We have the smartest people in our company working on our IT, do we need help?

I come across many businesses where the best minds in the business are working on IT. This is great if you run an IT company but is probably reducing your billable hours or reducing your sales if you are not.

Take, for example, an engineering business I recently encountered. Basically, their computers were driving them mad. Their first question to me was: "How can we minimise the amount of time our engineers spend on IT issues?"

As an engineering business, this company's employees are highly technical. Because of this, management decided that their staff knew enough to, "look after IT themselves". So, the company bought some funky computers, some cool applications, and left their staff to their own devises. As the business grew, they "whacked in a server", and things were going pretty well.

Things started to go wrong when a few big projects were landed, and the company's growth hit a steep upward turn. Their ad hoc IT environment simply couldn't cope, and because the engineers were now busy delivering, there were no resources available to fix the many emerging IT problems.

Of course, an engineer with a project to work on is a valuable resource; where every hour spent resolving IT issues has a direct impact on the project work. If the project is delayed, it impacts that project and every one that comes after it.

All of a sudden, IT was no longer a fun thing to play with in their spare time, it was actually constraining the business' ability to grow.

The key to reducing the amount of time your staff spend on IT is to develop a continuous, pre-emptive approach.

First of all, have a look at your IT environment from a strategic perspective. Does your IT environment support your company's business strategy? Will future growth (as projected in your strategy) require changes to this IT environment? Do you know?

Once you've nutted this out, get your IT environment up to speed by implementing the technology required. I recommend getting a reasonable standard operating environment (SOE) in place, with standardised hardware and reliable systems.

At this point, you'll probably feel like you've conquered the IT monster. But don't leave it there.

The key to reducing the time spent on IT is to monitor and improve your IT environment on an ongoing basis. Don't leave it alone and wait for it to break in six months time. At that point, you'll have to start the whole process from scratch again. Monitor IT on an ongoing basis, and you'll be able to evolve it as your business grows. Prevention is always better than cure – so pre-empt problems before they occur.

Only then will you have a stable IT environment that lets your people do the work that makes you money, and allows your business to grow.

David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.