As the year ends, we encourage you to take a step back from your day-to-day challenges, assess the current state of your information technology, and consider where you’d like to be a year from now.

But where to start? My advice: go back to basics. Examine the performance of your core functionality, asking these questions about:

• The overall health of your network. Have you been diligent in monitoring and maintaining your infrastructure? Will your network be up to your 2007 performance-level needs?
• Security. Are your procedures and processes in place and up-to-date?
• Application performance. Is your user community happy with your systems and network response times?
• Backup, recovery, and business continuity. Do you know how you’ll continue to do business if a major system — including servers — goes down? Are you prepared to recover from failures impacting email, your phone system, customer-facing web services?

Using independent expertise to conduct such an assessment will give you a clear, unbiased IT picture and help you decide where you need to allocate resources. It can also help you determine which issues are best resolved in-house and where your organization can benefit from additional independent expertise.