Are your company’s I.T. services growing or dying?

When you’re green you grow. When you get ripe you get rotten.

My Dad told me that over 40 years ago, and it still holds true today. Namely, if you think you’re “done” regarding anything of long term significance, it will slowly but surely degrade to its rotten end. This certainly holds true for all things business: if they are not growing, they are declining.

How do you know if the internal functions that support your business are green or ripe?

The best way is to never think you’re “done” with any part of your business — especially I.T. which is changing faster than any other internal service to your business. Compare your company to peers — even competitors — to see what they pay and what they get, and then size up those results to see if you are getting maximum value from your IT.

The only problem is that your competitors probably won’t tell you how they are implemented.

The next best way to find out if your I.T. is delivering as much value as your competitors may be receiving is by reading blogs written by industry experts, like this. To that end, here is what the companies getting the most value from I.T. are doing, and what you should do if you want to receive the same value.

• Flat Rate IT: the old ‘break/fix’ method of your IT provider waiting for you to have a problem, then billing you by the hour while he learns how to fix it is dead. You should be paying a flat rate to cover 100% of everything that may go wrong; and this flat rate should cover pro-active maintenance to keep things from going wrong. (In fact, a flat rate provider has strong incentive to try to drive your outages and problems to zero.)

• Outsource: all but the most simple of businesses need many different skills on occasional basis. In this day and age, no ‘one’ person or ‘two’ people can be experts in all of the different specialties. Hiring one or two IT guys and expecting them to do everything well would be like hiring one or two General Practitioner doctors and letting them perform brain surgery one day, heart surgery another, and eye surgery the day after. In contrast, by outsourcing to a large IT company that attracts, hires, and retains experts in all of the disciplines such as security, wide area networking, business consulting, programming, server maintenance, business continuity, disaster recovery, compliance, online systems, web presence, Search Engine Optimization, and Search Engine Marketing…you are assured of having a brain surgeon when the task is in the brain — and an eye surgeon when the task is in the eye.

• Pay for what you use: coupled with outsourcing and flat-rate payment, paying for what you use becomes much easier. This entire concept is know as Managed Services for IT, and Managed Services pricing can be simple or complex — depending on the provider. Complex pricing revolves around a price per PC, Server, Network, mobile device, etc. Simple pricing can be as easy as $x per employee. Of course the huge takeaway here is the fact that as you grow, you have predictable cost increase; and if you reduce staff, you automatically reduce cost by a predictable amount as well.

• Consider moving your servers and applications to the ‘cloud.’ In order words, most large providers offer a hosted option that will host all of the functions that your servers provide in their own SAS-70 compliant data center. With thick, concrete walls many redundant options for power and Internet, and 100% always on mentality, your business users will be better served by this increased infrastructure. As providers are already watching over and delivering critical services to other clients, your resources receive the same management and attention. Pricing here can be a simple add on per user in the best case.

• Remote support: 99% of work can and should be done remotely for the equipment that is in (or left in) your office. Issues should be resolved immediately without waiting for somebody to drive to the office (or the only IT guy to get freed up.) Only in the most unusual of circumstances should a technician be necessary on site (after set up, of course).

• Business Continuity: It’s best to think in terms of your business continuing rather than recovering — should a disaster occur. The ‘old way’ of protecting computer systems was to make a copy of all of the critical information, store it off site, and wait for a disaster to occur. Then, when the disaster occurred, weeks or months of labor were poured in to getting things nearly back to where they were. Contrast this with today’s method which is to get critical data encrypted off site as soon as it is created, to have complete images of the servers (that will restore to any somewhat-similar server), and to test the arrangement quarterly. Today’s method further protects the environment by creating back up servers in remote locations that can take over in case of disaster — thereby allowing the business to continue uninterrupted.

• Stable uptime: Computers and teeth have at least one thing in common: both require high maintenance to ensure that little problems (which will always occur) get fixed painlessly and inexpensively — lest the procrastinator end up dealing with an expensive and painful emergency (at the worst possible time.) Proper IT implementation requires that computers be monitored 24×7x365 by expert systems and technicians — who notice things like a hard-drive about to be full — and provide remediation the moment the problem is caught.

• CTO Strategy and business planning: As your business grows and as time marches on, your IT solution will always be falling behind unless you are having regular strategic planning sessions with a Chief Technology Officer. The CTO is should be up-to-date on the latest trends, traps, and technology and should be helping to guide you through the maze of: what is essential, what is too much risk, and what should be evaluated — for your business. Correct IT service delivery provides a virtual Chief Technology Officer and regular calls and/or meetings — in business English (not technobabble) to help you to guide your company where you want to be.

