workforce. Today cloud levels the playing field and takes away barriers to entry making technology available to all organisations regardless of size. From day one a business can ramp up very quickly and easily without having to make serious upfront capital investment.

Likewise moving to a virtualised environment delivers significant cost savings as well as more flexibility - especially if you have a lot of remote workers. If this is all outsourced to a managed service, organisations can flex their requirements up or down depending on what the business needs. IT is looked after by a team of professionals who do this day in and day out and are experts in their field. Organisations are then free to focus on core competencies rather than be hindered by IT’s inability to scale or handle sudden spikes in the business.

The key benefit to the business is that the organisation has a much more efficient and well run service and IT is able to guarantee the delivery of a good IT service and experience to the business. It will also provide the business with a competitive advantage in that the organisation can grow or acquire businesses knowing that it has the ability to add new users and provision what they need with the right level of management and support quickly and easily.

How do you get to an IT-as-a-Service solution?

Northdoor has an impressive portfolio and a strong history of helping property and construction organisations to implement fully managed services, either on-premise or in the cloud. Northdoor provides a full range of IT support capabilities – from reactive support and remote monitoring services through to fully managed outsourced solutions. By engaging Northdoor, companies can gain access to a level of technical expertise and quality of service that would be costly and difficult to achieve using in-house resources alone. Working with the CIO or head of IT, Northdoor’s managed services offering enables IT teams to become more strategic, lifting them out of managing the status quo and into business projects that deliver real competitive advantage. Northdoor typically takes a three staged approach to moving to a managed service set up:

• Stage 1 - Northdoor’s consultancy team helps organisations better understand what they need to do to have optimum IT services for the business.

• Stage 2 - Northdoor then has the IT capability and experience to help the organisation deliver and provision the new infrastructure (on-premise, hybrid or cloud)

• Stage 3 - And finally, when the new infrastructure is all set up, Northdoor can manage this for the business as well as support all users, leaving the organisation to focus on growing the business.

Here are two examples of how a managed service solution has helped construction and property consultancies Stace and GL Hearn.

Stace – improving the quality of IT service with a managed solution

Stace is a construction and property consultancy that was able to dramatically improve the quality of its IT services by moving to a managed service contract with Northdoor. As Stace expanded over the years, with multiple office sites, its IT infrastructure mushroomed into an unwieldy sprawl. As a result, the company regularly experienced IT systems outages and downtime. Stace engaged Northdoor to undertake an initial audit of its IT infrastructure to identify problem areas and make recommendations for improvements. The audit identified a number of projects that were required to rectify performance problems and to bring the infrastructure up to a level where it could be managed to best practice. Stace also needed daily support for the environment during this transition phase. Once these mission-critical projects had been delivered Stace decided to move to a two-year rolling fixed-term managed services contract. Today a small in-house team provides end user support whilst Northdoor looks after all the back end infrastructure.

GL Hearn – future proofing IT infrastructure with a managed solution

GL Hearn, one of the UK’s leading property consultancies, has over 200 employees with six major office sites across the UK. GL Hearn needed a more flexible and agile IT model and took the decision to outsource its IT services to Northdoor so that it could focus on its core competencies. As well as providing a fully managed service, Northdoor also implemented a number of high profile projects to develop the core infrastructure which included implementing a VMware ESX Host upgrade, designing and configuring a large desktop and laptop roll-out, developing a SharePoint web portal, and undertaking a Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint upgrade. As a result GL Hearn no longer needs to find, hire and train advanced in-house technical skills. System performance and reliability has been enhanced and GL Hearn now has a cost effective, flexible and scalable IT model geared to meet changing business requirements.

Conclusion

The market for the property and construction sector is definitely on the up and it would appear that all the predictions are looking to a brighter future. The key is whether organisations in this sector are equipped and ready to take advantage of this upturn. With technology constantly evolving it is hard to keep pace with the rate of change, especially if this is not the organisation’s core competency. And if you are looking for first mover advantage this means that the business needs to be fleet of foot and nimble. Often it is the internal processes and IT capabilities that slow the business down. Buying IT-as-a-Service can certainly help to ensure that your IT requirements are more easily met and that you are equipped to make that next move – be that an acquisition, opening new offices, launching new lines of business and so on. IT-as-a-Service makes it easy to scale the IT service to the business up or down. It is simple to provision new users, manage and use IT across multiple offices, and you can easily start up a new project and then close it down quickly and efficiently when it comes to an end. IT-as-a-Service enables you to make those strategic step changes in your IT infrastructure quickly whilst providing more predictable IT costs.

About Northdoor

For more than 20 years Northdoor has delivered tangible business benefits to more than 200 companies in over 20 countries with solutions that precisely match their needs. In fact, Northdoor has delivered more than 200 projects in the last five years and seven out of 10 customers have been working with us for more than 10 years. Northdoor was established in 1989 and has a collaborative and high touch customer care approach to delivering tailored solutions that helps clients achieve their business objectives.

To find out more about Northdoor and our range of managed and support services, please visit www.northdoor.co.uk/it_support or email solutions@northdoor.co.uk or phone Northdoor on +44 (0)207 448 8534.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jon Milward, Director, Northdoor .