How should we train our IT staff?

How should we train our IT staff?

How should we train our IT staff?

If you have internal IT staff, training is a big expense and you need to get it right.

In an SME environment, training is essential to motivate your staff and ensure you have the latest skills in your team. But, if IT is not your core business, training IT staff can be a challenge.

• When should you train them?
• What courses should you send them on?
• What are the alternatives?

Training is something that even IT-focused businesses struggle with, and it’s much harder for companies with a small IT department of less than five employees. Your people need to have the range of skills to design your future solutions, manage and run the projects to implement the new solutions, and be able to maintain the systems once they go live.

Training is ideal for companies that have found a strong group of technical people that include both strategic thinkers and tactical doers. If these individuals work well together and get each aspect of the jobs done, then it’s worth investing in training to ensure the team continues to perform and deliver the right solutions.

When you should train them will depend on your business cycles. If you’re in a stable or declining cycle, then there isn’t much point training on new technology that you do not have the budget to implement. You want to withhold your training budget for a time when growth is at least anticipated and the systems need to be refreshed to cope with the anticipated increase in load.

If your systems are reaching end of life, and there are new solutions available, send your strategic thinkers to tradeshows to see the latest gizmos, gadgets and tools. This will allow them to start making plans and doing product selection. In-depth training offering a deep dive into technology is not appropriate yet as this learning is quickly forgotten if it’s not used regularly. You should also be aware of the costs; multiple days and lots of course work or intensive study are a distraction away from day-to-day operations.

As you gear up to product selection, it’s worth doing some more intensive product knowledge training to ensure the selected solutions really meet the anticipated business requirements.

Once the product selection and pre-purchasing is done, testing can start. It may be time to do technical training now to ensure the product is suitably tested and not glossed over at a high level.

If the product passes the testing phase, more time can be put into technical training to ensure the implementation phase goes as smoothly as possible.

It’s vital to have a sufficient cross section of your team trained on the products; either by inclusion in the training or some team level hands-on supervised learning to ensure the quality of on-going maintenance is reasonable also. Certainly if the installation team is trained but the maintenance team is not, there will be very poor accountability for problem resolution once the project is completed.

So, the courses to send people on will typically be vendor lead, unless you are dealing with global companies like Microsoft and Cisco who have set up course standards that are taught by independent training institutes. There is also very good computer or book-based training programs available that can work very well for people who don’t like classrooms. It’s best to understand how your team prefer to learn.

The alternative to training your own people is to outsource specialist tasks to experienced contactors or consultants who come in to do focused components of the work.

Of course, there are costs and risks to both methods. Think about losing a newly-trained employee in an industry famous for its high job churn rates, or demotivating staff who want the opportunity to train on a new system and fail to respect the consultant brought in.

Balancing your team and getting the right people trained at the right time is complex, so plan ahead, have a training budget assigned to each major change you wish to implement, and consider whether you should be doing that job in-house or outsourcing it. The result of your decision will have a lasting impact on the cost of IT in your organisation.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

Ten ways IT can help grow your business

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

What is the real value of a Standard Operating Environment (SOE)?

This article is going to use a lot of three letter acronyms (TLAs) – but bear with me, it’s not too technical!

When it comes to IT maintenance and support, it’s apparent that SMEs are paying much more per PC than their corporate cousins.

I was speaking recently with a consultant in my business about help desk metrics and how to improve response times for our clients. He told me that when he ran an internal help desk at HP with an SOE and good work practices, he handled thousands of calls, achieved an average ticket resolve time of six minutes, and an impressive two-out-of-three calls being resolved by level one staff (who are the cheapest resources in a technical support business).

This got me thinking about how we score servicing thousands of computers in SME businesses where an SOE is unheard of. I realised pretty quickly that our statistics would not even come close to these resolve times, and that many calls are escalated to more senior staff to find a solution – driving the cost of resolution even higher.

We all know that where there are computers there are problems, right? Well, I would go so far as to say the more computers there are, the more problems per computer will occur. And, the more variation we have with our computers, the more variations of problems and therefore, the more solutions required. This all results in more time and expense; and for the employees involved, more downtime.

So, I’m now convinced that the only way to drive down the total cost of IT support is for SMEs to turn to a vendor that offers an SOE-like service. I would love to know how SME readers feel about having IT sales people dictate the technology they should use to access reduced price services.

The way I see it is that we choose to run our own businesses, so we have the freedom of choice and can run with flexible systems. Yet we are limited in the systems we can afford to support. There is a fierce battle between productivity and creativity that is leaving SMEs struggling with the cost of technology.

