We have a scalability problem in our IT department. Help!

We have a scalability problem in our IT department. When the GFC hit us, we scaled back. Now we're growing again, we need an extra half a person before we break our IT guy. But, we can't cost justify a FTE. Should we get a part-time IT guy?

Getting the right-size IT department is a problem for every company in the world – so rest assured, you're not alone. Even IT companies have issues around peak capacity, and balancing projects and support in their organisations.

IT by its nature is what I call a 'lumpy job', in that you have lumps caused by a project or lumps caused by problems. The potential of having both kinds of lump at the same time is quite high, and is a risk every business needs to manage.

As a rule, the larger the IT department the easier it is to pull resources from one area to cover another. But if there is only one person looking after your IT in a small business, you have an issue right there. If he or she is already working on a problem, there is not much that can be done when a new problem crops up. If you share that one person with another business, you are at an even greater risk.

Even if you have that one person to yourself, if that person is sick and a problem crops up, that problem is not going away any time soon.

If your internal IT resources become stretched as you grow, chances are the first thing they'll overlook is proactive management. The impact of this failure is many unforeseen problems, instead of working on prevention, your IT resources will quickly become reactive firefighters, with a huge negative impact on company-wide productivity.

Poorly implemented projects (large or small) are another culprit – leading to more calls to your helpdesk and less efficiency.

A prime example – I have learned that we must build every PC and server we roll out from a script to reduce calls to our helpdesk. If we make a minor mistake that requires post-build rectification, each one is a 15 minute job by the time we log into the computer, fix the fault and log the job in our system. We could easily add one hour for every PC we deliver with an application not installed, or a configuration not right for the site. Over hundreds of computers a year this adds up to many hundreds of wasted hours. Building a script is a proactive, ongoing job that requires foresight and resources.

So getting the right-size IT department is important. But what can you do to make it easier?

• Build a clear strategy that outlines what your company wants and needs from its IT department.
• Ensure you have the right people with the right skills working on the right problems.
• Outsource where you lack the right skills in-house, or lack the tools to do the job well. For example, level one helpdesk can easily be outsourced allowing in-house IT to work on projects and higher-level problems.
• Ensure you've made the right investment in your infrastructure to keep the work demands on the IT department down. Often, updating creaking infrastructure can cost less on a month-to-month basis than the staff required to manage failing, older equipment.
• Ensure someone is accountable, and keep score of your IT resources to ensure they're doing the right work and providing the right value.

Finally, good luck getting that part-time IT guy. In my experience, if you can find one, part-time IT guys are never there when you need them most. And, inevitably, they'll enjoy their time off more than you will when you're left to tear your hair out over a problem that inevitably springs up on their day off.

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

How should we go about selecting the right technologies?

My business is a little behind in making use of productivity tools, and while we don't want to be cutting edge, we do want to be efficient. How should we go about selecting the right technologies out of everything that's available?

This is a great question, following Kevin Rudd's comments on productivity building this week.

Welcome to the dilemma every business owner faces when selecting tools for the trade. Every trade has tools, and every tool comes in a range of qualities. When it is a broom with a head and handle it is pretty simple to select the right one. But when you get to a power drill where the working parts are hidden inside, it starts to become more difficult.

I know a low-grade handyman who buys cheap Chinese hand tools, and if they blow up he simply replaces them. Ultimately, he can buy three of the cheap tools for the price of a good one. But a tradie who uses his power tools all day knows that a factor of three is not enough, as he could go through three in a week and his quality tools will last him months.

In IT, the choices are even more complex because it is not as black and white as 'it works' or 'it's broken.' There are a few factors that affect usability, including:

• Functionality / fit to purpose
• Complexity / ease of use
• Stability
• Price
• Quality of support
• Level of integration with other tools

Add to this the fact that each of these factors sits on a sliding scale, so as one slides up the scale to 'good' the others, such as price, slide towards 'expensive.'

The solution to this dilemma lies in research. I recently sought an application for my iPhone to view my modest share portfolio. It is not a big portfolio, so I didn't want to spend a lot of time or money on the research. I looked for the best free application and found Bloomberg was highly recommended. It turned out to be a good tool, but did not keep a tally of my holding – just a list of the companies that showed current price and change. So I had to look further and pay just over $8.00 for a tool that met my purposes. The time that went into this research was over an hour.

When I wanted a more common app like weather, I just asked one of my techs in my office and two minutes later had the solution downloaded for under $3.00.

The moral of the story is that you can put more time into your research than the solution costs, and even then end up with the wrong product based on that research, and be forced to try again. When we are talking business apps, rather than iPhone apps, this is an expensive proposition.

Clearly we need to go back a step and look at the strategic approach.

First, figure out what business functions you want to improve productivity in. Questions here to consider are:

• Where will you get the quickest financial gains in your business?
• Can you group a few of these gains together and solve them with one piece of software or one set of infrastructure?
• Will the cost of developing the solution be returned in a reasonable time frame?
• Are there better technologies that will solve a broader range of problems?
• How will the solution integrate with other aspects of the business such as sales, marketing, production and finance?

Once you have answered these internal questions, it is time to look to the market place. Here you will do well to find a guide who knows the pathways to reduce the time you spend in the wilderness, and to ensure you get to the end of your path without wasting time and money on a solution that won't work.

