OK so here’s the thing before I get started on the new rules you must know. I recognise that IT, in whatever form it may come in for your business probably isn’t the most preferred topic of conversation and often might only come up in the form of “I have an IT problem”, “we need a new IT guy”, “we need some new IT stuff”" or “damn, this IT is getting expensive” – the reality is most of us don’t want to think about IT but..
The game has changed.
The focus around IT has shifted from nice-to-have to critical and integral to the success of our businesses. Companies that follow the rules stand out and are more competitive and win - so to help you on your path here are 7 new Rules for IT Support and if followed correctly, will help you survive and thrive in this new market.
Here goes:
1. IT Manager or IT Outsourcing? It’s not always one or the other..
For whatever reason, I’m often asked whether I think a company should outsource their IT completely or keep their existing IT team. Sure, there are circumstances where companies no longer need an IT manager or IT team in-house, but there are also many circumstances where having both can actually leverage your company to new heights. For companies to survive in a new marketplace they’ll need a competitive edge. If you’re an IT Manager and you find yourself bogged down in support calls all day, how then can you get the big runs on the board to help the company leverage technology and break away from the pack? External IT offers the ability to fast track fault finding and problem resolution usually at a much lower cost than making another hire such as a desktop support engineer. If IT Managers work strategically with an IT outsourcing partner it doesn’t need to be a shoot-out scenario.
Rule #1 Use an IT Outsourcer to Extend Your IT Capability and Compete In Your Market
2. Automation Nation
We’ve all been there. Your computer crashes, blue screen or some other trademark Microsoft problem and the IT guy needs to come sit down at your desk and fix it. A few coffee’s and swear words later (and about half your day) you’re back up and running.
Things are changing. The risk of you being out of action and potentially paying for someone to sit at your desk fixing a computer presents a historical snapshot of what IT used to be like, but shouldn’t be any more.
The advent of remote support tools coupled with backups, virtualisation and automation tools mean that if you find yourself in that situation again – you’re probaby paying too much for IT support.
Rule #2 Deskside Relations Cost Time and Expense – Automate and Save
3. Go/No-Go
Once upon a time I was asked by a friend to help him out on a building site one day during my early uhh unemployment years. No sooner did I arrive, when I was approached by a surly gentleman from Work Safety directing me to leave the premises because I wasn’t wearing safety boots. So strict were the standards on that building site that I was spotted a mile away in my worn out sneakers.
Similarly, during the 90′s and the early 2000′s few standards existed in IT to prevent a major accident from happening. You can probably remember massive internet outages that went on for what seemed like forever and, unbeknownst to you it was probably because someone at your Internet provider was playing with something he shouldn’t have.
That has changed – if that same guy was tinkering around at your Internet Provider he’d be out of a job. Your IT support should have “go/no-go” standards in place to prevent changes being made to your system in real time. Each ”tweak”or “hey I wonder what would happen if we changed this” should go through a standard process to ensure users aren’t affected and that your business doesn’t suffer from costly downtime.
Take it a step further, and your IT support should be limiting the number of people who have administrator access to change things on your system without authorisation (i.e. third parties like your software vendor).
Rule #3 Look But Don’t Touch.. until it’s clear that it won’t impact the business
4. What? Another Invoice?
Back in those same “hey days” of running a business which requires computer support – IT support providers were often seen as tradesman – a bit like calling an electrician or a plumber – we call you, you fix it, we hopefully don’t see you again for a long time. And, to some degree that may have been true – until IT usage exploded in the late 90′s to today. Once businesses went online the game changed dramatically, and suddenly the “IT repairman” became a bit of a necessity around the office.
And that’s nice – he’s probably a really nice guy.. except if the IT repairman maintains his pay-as-you-go model, that can add up to a heck of a lot of money for you.
The new rule is this – we – as in the collective IT industry – have been doing this long enough to know how much time and energy is required to run the day-t0-day IT operations of a company. And, if we have that knowledge then the benefit to you should be a fixed cost or at the very least an IT budget set for each project. This shifts the risk and the cost of any IT problems back over to your IT support company.
This is often referred to in our industry speak as Managed IT or Managed Services. I called it IT Assurance in a previous article you can find here.
Rule #4 Pay as you go can easily become a pain in the cash flow
5. ITIL – now we have standards
Yawn. OK I won’t run you through the entire ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) but suffice to say, if the 90′s and early naughties were the cowboy years of IT, ITIL represents the somewhat less wild and exciting but a little more stable and predictable years of IT for your business.
ITIL was developed so that IT companies had a set of standards to follow such as what determines if something is a process or a project, how to review problems and ensure they don’t happen again, how to ensure change (see rule #3) isn’t implemented without a plan.
Your IT support provider should have ITIL compliant people, ITIL compliant systems and better yet, be ITIL accredited.
To use the building site analogy again – ITIL ensures those who touch your computer systems are doing so in a safe and controlled manner and minimising the impact of new versus known IT problems for your business.
Rule #5 ITIL is the new set of standards for IT people, and they’re the people you want touching your critical business systems.
6. Response-able
If IT people were likened to the ”I’ll get to it when I get to it” repairmen in the early days of IT support – some of them may have been forgiven for acting like them, such as showing up in the afternoon when they said they’d be there in the morning – or, sometimes not showing up at all due to their workload and, after all, it is beer-o’clock 
Not so today. Far from the days where IT was a nice to have, today’s businesses can’t afford down time at all. So, when even what might be considered to be a minor email problem for a Personal Assistant, or an issue logging on for a CEO – these issues need to be dealt with promptly.
To do this, the IT support needs to not only have an agreed response time with your company, but also have the capacity to deal with multiple problems at once. Yes, this often means dealing with a slightly bigger IT firm that has the resourcing - or, in exceptional circumstances it might be that the provider limits his number of customers to ensure response times are able to be met.
Rule #6 Develop Clear Response Times Between You and Your IT Support
7. IT is not about problems, it’s your competitive advantage
Think about it. You walk into your office. You look out at the people you work with and they are connected, seamlessly to their IT systems – some are working with iPads which connect back to your project server, others are talking on Skype and some are busy typing out emails. You sit down at your own PC and you don’t remark at how fast it’s running today – you expect it because it’s the norm.
You sit down with your IT specialist and you plan how your company will use IT this quarter to launch a social media strategy and to set up a weekly video conference with your sales team and a key customer. This is how IT should be.
Think about your competitor. He hasn’t read the rules yet. His computers are aging, he hasn’t got the right technology to go forward on some projects which require specialised software. His systems are crashing and his IT guy is fixing it – but it will take time. Go and grab a coffee..
IT is your competitive advantage. Make no mistake – if your systems are running effectively they are costing you less, leveraging your team to do something more than wait for their computer to boot up.
Rule #7 (and the most important one) Use IT as your Competitive Advantage
That’s the new rules of IT Support, good luck!
