Managed Services Can Significantly Improve Your IT Outsourcing Experience
Your business’s technology touches all aspects of your daily operations. It is the nervous system of just about any business. It can be an asset that runs efficiently or be a hindrance to your employees. Worst of all, your IT infrastructure can be a significant liability if not properly maintained. Many times, small, nagging issues can be an early indicator of much larger looming problems that should be addressed.
Technology Impacts All Aspects of Business
If you think of any role in your company, it most likely relies on a PC, notebook, or mobile device to access critical information. That information may reside on a server or in the cloud. Either way, your IT infrastructure is the one tool in your business that has a profound affect on every employee.
If sales cannot get to their CRM tools, the sales pipeline slows down. When finance cannot access reports quickly, knowing the current status of the business becomes cumbersome. When email is unreliable, customer service cannot quickly communicate with customers to ensure a pleasant experience. If there is a major disaster or technology failure, your entire company can grind to a halt.
Anyone Can Say They Provide Managed Services
Managed IT services is a great buzzword that just about every outsourced IT company has been adding to their service offering menu over the past few years. True managed services should have a profound impact on the performance and reliability of a company’s network. At my MSP, we look to four key areas to measure our impact:
- Higher Productivity – Employees should experience significantly fewer problems and get immediate response for the few that occur.
- Increased Functionality – Provide new ways to utilize technology, streamlining workflows and increasing workforce leverage.
- Reduced Risk – Effectively prepare for and mitigate risks such as:
- Virus infection through spam, disreputable websites and hacking
- Data loss due to failure or human error
- Downtime due to disaster.
- Reduce Capital Spending – Through effective budgeting and technology planning to reduce unexpected expenses by anticipating potential growth areas and future inadequacies.
Many times, an IT support vendor will simply add some monitoring to their break/fix model and call it “managed services”. I go into more detail in my last post, What is Managed Services?, however, the important point is that managed services should be more than response to problems. It should focus on reducing and eliminating problems, and more.
Outsourced IT but Not “Outside IT”
An outsourced IT managed services company should never feel like an outside company to the client. A close working relationship with ownership and employees is necessary to have a true impact on a client’s experience.
If an IT company is simply seen as a necessary evil and costly business expense, the relationship is doomed. If employees see a burdensome phone call to some tech guy instead of a quick and helpful resolution to their issue, they will put off dealing with their computer problems, compounding the lost productivity.
A great managed services company should have in-depth knowledge of each of their client’s technology environments. This process involves continuous auditing to ensure proper alignment to best practices and a high level of standardization to ensure an equally high standard of service.
Client buy-in is a must. Even the best managed service provider will eventually fail with a client if they cannot secure owner or management support. No matter the result, if ownership and the MSP do not effectively communicate the goals of the business and what is expected of their technology, properly aligning those goals is almost impossible.
Being seen as the internal IT department simply located in a separate location is much different than being just another outside IT vendor. To accomplish this, it is important for managed services providers to engage ownership early and often. They must develop goals and milestones for service, properly address business issues relating to technology, and deliver results that make them an invaluable resource. Doing so ensures that both parties are satisfied with the relationship in the end.
The Best IT Company Cannot Work Both Sides
What I mean by this is that if an IT support company provides managed services, they cannot deliver them effectively if they still provide reactive break/fix support. Here’s why:
Culture – The culture of a managed services company is one of planning, productivity, process, standardization, best practices and employee well-being. If a culture of minimal reactive issues is the goal, dealing with continuous problems from customers not on the managed services plan defeats the purpose.
Dedication – The level of dedication and commitment required to deliver truly business changing IT service cannot be delivered to some clients and not others. It needs to be 100%, every day for everyone. Effective process cannot be developed and delivered when clients that have not bought into the process are pulling resources dedicated to implementing it.
Consistency – When properly managing a client environment, developing repeatable process is integral to gaining efficiency and further impacting client results.
Leverage – In the same way that we strive to increase a customer’s employee leverage, the goal needs to be the same internally. A managed services provider can only continue to improve their service by properly utilizing technical resources to work toward that single goal.
Service Delivery – It is not possible to deliver the best results when an IT company is trying to be everything to everyone. When dealing with ever-increasing reactive issues from other clients, the IT support company cannot deliver on their managed service offering. When dealing with immediate problems, developing process and best practices for managed services clients will always take a back seat.
Choose an Outsourced IT Vendor Wisely
Managed services requires a level of dedication, process and culture that does not allow for a “jack of all trades” company to deliver it. If you want a significant improvement in your technology investment, choose a MSP that focuses on delivering increasingly beneficial business results. Any company can answer a support call, the best companies prevent the support call from being made.
At Pittsburgh Technology Management, we have a unique approach to IT support that significantly increases productivity and functionality while reducing business risk and capital costs. Our company is built to do only that.