Would you believe me if I told you I’m not allowed to touch the servers in my business anymore? It’s true!
A few years ago, my technical team ganged up on me – despite my qualifications as a graduate engineer with all sorts of Microsoft qualifications and years of server management experience – and changed the administrator’s password and effectively locked me out of the backend of our systems.
Their instincts may have been driven more by the mistakes I was capable of making as an out-of-date technician than the fact that I should have been focussed on business growth. Either way, it had much the same effect.
Unfortunately, people who are capable of working with technology often find themselves drawn into the depths of it to the distraction of all else. We all know the answers to every problem – especially IT ones – are just a few searches and clicks away on Google. And so we can be easily sucked in by the calls for assistance from the staff around us.
I often talk about ‘hero work’ in IT where the technically capable like to swoop in to fix a problem and zoom off to the fading cries of, “You’re a genius, thanks!” This kind of hero work has instant gratification for people who like solving problems or like helping people. Now, if you’re like me and you like helping people AND solving problems, the short-term rewards of this kind of work can drive you to work extraordinary hours and hardly notice the time.
However, this is rarely the right solution – as my team observed. Often, having a go at solving technology problems leads to more problems, due to the lack of knowledge of the grey areas. It is far better to get the right resources aligned to solve the problems on a long-term basis. And this is never the right job for a managing director – even a capable one.
Imagine if you will a marketing company where one of the directors has a strong grasp of technology, due to personal involvement in his early career. When the business is small, he starts looking after the PCs himself. As the network grows, he looks after more of it and directs the decisions. Eventually, as the business grows further, he outsources to a bloke he knows and manages him closely and jumps in when the chips are down. His technical interest remains and many of the problems are solved, but his staff are troubled by an environment where they can’t get their problems looked at or fixed, unless the director is around. Hardly empowering, right?
The solution for the marketing company was to outsource to a managed services company where the marketing firm’s staff were encouraged to call the helpdesk if a problem arose, or a new starter needed a PC. Suddenly, the director was set free to work on growing the business, and so it grew.
Today, even technical experts who work with technology all day for multiple clients, and do training courses and read technical books in their spare time, rely on being part of a team to solve problems effectively. The breadth and depth required to work effectively and keep at the forefront of technology is simply exhausting and to believe you can do it in your spare time is pure folly.
If you need to assess the resources you have working on the IT systems in your business, find a technology guide who understands your scale of business and work with them to get the right solutions and services in place. This will enable you to focus on business growth and future value, rather than being distracted by IT.
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David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.
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