Salesforce Health Check and Road Map

The Strategic Services Division of Summit Technologies helps organizations achieve maximum value from their technology investments. We help small businesses who are growing and have not yet invested in IT and need guidance in getting started. We also help medium-to-large businesses who need assistance in fixing things that are broken, building a scalable and cost effective IT infrastructure in preparation for rapid growth; or need complete restructuring of their IT infrastructure: i.e. re-organizing, outsourcing, insourcing, downsizing, upsizing, etc. Summit Technologies provides the guidance, recommendations, and, as needed, the skillset to implement these initiatives.

High-level Initiatives:

• IT Strategic planning: Create, and optionally implement, a comprehensive strategy that leverages technology to help your organization become a high-performance business. Develop a big picture that realistically defines your information technology investment as a strategic business tool to give your organization a competitive advantage.

• Rationalizing and managing IT budgets: Understand which IT investments make business sense. Create models for Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), Return on Investment (ROI) and Risk Management that relate to your short-term and long-term business strategy. Define an IT budget that supports business growth, and manage the budget in step with actual business results and perceived opportunities. Consider opportunities for outsourcing/insourcing. Evaluate potential vendors, develop, and implement a plan.

• Business and IT process improvement and reengineering: Analyze current workflows and processes within your business and IT, and between your business and outside organizations. Use information technology to help you improve or redesign business processes in order to enhance collaboration with suppliers, partners and customers to maximize performance and achieve your business goals more quickly. Improve your IT processes through the adoption of IT best practices.

• IT Contract and vendor negotiations: Qualify vendors and evaluate products and services that support your business objectives and are in line with your IT budget. Negotiate contracts to maximize the business impact of your budgeted IT investments and to meet cash flow requirements. Monitor product performance guarantees, service level agreements, and special upgrade opportunities.

• Business Continuity Planning: Create and test an IT disaster recovery plan that: includes analyzing the vulnerability of your IT infrastructure and critical data, addresses disaster scenarios such as hardware failure, natural and man-made catastrophes or hacker attacks, defines backup procedures and/or backup system validation, describes an effective and affordable power backup system, and incorporates an appropriate level of system redundancy.

• IT organization assessment, design, and staffing: Assess the strengths and weaknesses of the IT organization by conducting a skills assessment. Reorganize the IT team, if necessary, based on functional areas. Where there are gaps, fill with key hires or supplemental staff while being watchful of the IT budget and staying in tune with business financial metrics and score cards.

• IT Project Management Office (PMO) design: Work with the team of project managers to create a holistic strategy to startup, evolve, and mature a PMO. This entails attention to culture and governance, skills development, process refinement and standardization.

• Emerging technologies: Research and propose pertinent emerging technologies to propel the business to achieve high gains in operational efficiencies. We stay on top of the most advanced technologies so that organizations can reap the benefits of using emerging technologies as differentiators in their industries. E.g. cloud and SaaS technologies, virtual workspace, wireless and mobile, hand-held, interactive media, visualizations, Low-Code, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

​

Our process:

Needs assessment: We work closely with the executives, managers, employees, and board members of the organization to gain a deep understanding of the business goals and IT needs.

Establish a baseline: We evaluate the strengths and weakness of the organization from an IT perspective (processes, staff, infrastructure, best practices, etc.), while always relating the IT needs to the business goals. We establish a baseline as a frame of reference for progress.

Produce a plan: We develop an IT plan appropriate to the size and expected growth of the organization. The plan usually includes prioritized tasks, timelines, deliverables, and budget.

(Optionally) Execute the plan: We manage tasks to completion based on business priorities and agreeable IT investments.