Be warned that there are many businesses out there that have spent many thousands of dollars on applications for internal use that never got used because the staff rejected them the day they were delivered. I've seen several businesses invest millions of dollars in fully customised CRM systems that ended up taking years to implement due to negative – and therefore slow – uptake. These businesses could have easily plugged into one of the many CRM systems in the cloud, and saved themselves a huge amount of time and money.

So, once you have a guide who really understands the needs of your business, double check their advice and ensure you'll get a clear ROI. Only then will you be able to progress with a solution that will truly help your business to grow.

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

IT people keep talking to me about compliance, but is my business big enough to warrant it?

Compliance in the SME sector is an interesting issue because so many small businesses aren't regulated.

If you're involved in insurance, pharmaceuticals or are a publicly-listed company you'll know all about compliance, with standards to follow set out by APRA or ASIC, or similar bodies.

For the rest of us, compliance is a much talked about topic; but most businesses in the SME sector fall short of meeting any standards. It's true that by and large we are not compelled to spend money on compliance systems. Nevertheless, doing so makes good business sense. After all, compliance ensures business continuity and security.

In Australia, each state does have data retention laws, but they have not been well publicised. In the US, they have the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, yet here the requirements are more of a well-kept secret than a known standard.

There are currently over 1,000 regulations in the US that relate to IT compliance, and Gartner has predicted that by 2012 this will have doubled. In comparison, Australia lags behind the US, while SMEs lag behind the whole compliance issue in general. But, it is safe to say that we will soon be hearing more about compliance with standards around:

• Data security;
• Protection and storage of private information; and
• Recovery requirements.

Business consulting firms and accounting practices are already performing IT audits for charities and not-for-profit organisations. This is a trend that will continue, with company directors wanting assurance that they are not going to wind up in jail for acts committed by their IT department.

The area that is most relevant to small business owners is software licensing compliance, as it is a simple matter to align licenses held with software installed. Many business owners and company directors risk serious fines and imprisonment over a lack of licensing compliance within their businesses.

Fewer of these owners and directors are aware of the risks they take with filed credit card numbers, or private client information, that – if leaked – could be grounds for serious legal action due to breach of the Privacy Act.

Complying with backup requirements and disaster recovery time frames is just good sense for many businesses, but is still misunderstood by Australia's SME sector. It is even misunderstood by the IT consultants who are setting up tape-based and disk-based redundant copies of data, without creating any recovery path for the case of corrupted or deliberately modified data.

Most of the standards around IT compliance are about creating better business systems and protecting businesses from serious data loss. They are not about creating layers of unnecessary cost.

What compliance issues have you come across in your industry?

Click here to read more IT Systems expert advice.

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

Welcome to the new decade. What are the next 10 years going to mean for IT?

What a huge decade we have just had for IT, which started with lots of promise and a huge sharemarket bubble, followed by a tech wreck that took out all sorts of dotcom companies – good and bad. Many survived and made a fortune, while others withered and died. There is no longer any doubt that a successful web solution can create billions of dollars. We have seen Google boom ahead. We have seen The Scrivener's Fancy Homepage, eBay gain world dominance. We have seen cloud based providers such as Salesforce.com gain significant market share and these are just to name a few.

We now accept that tiny applications can be highly useful and generate massive income as seen in Apple's 'AppStore' and we have seen social networking become a buzz. So we wonder, what is next?

My sense of it all is that internet bandwidth is going to play a big part in which nations will progress and which ones will fall behind. Australia has the world's fastest wireless broadband, which is a good start, but the National Broadband Network (NBN) is going to be a very hot potato for the politicians in terms of who gets it and when. Heaven help the local politician if the town can't have NBN for any reason or if it is significantly delayed once others start to rave about it. The productivity gains created by NBN will more than offset the massive costs of implementation if it is set up so the SME sector can afford to use it.

For the SME sector, we will see more solutions offered online. We will no longer host applications on our own servers as the developers will want to host the application and charge for its use as much as possible. Back-up will initially move to the cloud, getting rid of tapes and swappable hard drives and then will disappear altogether as the hosting providers begin to do the data back-up for you.

Social networking will continue to grow as a way of connecting and communicating, using more new tools as they arrive for harvesting information from applications such as Twitter. Online video and video telephony will become even more popular and by the end of the decade most homes and businesses will be making video calls from video phones and not just from computers with geeky webcam set ups as we have today.

Businesses will offer video help desks where you can see the person who is giving you advice over the phone. This will force service desk companies like mine to get the pimply geeks to use skin cleansers and razor blades before coming to work.

I would like to tell you all that it will be smooth sailing and that IT will stop being one of your major business expenses but I am afraid this will only be a transition period moving between old technologies and new. Throughout such a transition period it will be important for all businesses to manage their IT well and seek advice about the new technologies.

With each technology update we do there will be the choice of real infrastructure, virtual infrastructure or no infrastructure. With each new computer purchase there will be the toss up between size and speed as there has been for years; do I get a desktop? Or do I get an ultra-portable net-book? I hope the old Sony screen goggles come back as an add-on to the iPhone so we can have our full size screen, the full size Bluetooth roll out keyboard on the table and the phone in our pocket as the full mobility solution.

What do you want to see from IT in this new decade?

Click here to read more IT Systems expert advice.

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