Built for the Largest County Boards
You are a huge organization! You have unique challenges that only County Boards your size experience. Luckily, there is one company in Ohio that understands that, one that truly gets it, and we are perfectly built for you and your team!
Struggling with the same ongoing issues day after day, month after month, even year after year? Projects dragging on, issue of the day dominating time, staff overworked, lack of time to properly strategically plan, feel like you are addressing issues and not really solving problems, and worst of all… not really knowing just how vulnerable you are? It is time to take a new approach to overcoming these and the many other challenges you face.
Aside from the challenges many organizations experience, it is extremely important to consider the sheer scale of these challenges the largest organizations encounter. Our proven and award winning solutions are, and always have been, designed around scalability. In fact, they have been built with the largest entities in mind. So, whether you are a staff of 1,000+ or less than 50, we have the exact solution that scales with the size of your operations and needs. Since your organization is much larger than most others, we know your problems and needs are much bigger. Whether it be today, tomorrow, or long term, your tasks and the difficulties in tackling them are never ending, so it’s vital to have a partner working with your team to help them stay proactive, remain ahead, and be well prepared for your future.
Do you have projects lagging and way past due? Does it seem like you can never get them done… never catch up?
It’s too easy to just say an IT team is not large enough or skilled enough to stay on top of projects. There are a lot of great IT people that work extremely hard, you most likely have some, but even the best of IT staff only have so much time, so much expertise, and today’s complex IT needs and sophisticated cyber threats present very tough challenges even for the most talented. Just like large companies, large organizations are forced to focus on current issues, the ones impacting them the most today. What gets lost in the day-to-day grind are those “things you really need to get done,” but “just don’t have the time.” The traditional solution has been to hire more staff or to only seek outside project-based help from a third party. The problem here is you are just doing more of the same and getting more of what you already have, not to mention more staff is expensive and typically has limited knowledge and capabilities. Then if they don’t just fall into the trap of helping on the daily issues and are actually able to get a project done, what do you do when they are no longer needed. When it comes to going to a third party consultant to just help with projects, they don’t know your systems, your network, your needs, and haven’t been involved to help plan and fully consider how this will impact your IT infrastructure, security, compliance, and reliability. This route is also typically expensive and when it is eventually done, who is responsible when something doesn’t work as expected, an integration isn’t quite right, or an IT system is negatively impacted. Let the finger pointing begin, as that third party has no responsibility for your existing IT… their goals and mission aren’t truly aligned with that of your organization. The relationship is merely transactional and not that of a true partner.
Do you feel like you’re solving problems your County Board faces, or just dealing with them?
There’s a big difference between truly eliminating core challenges, and just finding a way to work with them. If any organization gets complacent, they open themselves up to major issues, such as work overloads, extensive system downtime, severe security risks, extra IT expenses, vulnerability to mounting cyber security threats, and HIPAA noncompliance.
As a large County Board of Developmental Disabilities in Ohio, do you truly know what your core challenges are?
Core Challenges That Large County Boards of DD Face
There are several challenges all businesses face but there are three core challenges that larger businesses must contend with such as, staff, funding, and solutions. With the right strategic plan in place, your organization can overcome these challenges. It’s important to be proactive, not reactive. We can help set your IT team and organization up for endless productivity and success so you can focus on what truly matters, those you serve.
Not Enough IT Support Staff
The greatest limiting factor we see with large organizations like yours is not enough IT team members. With a large organization, trying to get things done on that scale can be difficult. Your staff can only achieve so much, you only have so many days in the week, only so many hours in one day. One person can only achieve so much and one person can only have so much knowledge, experience, or capability. What if that one person gets sick or goes on vacation or has a family member to tend to, or worse?
Another staffing issue focuses on cybersecurity. With your current IT staff, what is their level of current expertise on cybersecurity? You may have one person that may be in a head position, and you may hire others that just don’t have the right level of expertise. You may have people to handle the day-to-day, fix-it type of issues but are they highly skilled enough to take on issues of a cyberattack or if something happens to your entire network? Do they know the latest in preventive measures and how to be proactive to best protect your network and sensitive data?
This is not something you can just hire your way out of or throw more people at hoping “nothing has happened yet” continues. It takes a strategic approach with long term vision and goals that can only be properly achieved with a partner specifically and expertly versed in both these areas and what you do and the challenges you face. Whether taking over your organization’s IT or collaborating with your existing IT staff as your co-managed IT partner, working with GO Concepts will give you the major advantage of having an entire team, an entire company of varying experts, people that work 7 days a week, monitoring your network and data 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
We bring a breadth of skill sets and tools that your board might not have and most likely does not have on the scale we can provide… a scale to match that of all your needs. We won’t just bring in one expert who can work on a specific task, we bring in a whole team of experts who can perform all tasks to support your organization and your IT team to help them be the absolute best they can be.
Funding in the Wrong Areas
One of the biggest challenges for large County Boards is funding. Are you spending dollars in the right way or are you overspending dollars unnecessarily?
We will assess what you have in place and what you are paying for. Chances are there may be redundancies that result in cost savings, or better more cost effective solutions, or you are paying for things like software and licenses you don’t need or use anymore. If it touches IT, we are going to review it and see how we can help your team do it better and if we can save you money along the way, we will. Most County Boards don’t have the time to perform this vital task. As your partner, it is just something we do by default. And, by partnering with us, there are a lot of things that you won’t need or won’t have to pay extra dollars for as they are included in our IT for DD service.
You will only be utilizing assets that you truly need. Everything we do, whether it’s managed or co-managed, is based on the number of end users and as that changes every month, that is all we will bill you for. Even our Private Cloud in our on-premise Data Center is usage-based and it includes a complete back-up, data retention, and disaster recovery solution specific to your needs. You will never pay for more than what you are actually using. You will never have to overpay on your IT expenses ever again.