So, what can we do to maximise total cost of ownership (TCO) without locking ourselves down too much?

The answer is to standardise as much as possible, across as many PCs and businesses as possible. We do this by minimising both the brands of technology we sell to clients, and the models of device within the brand. We build our computers from scripts that produce standard results in minimum time, and try to reduce the number of operating systems in use. To do so, it’s important to keep devices up-to-date and move clients to new operating systems as soon as they prove to be stable enough to ensure longevity of the platform. We also introduce usage policies to minimise risk and variation.

We then document solutions to problems as we resolve them, keeping a knowledge base of problem resolutions. To have level one staff resolve problems quickly, we give them access to the store of proven solutions as level one staff lack the time to do the research required to find a new solution on the fly. They may also not yet have the skills to develop a solution on their own.

Of course, building the standards and knowledge base requires internal infrastructure, applications and human resources which come at a high cost, and so becomes part of the scalability issue of a support business. You can’t build the knowledge or the structure until you have scale, and you can’t grow further until you have the productivity. This forms part of the challenge for internal IT departments in rapidly growing SMEs.

It is this scalability issue that causes relatively small companies with four or five IT staff to work very inefficiently. Essentially, they never built the productivity tools. A couple of hundred computers did not create the scale that justified the building of the systems and so the work grew. By the time we reach 300 PCs, the SOEs and systems really start to make sense. So it is common to see lower head counts per PC supported in large companies than in the medium companies that failed to outsource or build knowledge bases and SOEs.

The key for SMEs is to partner with organisations that have the systems and the scale to have a quasi SOE in place that lets them work to a tight Service Level Agreement (SLA), and reduce the time that goes into solving each IT problem – thus driving down the TCO.

If you take anything from this article, make it this: It takes a lot of smarts to make complex systems simple and drive the cost of management down. Find an intelligent team that can make your life easier and cheaper by removing the impediments to growth caused by IT.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

How do we know if it’s time to get help with our IT system?

There are lots of reasons why IT goes to the bottom of the agenda in a small business. We often see businesses drop IT off the radar after upgrades, due to tough financial times or because of the loss of an IT employee.

Unfortunately, IT has its own way of putting itself back on the agenda. This can occur suddenly, with a malfunction costing a fortune in downtime or if your system fails to deliver the services the business requires. Worst of all, is having one incident that causes down time that can cost more than replacing the entire system properly. (You will not have this experience until you have a significant number of staff dependent on the systems to do productive work.)

If your internal IT people are too tactical, they are not going to notice the bigger picture of how the decaying systems are impacting your business. Wasting management’s time by discussing options back and forth becomes costly – particularly if the options have not been properly explored with their costs calculated.

Many IT companies in the SME arena will offer cheap technology assessments to impress prospects. This work is often a loss leader in the hope of winning projects and ongoing maintenance, and when it is done free may lead to serious oversight of your real requirements. It takes significant time to assess where you are up to and what your real needs are.

A good assessment will determine:

What you have, what you can keep and what you need to upgrade or replace to gain productivity, security and continuity of access to data.

A balanced report will also outlay the cost of ongoing maintenance of the system you will have.

In the last week we have seen a system costing $75,000 over the past 12 months to maintain. We have been able to put forward a replacement plan costing $2,500 per month to finance and another $2,600 per month to maintain that will improve productivity significantly and save the company $13,800 per annum. The new systems will streamline business functions, allow for scalability and ensure IT is performing for three to four years.

So, my advice here is:

• Don’t spend too little on the assessment.
• Get a thorough assessment of your needs to ensure you align your IT plans to your business plans.
• Then, invest in a system that will support your organisation over the next few years.

So you know it is time to get help with your IT system if you are spending the money but not getting the solutions you require or if it is showing up on management meeting agendas but there are no facts to report for options going forward.

It really is worth investing in a robust, stable system to minimise downtime and malfunctions. Aligning your IT to your business plan ensures that IT never impedes your growth, and is well worth the investment.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

Do we really need high-speed internet in Australia?

A lot of my time recently has been spent focusing on cloud computing, specifically how it will impact on my business and what opportunities it can offer my clients.

It is very easy for me to forget that many business owners and senior managers are still trying to get their heads around what it all means.

Using the history of wheel-based transport versus the history of the internet let me illustrate an interesting analogy to outline the necessity of high-speed internet in Australia.

