4 Lessons from IT Leaders of High Achieving Firms

We recently asked the heads of IT of 4 high achieving and highly resilient AEC firms to talk about the secrets to their success.

Not only are these firms at the top of their game professionally, each of them has come through COVID shutdowns in great shape.

Here’s how they did it.  

Focus on Delivering an Exceptional User Experience

IT leaders in high achieving firms aim to provide an outstanding user experience, all the time.

They start with the premise that the best people want to perform at a high level.   That means they need the right tools to do their job and they don’t want to waste time waiting for files to respond.

Applications like Revit, Civil 3D and Solidworks are notoriously susceptible to latency.  That means that any distance between users and files slows the reaction time of these files, so they can take many minutes to open and save.   

An exceptional user experience means files have to open, respond and save immediately, for every user, whether they’re in the office or working from their kitchen table.

Prioritize the Important, Not the Urgent

As IT teams take inbound calls and emails throughout the day, individual user concerns naturally take priority.   Especially when important deadlines are concerned.  

These urgent requests can easily suck up a huge amount of IT time, leaving very little time to dig into what’s causing the problems users are experiencing.  That puts you on an endless merry-go-round of short term fixes to get through the day, rather than resolving the underlying issues that are affecting productivity across the company.

Plan for Resilience No Matter What

For firms in the business of working with files, true resilience can only be achieved when users can continue to work like they’re in the office, regardless of where they are.

That means working off a network drive, without replicating data to local machines.  It means overcoming latency so files still feel like they’re local.   And, it means a level of data protection that’s up to the task of keeping your files safe despite increased ransomware attacks and home-based security vulnerabilities.

Achieving this level of resilience takes time and requires investment in exactly the right technology.  

For these IT leaders, Panzura’s global file system is the technology they choose to invest in, and 2020 was the year their technology investments paid extra dividends.