subject: Your Ideal IT World [print this page] Your Ideal IT World Your Ideal IT World
In an ideal world, a business with 25 users would require one IT expert and that one person would be able to:
Keep all the ICT systems running
Monitor all your printers and keep them topped up with consumables
Configure all your mobile devices including blackberry
Administer all your business applications including writing queries for the SQL database
Instruct and train all your staff on how to use your systems efficiently
Redesign and fix any systems that aren't working properly
Project manage all of your system upgrades and technology refresh projects
Give you high level strategic advice like a high paid CIO
Answer every question from every staff member about any aspect of IT, no matter how complex or plain dumb, with patience, intelligence, plain English and a sense of humour.
Now give them a budget to buy the right hardware and software, and away you go, right? Well, no, actually but wouldn't that be great!
Once in a while you find someone who is SO brilliant that they can do all the above as well as play indoor soccer with the staff team,
The problem is that once you have this person, After 12 months they go off to get a high powered career in the corporate or government world or to do massage therapy - it never seems to be anything in the middle.
This problem of having the correct expertise is very similar to building a house. You need an architect, a builder, a project manager, a carpenter, an electrician and so it goes. Just because you want a small house, doesn't mean you need fewer tradies, it just means you need only part time resources for each of them. But each of them needs exactly the same tools and training to do the job well for a small house or a large mansion.
Any position or job can be just as specialised and requires the same sort of classification and distinction. In the case of IT, the roles are:
Help Desk technician / 1st level support
Network Engineer / 2nd level support
Senior Network Engineer / 3rd level support
IT Architect
IT Consultant / Strategist
Trainer
Business Analyst
Programmer
Systems Designer
Just because you manage a small office or enterprise, doesn't mean your business can afford mediocre inputs on any of these aspects of your IT system. A generalist handyman can do a fantastic job of maintaining the house and that's fine given that a house has a lifetime of about 15 years before it requires significant renovation. Houses also tend to have been built properly in the first place.
IT environments need to be refreshed every three to four years and generally speaking you want to do the infrastructure and the applications separately - so a major architectural review needs to happen every 18 months to 2 years with a good chance that something significant and strategic will need to change. If any aspect wasn't properly designed in the first place, your handyman is unlikely to have the tools or training to fix the underlying cause.
To make things more difficult the last time you looked, most of the technology and options available to you as a business owner have radically changed. In some situations you may need to start from scratch. What business purpose you serve and what IT is required to support that purpose are decisions that have to be made every 18 months to 2 years.
Your handyman or jack of all trades has spent the last 18 months stabilising your system to get rid of all the glitches, he is not going to be positioned, trained or perhaps even interested in upsetting the applecart and starting again.
So if you are having trouble getting the results you need from your IT, and you only have one or two (very stressed) IT people in your organisation, this might be the reason why.
What can you do? Well one solution is to look at a managed service provider who can take the load off your internal IT person by covering some of the things that they either do not have the expertise to do or do not want to do.
If you need a system to monitor and manage the servers and your local IT guy is happy to support the users then you can get a solution provider for that component. If your IT person skills are design and architecture then get a solution provider in to support the users as level 1 3 help desk.
Any combination of these ideas will reduce the stress of the IT department and will free up resources to improve your business. There is no single answer to the problem but there are always better ways of implementing the solutions.
No matter what the situation if you have a jack of all trades then you need to be able to keep them by relieving the stress and workload that they encounter every day. To do this, then a managed IT service provider is an alternative that you should look at sooner than later.