Some large organizations with a small IT staff will outsource to multiple IT companies. They feel if one company is on vacation, they can call another company. It’s not a good strategy to have multiple companies. The only thing worse than this is not having anybody.
The organization will just call on an outsourced company when they need something. This is very reactionary. This break/fix mentality can cost your organization unnecessary funds and underlying issues.
First off, do you have Business Associate Agreements with all these companies? Do they have to come in contact with sensitive HIPAA data? That’s a concern. Second, if they are not working with your network all the time, do they have to relearn everything every time? Do they consider the big picture of how things impact your infrastructure or do they just complete the task?
It probably takes them a lot longer to diagnose and resolve a problem, then it would if you were working with just one partner, all the time. One partner who is intimately experienced with what you are doing and knows what needs to be done quickly to mitigate and resolve those issues.
Lack of Efficient Solutions
Efficiency is as large as the scale of your organization. Your organization has to be efficient with the dollars you spend, efficient with your time, efficient with your solutions, and you really need to be planning for the longer term. You are still planning the same things as a smaller organization just on a way bigger scale. Having to do so takes more time but if you have a partner like us, we can help plan, then implement changes and migrations a lot faster for you.
Maybe the entire organization wants/needs a new phone system. Though often forgotten, phone systems are directly related to IT. You may not know about outstanding expenses with your current phone solution. You might not have even considered the fact there are cloud-based solutions with the latest and greatest features that will incur a low monthly cost. How will it impact your existing network? Does it work the way we want it to work? We can help organize this for your team, research options, make a recommendation, order, and set up all the equipment for you as well.
What about your organization’s security systems, cameras, key cards, etc. Each County has a different system and since they impact IT, we handle all of the planning, implementing, working with vendors, making sure network connectivity is available where needed, and much more.
We handle all third-party vendor relationships. For example, with the chip shortage currently happening, does your organization have a plan in place for your hardware life cycles? Considering the large size of your board, the scalability of handling your hardware life cycles can take a lot of time in planning, receiving, and setting up new hardware throughout the organization. We can help strategically plan this and handle this for you.
We are proactive in that we will tell you, here’s a challenge that’s coming, here is a solution that we recommend, and then we help you make the ultimate decision. If we can automate it, if we can monitor it, if we can be proactive toward it, that’s what we do. It’s the only way you can handle things at your scale.
3 Key Measures That Every Large Board Can Do
You can greatly improve your IT, security, and reliability by doing these 3 key things:
- Educate Your Staff – Your staff should have security awareness training. They should be educated on the most current cyber threats and attacks such as phishing, spear phishing, email scams, ransomware, and more.
- Have an Amazing IT Partner – Partnering up with an IT company that specifically works with your industry, who knows what your goals are, is paramount. GO Concepts works with several County Boards of DD in Ohio and has for many years. In fact, we are the only company in Ohio 100% focused on County Boards of DD. We can be your managed IT partner or your co-managed IT partner, working with your existing IT team and helping them be their absolute best and achieve more.
- IT is Important – Starting at the very top of your organization, all the way down, everyone needs to view IT as one of the most important and integral components of your organization. You simply cannot function without IT and it needs to be the main priority in planning production and success.
Lucas County Board of DD Made the Right Choice with GO Concepts
Lucas County Board of DD has achieved the lowest number of risks they have ever seen by instituting the above 3 key measures. It was really driven by the Superintendent of their County Board, and their IT manager, who recognized how important their IT was. They made sure their entire staff was educated and they keep up with educating their staff on awareness of current threats. They made the decision to have an amazing IT department by partnering with our team at GO Concepts, who specifically works with organizations just like yours, to implement the right solutions in place to complete projects. By focusing on the importance of IT, we were able to help them attack the scale of their challenges by taking them from a reactive position to a proactive position. As our CEO likes to say… “We take you from fire fighting to fire prevention!”
Our job isn’t to react to something when it happens, our job is to prepare for it and prevent it so that it doesn’t happen. But if something does happen, you are prepared. In today’s world with cybersecurity threats continuing to grow, being reactive is just not acceptable. Taking a proactive approach to the challenges your large organization faces is how you stay ahead, productive, and successful.
Ready to Overcome Your Challenges?
So what is a large County Board to do, especially when it has an experienced IT staff it wants to keep?
Large organizations like yours need a complete team of broadly experienced and talented individuals to get the immense amount of work done. And if you are one of the ones that still have a small staff or frighteningly, just one person, they can’t do it alone, not at your scale! The demands and threats are just too high and too many. Based on our experience and how many County Boards we have spoken to, I can almost guarantee you aren’t truly secure, aren’t truly reliable, and are most likely walking the line of compliance. You have most likely heard or said the words “we haven’t had that happen” when it comes to IT issues, which isn’t a responsible strategy and should see those words end in the word “yet.” So to put in place a complete team, you need to add what is not there. You need to look at the big picture and fix what the underlying issues are to keep up with day-to-day demands, get projects completed in a timely manner, do proper strategic planning, and ensure you are secure, reliable, and compliant.
You need a team for your team! You need a partner for your people! You need the premier provider in co-managed IT services for your County Board and its dedicated staff! We provide you what you don’t have… scalability, breadth of expertise, 24x7x365 dedication, a partner that truly cares about you, and an extension of your organization that is aligned with your goals and mission!
GO Concepts is the premier technology solutions provider in Ohio for County Boards of Developmental Disabilities for the past decade. We will face the scale of your challenges together and help ensure you are not only properly prepared, but overcome them. Call us at (513) 934-8235 or send an email to sales@go-concepts.com.