• Intrusion detection and prevention: threats come from all sides (virus, malware, SPAM, hackers (both internal and external)), and your IT service company should be on top of preventing 99% of these and detecting any of the 1% that get through the first layer of defense before these intrusions become risks to the company. Proper delivery of IT should provide you with reports that monitor threats detected and eliminated, and ongoing effort must be applied to keep your network safe.

• Helpdesk: Best-in-class IT Outsource providers deliver 24×7x365 help desk solutions to keep your staff working at peak efficiency all year long. Any technology-related question should be fair game (from ‘how do I create a mail merge?’ to ‘I need help evaluating a mobile device’ to ‘I would like a program installed’ and even ‘I am having trouble scanning a document from our printer to our network.’ In today’s business climate, many people are working at odd hours, and best-of-breed IT Service companies understand that people need to get their work done, and are always available for your staff to call.

• Hardware/Software acquisition: Large IT firms have relationships with the major hardware and software vendors, and should be able to provide Fortune 100 pricing and support options along to your company. Strong vendor partnerships allow IT firms to get the best support from the vendors — and thereby get and keep your systems up and running quickly.

• Routine maintenance: part of what keeps IT infrastructure stable is a dedicated, failsafe maintenance method to keep the latest security patches on computers, tidy up their hard drives from fragments of old and deleted information, and scanning them for viruses, etc. Larger IT service companies have software called ‘agents’ that exist on PC’s and Servers to automate this maintenance and ensure that everything continues to run smoothly.

• Software upgrades, and rollout to users: Many companies have line-of-business applications that are unique to their line of business. Examples are legal trackers, construction and job-cost estimating and invoicing systems, etc. Best-in-class IT outsourcing companies require that you keep this software under maintenance contract with the vendor, but will take on all of the work to interface with the vendor — including roll out of new and upgraded versions.

• Vendor management: Since most of the office equipment and systems in your office now tie back to your computer network, it makes sense that your IT vendor should be the entity to communicate with your ISP, your telephone vendor, your dial tone provider, etc. This feature further reduces your costs, and ensures that technical people are communicating when and where they need to be.

• Telephone systems support: Like most things in business, telephone systems are affected by, and interfacing with the Internet. A capable IT firm should be well versed in major telephone systems, and particularly in Voice over IP, and how to ensure quality of voice service if you are using it.

• Sales help: no discussion of IT should be complete without a mention of how computers and the Internet are integrating with the marketing and sales process. Incredible tools are available to capture and nurture leads, to educate, and to build permission-based relationships with prospective, new, and existing clients. Best-in-class Information Technology Companies understand these tools and are helping all types of companies (even companies in residential roofing and related industries) to better use these tools.

• Non-technical increase in efficiency: All of the above should be implemented with an eye towards trying to save the average employee time during the day. In an average office of 50 people, saving each person just 10 minutes per day results in an extra person-day of productivity for your company every day. While this appears to be a soft cost savings, it translates to real dollars in not having to hire one additional person because the work is being absorbed by the 50 existing employees.

• Cost savings: Hiring just one IT guy costs an average of over $5,000 per month, and results in one person who can never get sick, go on vacation, quit, or leave the company for any reason without exposing the entire network to crash and disaster. If outsourcing a 50 person company costs approximately the same $5,000 per month, but gains a person-month of productivity, the business can see an increase in hard cash of $5,000 per month simply by replacing the sole IT resource with an Outsource company — and gain the efficiencies and peace of mind of knowing that the company is always there to cover IT: 24×7x365: no vacations, no sick leave, etc.

In summary: how much of this are you doing, and how much of it do you need to do?

Without a Network Audit, it can be difficult to know; and that is the final point of this post: the Network Audit should be free. We commonly see companies charge $1,200 for 3 days of human labor that can be accomplished in 30 minutes using the proper tools.

With the proper tools it’s easy to find out how far (if at all) your company falls short of the current state-of-the art.

And if you believe that your competitors may be ahead of you in this area (or that you have a chance to get ahead of them), and the audit is free, why would you not want one?

You can get one here at: http://www.crcsecure.com/free_network_security_audit.asp.

Tags: Business Continuity, chief technology officer, cloud computing, cto, flat rate it, help desk, helpdesk, information technology firm, it firm, IT Outsourcing Company, IT Service Company, managed services, remote support, stable uptime

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Business Topics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.