If your business is back in growth mode and your IT department is stretched to capacity you've probably tried to find new staff and found that the job market is short of well-qualified, experienced IT people.
The effort required to find and attract new staff has increased significantly but fear not, because an option has emerged that is entirely different to anything I've previously seen offered in the SME landscape.
The new option is to offload part of the work to give support to your in-house IT team. Of course there are always choices to make regarding what part of the work to offload.
Common practice has been to offload project work to consultants who have the expertise and experience to get the job done quickly.
But that has always left a bad taste in the mouths of the team left behind to administer the fallout of the system long after the consultants have gone.
Now there is the option to outsource the lowest level of tactical work to allow technical people inside your organisation to focus on the value-added solutions your company really needs, with an understanding of how your people really work.
The lowest level tactical work is the help desk, logging and resolving small mundane, but time consuming jobs that ensure productivity is maintained.
There are now tools that allow your staff to call or email an external help desk to log a ticket and receive instant remote support.
When the problem needs more local attention it is possible for the remote help desk to place the job ticket in a queue accessed by your in-house team, allowing jobs to be passed seamlessly from your staff to the help desk to your IT team, ensuring correct prioritisation of jobs and reasonable resolution time.
Those tools are available to medium-sized local IT firms to provide local support with site knowledge shared and accessed, ensuring that value is added by the remote team.
The benefits of the system are many and it will add great value to those who adopt it:
- Cost effective team expansion in a totally elastic offering.
- Breadth of IT team across multiple disciplines.
- Depth of IT on specific technologies.
- Multiple hands to ensure the ball is never dropped on critical issues.
- Your small IT team is partially managed by external task management against an SLA provided in a contract.
- Industry best practice is applied to your site by the remote management process, driving better efficiency.
- External people share your internal systems knowledge, reducing risk of loss.
- Internal staff can take a holiday without creating risk or exposure for business critical systems.
- Your entire business has a professional help desk to call on, ensuring there is a person there at all times.
There are risks with this solution and they need to be noted and mitigated via your selection process:
- The external company will gain access to your IP and must be trustworthy.
- The quality of people in the external organisation will impact on your staff, so they must be good.
- The timeliness of the external organisation could delay urgent requirements, so they need robust processes.
- The external body must cover your technologies, so they must have the required breadth and depth.
- The remote management will have an impact on your bandwidth, so you must have the right connections to facilitate the connection.
If your IT resources are letting the team down due to too many demands on their time and capability you can now get a very quick boost to capacity by removing the most tedious work.
That allows internal staff to do more meaningful, higher-level work in a better managed environment with great tactical support.
For now this service is offered locally but due to the inevitable future of our globally-connected world the service will switch to telco-scale organisations and be moved offshore to the cheapest capable resources.
It will certainly be interesting to see how the field of computer support changes in the next three years.
David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.
No comments:
Post a Comment