New Year offers a time to reflect, and I’m extremely proud to share some of the fantastic achievements C5 Alliance Managed Services realised over the past year, as well as our plans for positive change in 2017.

Having enjoyed a hugely successful 2015, our strategy for 2016 focused on reinvestment. Specifically, channeling our success back to our clients and our people.

I’m a firm believer that organisations should put as much effort into relationships with existing clients as they do trying to gain new business. We may have already gained a client’s custom, but why should the value end there? After all these are the benefactors to our success!

We realised we needed to put our money where our mouth is.

Our plans for reinvestment involved the ambitious renovation of our Business Continuity (BC) suites at Rue des Pres 1. We were already providing a premium service and wanted premium facilities to match. This went hand-in-hand with the redevelopment of our Managed Services offices at Rue des Pres 2, allowing both staff and clients to benefit from open, collaborative and modern working environments.

Skills were also an integral facet of our plans. We were confident in the quality of our services, but wanted the badges to prove we were hitting global standards. We set goals to achieve two ISO certifications in Service Management Systems and Security Management. I’m pleased to say we passed both with flying colours, instilling further client confidence.

2016 was also a great year for staff. Several team members developed new skills, including BC Consultant, Phil Heath who is now qualified by the BC Institute to offer clients independent advice on their personal BC plans. Ten ‘new generation’ IT experts also passed probation and 17 team members were promoted. It’s inspiring to work alongside a team who are so committed to personal development.

These changes allowed us to improve and expand our offering and resulted in staff and clients feeling more valued. Better still, clients who were considering leaving us were impressed by our commitment and chose to re-sign as a result!

We managed to hit all our 2016 goals ahead of our end-of-year deadline, laying the foundations for 2017. So, what’s next?

While we’ll still be reinvesting to benefit clients, our core focus in 2017 is Business Resilience.

To be Business Resilient you must look beyond IT. Business Resilience means knowing your systems are available 24/7, having the right people and skills to run efficiently, being proactive by understanding why problems happen and preventing them for the future, and being able to continue in a time of crisis.

Jersey is currently limited in the range of digital skills available meaning businesses must go through the costly process of recruiting and training a specialist, even if their skills are only required for a short amount of time. From an IT professional’s perspective, working for a non-IT business only offers so much. It can be a struggle to keep staff interested to retain them long-term, and repeated training and the occasional quitter isn’t often factored into the budget.

Recent news stories like the issues with JT’s undersea fibre-optic cables and the power cut in Alderney has highlighted how critical BC is to risk management strategies. With modern businesses reliance on IT, I stress the importance of thinking about how you would enable continuance in a time of crisis.

Many businesses probably don’t know how much time, effort and money is wasted due to a lack of Business Resilience.  Wouldn’t it be great to be able to mitigate these issues?

C5 Alliance Managed Services is here to take this headache away. We want to understand your whole business to offer multiple perspectives based on overarching goals, rather than just IT goals. Our new starters and promotions prove we have the people and skills to mitigate costly recruitment and retraining, as well as the knowledge and facilities to ensure business is always running when it needs to be, no matter what situation you’re in. This is about more than just IT systems, it’s about the resilience of your whole support structure.

I challenge Jersey’s business community to make positive changes to become truly Business Resilient in 2017. It’s probably the best New Year’s Resolution you could make for your business! If you’d like to find out more about how we can help, I encourage you to get in touch to ensure your business is resilient and fit for the future.