The I.T. support industry is built upon knowledge and experience.
The job market is saturated with younglings leaving college and those at the other end being ‘retrained’ in I.T. by the employment agencies meaning companies can pick and choose the best talent and skills that they need. So why is it when a company staffed by trained professionals makes a recommendation to a customer they are so often ignored?
When a computer issue comes up it can be the most frustrating thing in the world. You’re right in the middle of typing and a background program crashes, the whole computer freezes and it wasn’t even close to your fault. You need to get back to what you were doing so you call an engineer in to fix the computer and get you typing again. They arrive, they unfreeze the computer and that little flashing bar is back just where you finished off. Great, it’s fixed, push the engineer to one side and carry on, but then they start opening some more windows, clicking different options and generally getting in the way.
Unfreezing the computer is step one, stopping it freezing again in the next ten minutes is steps 2 through 10. There are potentially thousands of reasons why a computer can go wrong and that’s only including the machine itself and Windows. When you include other software it’s going to billions. One small piece of misplaced code in an update that will only activate when a particular series of functions happen can cause a recurring memory leak eventually slowing your machine to a crawl which doesn’t even fix itself when the offending program is closed.
Finding and fixing the root cause is always the priority for an I.T. professional and the motivation isn’t selfless. A recurring issue means recurring call outs. It means engineers making repeated visits to site or logging in remotely to the same machine which in turn means greater overheads for the I.T. supplier and technicians being tied up when they could be working on something else. The important thing to remember is that all those reasons apply to you as well. The longer a computer problem goes on the longer your employee can’t work. They’ll still need paying but they’ll be unable to do anything productive.
This analogy easily scales up to the company as a whole. Someone from I.T. comes to assess your network and they recommend upgrading your security hardware because there have been advances in both technology and threats since it was last done. Yes there will be some expense and yes there may be some downtime but if your I.T. provider has any kind of credibility they’ll be making these recommendations because you need them. You as the customer have the right, and the responsibility, to ask ‘what happens if we don’t?’. When you weigh up the cost of upgrading, against the potential loss if you don’t, 99 times out of 100 it will be a no-brainer decision.
The relationship between business and I.T. should be just that, a relationship. A good I.T. company will know your business, what you use, what you need and how you do it. They’ll monitor your systems, see where the slack and strain is and adjust accordingly… You’ll get a tailored experience because no two businesses are identical. A good business will listen to their I.T. because ultimately everyone benefits.
