Network Upgrade? Improve Decision-Making with Advisory and Assessment Services

As the technology market grows and gains complexity, it has become more challenging for IT professionals to stay familiar with manufacturers and products and to stay abreast of emerging networking solutions. That’s a major reason customers take advantage of CDW’s advisory and assessment services. 

Companies want to be intentional in their decision-making and confident that their ultimate IT investment is the right one— that is, that it will integrate well into the existing environment, solve the targeted problem or achieve the desired business objectives. Then, once an organization has made these decisions, it wants to go into the deployment knowing there will be few surprises.

Our advisory services are meant to uncover business objectives and then tie them to technical objectives and capabilities. Essentially, we help customers make sense of the IT marketplace in a specific area, which can accelerate decision-making.

Often, the prompt for an advisory workshop is a networking problem that needs to be solved or an objective that’s about to get underway. We work with teams to identify any ancillary issues that could be affected. We also look at the technical capabilities and considerations that are important for achieving specific goals. 

This service can be especially beneficial in newer areas, such as software-defined networking, or when numerous manufacturers have similar products or messaging. Often, organizations end up spinning their wheels, unsure of the best way to evaluate options through the lens of their specific environments and business objectives. Our goal is to help organizations narrow down the field, identifying one or two solutions for further research.

The workshop concludes with a document that includes executive summaries, charts and narratives — all the information an organization’s leaders need to make a decision.

Our assessments focus on building a plan for deployment or remediation. These are useful when an organization’s leaders know at a high level how they want to solve a particular problem but want help with planning and design. 

We look closely at the organization’s network environment to make a detailed recommendation on how to integrate something new or improve existing infrastructure. If the organization is moving to software-defined WAN, for instance, we help them build a plan for exactly how to make that happen.  

Our goal is to make sure that when the customer goes to do the deployment work, there are no surprises. The IT team leaves this workshop with a much better idea of what will happen during the deployment, so they don’t go into it blindly.

In other cases, organizations have completed a deployment but are running into issues or aren’t achieving the desired results. For a network or wireless assessment, for instance, we would review the implementation to see what was done, whether it adheres to industry-leading practices and whether we can identify areas for improvements.

The assessment workshop can also support adoption. In working with organizations post-implementation, we ensure they are using the networking solution efficiently, taking advantage of any feature updates and otherwise gaining the returns they were looking for. Our goal here is to make sure the solution looks better on day 180 than it did on day one.