History of Wheel Based Transport	History of Internet
3500 BC wheels are attached to hand drawn carts	1836 Telegraph
2000 BC horses are domesticated and used for transport	1876 Telephone
770 Iron horseshoes improve horse transport	1962 -68 Packet Switching networks developed
1662 first record of a public horse drawn bus	1969 – ARPANET commissioned by DoD as research project (basis for internet)
1740 a clockwork carriage is demonstrated	1971 Now 15 nodes and 23 hosts on ARPANET First E-mail Sent
1769 First steam powered locomotive for roads	1972 Public demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines
1771 First car accident as car crashes into brick wall.	1973 ARPANET goes global UK and Norway
1801 First steam powered train	1974 TCP is defined for use on ARPANET
1807 First internal combustion engine vehicle (hydrogen gas)	1977 Number of hosts on network exceeds 100
1814 First practical steam powered railroad locomotive	1979 News Groups (still active today) are created, Collaboration tools begin
1862 First Gasoline driven vehicle	1982 TCP/IP is defined
1885 First Benz practical Automotive	1983 Name servers created as network is too big to know all points
1908 Henry ford generates mass production of the motor vehicle	1986 Potential identified as 5,000 hosts exceeded
2008 GFC almost wipes out car manufacturing in USA	1987 Internet moves from University and military to public 28,000 hosts
	1990 300,000 Hosts firs ISP world.std.com is launched
	1991 World Wide Web WWW is released
	1992 Multimedia hits internet term “Surfing the internet” is coined
	1993 2 million hosts a doubling of year before exponential growth is on
	1994 ARPANET/Internet concept now 25 years old
	1996 Microsoft starts the browser war with Netscape. Combo is created.
	1999 Browser war over, Microsoft declared a Monopoly
	2000 Number of web sites doubles in 7 months
	2004 Facebook launched
	2005 YouTube.com launched
	2007 Google passes Microsoft as “the most valuable global brand” over 1 billion on WWW
	2009/10 Cloud becomes the next big thing at a public awareness level
	2011 Office 365 launched by Microsoft

The point of these dates is to illustrate that it took 5400 years to go from the wheel to the modern motor vehicle and less than 200 years to go from message on-a-wire to a global multimedia collaboration tool.

Today it would seem that there is a greater sense of urgency to improve communication than there is to improve transportation.

While there is no question that faster transport has changed the way we think about the world computers are responsible for changing the way we think about what we know.

Do you still use a fax in your business or do you scan and send your documents? This is a great example of technology being rapidly superseded by a new development.

When the automobile became a reality no one thought the idea would take off for all sorts of reasons – people should not move so fast, noise, distribution of fuel and danger to horses and other road users.

We are now used to adopting new technologies and tend to worry more about convenience in the moment than fearing the risks of early adoption.

So how do we extend the analogy between transport and the cloud?

Today we have motor vehicles, planes, trains and boats.

In computing we have mobile devices, PCs, laptops, servers, private clouds and public clouds.

• The mobile device is like a motor bike. It will work almost anywhere, is lightweight and conveys one or two people from place to place without the need to pedal.
• The PC is more like a car. You typically lease or own one and use it for the full range of tools and applications you require.
• A taxi is like an internet café, where you use the technology in sessions.
• The company server is more like a bus than anything else. You all ride on it but have no direct ownership of it. You can use it as a place to chat with many people but you do not plan to do collaborative work there other than with people you know and trust.
• The server farm in your office is akin to a rail road. It is private infrastructure that we all use part of to share information. It is also a private cloud and it is where larger-scale collaboration begins to happen.
• If you take the entire network of roads and rail, including international airports and ports, you now have something that aligns with the public cloud. This gives you instant global reach with your communications, with multiple utility scale server farm environments running at a level of complexity that no one individual can comprehend.

Transport is constantly evolving to be faster, more efficient, more comfortable and safer. Internet systems are constantly evolving to be faster, more efficient, easier to use and of course, safer.

The rate of adoption of the internet makes the evolution of transport look sluggish. As billions of people go online and seek tools to work faster and smarter to share information, collaborate on ideas and seek entertainment the future will develop in ways that we cannot predict.

If you are happy riding an unshod horse as your primary mode of transport you will believe that we don’t need fast internet in Australia.

If you intend to be part of the rapidly evolving, data enabled world, than there is no question that we need all the bandwidth we can get our hands on.

Of course cost is important and timing is everything, particularly as technologies get adopted and unit prices decrease when more people are buying them.

It could also be assumed that a new technology will emerge to create alternatives to the tools we buy today, so change is guaranteed.

The bad news is that there is little truth in saying it will get easier. I believe we will be faced by complexity of change and choice, which is great news for the support industry, but hard work for any of us getting old and trying to stay up to date with technology.

● David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.