Am I wasting my money on IT?
How do I know if I'm safe from hackers?
Is this 'cloud' thing for me?
Am I making the right decision?
Is now the right time to upgrade?
Can I sweat my assets past five years?

In talking to customers, these are the types of questions I hear the most; essentially what they feel is the general uncertainty of making the right and most cost-effective decision for their business.

Since 2000 we have been helping our customers in the education, aged or disability care and corporate fields with consulting products like ICT health checks and system audits to discover what is wrong with their hardware/software or staff and to allow them to plan their way forward. These types of checks are still valid, and especially useful in getting to know an environment or business at the start. Unfortunately, these deliver limited value to a business with an ongoing relationship with a supplier.

Personally, as someone that leads a business - the conversations that I prefer to have with my suppliers and customers, and to be honest the ones that I feel best represent real value, have almost nothing to do with ICT. The discussions about my business and my customers show that they care about what I am trying to achieve and the pain points I have when trying to implement the strategy.

Over the years, this is where Subnet has planted the SEED (Subnet Exec to Exec Discussions), enabling our executive team talk to your executive team on the same level, dealing with the same type of issues as peers. Following these discussions, we can translate strategic decisions made at the executive level to technical designs created utilising our team of very experienced solutions consultants and technical staff.

In my experience this allows us to get to the heart of the issues and be in better alignment with the strategy which delivers more creative and cost-effective solutions. Using this process develops a trusted partnership between the two parties, which doesn't happen overnight, but generally bears the best long-term fruit.

Out of these discussions, we can hand over to Subnet's experienced consulting team to drill into gathering better business intelligence through services including:

• Audits & Recommendations with products like our 30-Point Health Check, Strategic Reviews which provides a longer-term 3-year budget and planning, and security audits.
• PowerBI dashboards to offer insights into your data through existing systems.
• ICT rationalisation or growth planning, generally provided to customers that are completing mergers or acquisitions which impact staff and infrastructure.

Using these services in conjunction with Subnets Exec to Exec Discussions, in our experience, prove to have the most impact on the relationship and provide the best value for your business.

If you are an exec or board member and want a chat about strategy or business lets organise a coffee to plant our first SEED now.