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Things To Think About as IT Spend Comes Back
Although economies rarely behave in an orderly and predictable fashion, the industry experts are claiming that good times are returning for IT and that IT spending will be increasing in a ‘V’ shaped fashion in 2010. While it is always hard to really know what will happen with IT spend, it does indeed seem likely to me that IT spending will increase, and increase at a strong rate in 2010. This may not be driven by the economy, however, as much as by neglect and natural replacement/upgrade/maintenance cycles.
Let’s face it, 2009 was a scary year. Many companies pulled back on all spending to ensure they had the reserves to survive a downturn that at some points appeared to be an ever deepening pit. As preventative IT spend went down, coupled with holding off on many much needed infrastructure and computing equipment upgrades, a backlog of spend was being created. In IT, that backlog always has to clear at some point. Server upgrades become needed, user machines have begun to breakdown, software upgrades have been skipped – ultimately productivity is impacted.
Yet, despite the significant need, there is lingering fear of hiring in a world with a lot of uncertainty around the recovery, taxes, and health care reform impacts. For SMB’s, there are added questions around keeping IT costs variable to match business cycles.
This becomes a perfect storm for growth in the IT outsourcing world, as businesses scramble to play catch up without having to over commit to long term labor costs. There are countless articles and white papers on how to select IT providers. Many of these provide potentially valuable information on ensuring that your provider can support your business and technical vision.
All this is very educational and interesting. What always seems to be missing from these discussions is what the underlying motivations behind IT support really are. At the simplest level, business owners (and computing users) just want to be productive and feel supported. You want to be happy with your IT provider without having to get distracted from your businesses core mission. These things have less to do with the technical details of how work gets done and more to do with how that support is systemically delivered. In my experience, many computing users feel annoyed, frustrated and abandoned as they have disruptions, followed by a feeling of desertion as their vendor is delayed in providing the support they need.
Ask any potential vendor how they will help ensure your computing users will be happy, and wait for the blank stare. Ask about how they minimize delay and ensure you’re never deserted. Ask them how they limit disruptions in the first place! At the end of the day, those are the real key questions, and the key to finding a great IT service provider. Any smart IT consultant can explain the specifics on how they remediate an issue, but at the end of the day, that is a transactional approach. Take the conversation up a notch and ask a few key questions about their client support model:
- Do you have the breadth and depth of expertise to ensure you can manage all my needs now and as I grow?
- Do you have the size and scope to ensure you can always respond to my emergencies? What if a local issue causes multiple clients to go down at once, how can you handle that?
- How do you handle inbound client calls and emails? Do you count on a field technician to respond to those when they can, or do you have live dispatch that can triage, prioritize, and assign all issues to the best resource?
- Do you have live local remote staff that can immediately solve my user issues when needed?
- Will I have access to multiple resources, or just one?
These are basic business level questions that will help you gain confidence that your selected partner can fulfill the goal of ensuring your users don’t feel disrupted, delayed and deserted, but instead feel happy, productive and supported. At the end of the day, THAT is the real end goal of all IT support.
Happy Computing!
Richard Brunke
