Should you handle IT yourself?

Should you handle IT yourself?

In todays business environment you can no longer rely on “my nephew does our IT” case!  With the issues of complex security and ever changing technology as the solutions move from the local desktop to the cloud, you need to have a better solution.

As a business owner, even if a small business, you don’t build a power plant to provide your building power or you don’t create a complete roof top rain collection system to get drinking water.  You don’t get legal advice from a neighbor (unless they happen to be an attorney and even then, are they in the right specialty), so why do we think we can get our IT solutions from Best Buy or from the same “nephew”?

As a company grows there is a point where in house expertise is needed but most small businesses focus on the IT person that can “fix my mouse” or “keep our antivirus up to date” when they really need an IT person that concentrates on the applications being used in the business (line of business apps).

So what happens next?  One of two things:

1. The IT person gets tired of handling the breakfix stuff and moves on to another company. You are then back to bringing on an entry level person to train all over again.
2. The IT person says “we need more help” and then you start to build your own internal IT company.

Building an internal IT team the rule of thumb is one full time person for every 100 seats in the company.

So you say, I will get a person that handles accounts receivable 50% of the time and IT 50% of the time and that will keep my cost down!  Nice in theory, terrible in practice.  Give any individual two radically disparate jobs and they will automatically gravitate to one or the other.   In this example it means that you will have either a great AR person and an extremely lousy IT person OR your will have an IT person that will run full time (they always move to where they feel the most comfortable) and an AR person that will never collect!

Maybe it’s time to look at “Managed Services” to enhance your business needs!  At some point you may still want to have that internal IT person but they should focus on how you are leveraging IT to benefit your company and NOT the daily bits and bytes of technology.

Want to find out more?  If you want to find out more about Managed Services, simply reach out to any of our team and ask about Millennia’s TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) analysis that can guide you to the new world of Managed Services! Just call us at 616-828-5360!