IT Support Services
As traditional businesses grow and organically evolve, multiple people - each with their own individual preferences and methods, are employed and change roles or leave the business altogether. Naturally, responsibility for the IT function changes but eventually falls under the remit of one of three business functions - Finance, Procurement or Technical. This leads to a disparate environment whereby the IT function becomes disjointed and as more technology initiatives are undertaken complexity, costs and frustration arise. The following scenarios are all too common: Finance: Maintenance costs rise with complexity, maintenance agreements become vehicles for manufacture lock in and contractors are brought in to manage at mercenary rates with no loyalty to the company. Procurement: Multiple prime suppliers with unsynchronised support contracts occur. The effort required to maintain continuous cover with suppliers who refuse to take responsibility when things go wrong is common, often preferring to blame each other. Technical: Multiple contracts require inconsistent support lines tied to hard to track serial numbers. The support experience degrades due to outsourcing and other cost reduction measures, cross vendor support results in solutions taking longer to find. How a comprehensive IT strategy can help. Finance: Reduce complexity and costs by consuming cloud based services. You no longer care what technology you use - just what it does. This avoids manufacturer lock in and provides cost transparency - per user, per workload (i.e. email), per month. Business units can be charged on a utilisation basis. Cloud based offerings no longer require contractors to operate, manage and support as the Cloud Solution Provider does this for you. Procurement: Consolidate contracts and vendors with a complete business technology provider whose responsibility is to manage the complexity. This ensures no 'finger pointing' can occur. A single provider avoids multiple start/finish dates and the service provider maintains the technology. However, ensure they don't lock you into a contract which may simply transfer the problem to the Finance team. Technical: By consolidating support to a single provider with a combined 24/7/365 network operations centre (NOC) and helpdesk, consistency is achieved. Ensure the supplier maintains highly effective and qualified people and processes with tools including an integrated Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) solution which automatically tracks serial numbers. As before, ensure the provider is willing to lock you in with performance, not a contract. Technology is an intrinsic part of any business that requires multiple stakeholders working together to overcome challenges. In traditional businesses 'silo's' naturally occur, but in digitally mature 'transformative' company's the team focusses on working together to delight customers. The first step to becoming a Digitally mature organisation is with an effective IT strategy.