IT as an Ecosystem What It Takes To Build an IT Solution That Drives Business Growth By JMARK, MIBA Endorsed Vendor Most businesses outgrow their IT before they even realize it. They often rely on one employee to manage infrastructure, security, onboarding, compliance, innovation, user support, etc. The reality is that this setup is only sustainable for small businesses with no more than 20 employees. Once your organization is responsible for more employees, the needs shift from managing a few endpoints to addressing compliance requirements, shadow IT, cloud platforms, hybrid infrastructure, and employee policy and education. To unlock IT as a lever of growth for your bank, it’s crucial to understand that IT is a living, interdependent ecosystem where every weak link creates a slower experience, higher risk and growing frustration among your team. This article breaks down what that ecosystem really looks like, why hiring another generalist won’t solve your pain, and what it takes to turn IT from a bottleneck into a sustainable engine for institutional growth. The Core Components of a Healthy IT Structure What Most People Think Makes a Healthy IT Structure We all know the basics, like ticket management, security, service technicians and client relationship management, but there’s so much more to IT than what happens on the surface. The issue many institutions face is the belief that they can rely on an IT generalist who does just enough to keep them afloat. Suddenly, your technician is also in charge of your cybersecurity, compliance, network infrastructure, hardware refreshes, etc. This not only places the burden on a single individual, increasing the likelihood of burnout, but it also creates a single point of failure for your entire organization. What a Healthy IT Structure Actually Looks Like So what really goes into IT beyond the typical help desk support? Here’s a breakdown of the core functions needed to create a best-in-class IT infrastructure: 1. Finance 2. Growth 3. Security 4. Projects 5. Onboarding 6. Field Services 7. Audit and Compliance 8. Business Intelligence 9. Product Development 10. Proactive Health and Automation 11. Vendor Relationship Management Why Every Piece is Essential to Your Business Remember the part about IT being an ecosystem? The reason most organizations struggle with IT support as they scale is that they don’t view it as a connected ecosystem. Security needs proactive monitoring and automation to effectively identify threats before they shut down your operations. Project rollouts can easily veer into scope creep without the due diligence performed during the onboarding phase that ensures hardware readiness. Business intelligence loses impact without strategic leadership and clean data. Compliance falls apart without well-documented financial planning, and you can’t stay up to date on what your bank needs without consistent communication and visibility from vendors. Without each component working together, IT workers burn out, issues begin to multiply and your growth slows to a crawl. 12 | The Show-Me Banker Magazine
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