December 8, 2011
A year ago, I made a commitment as CIO to outsource some of our IT services. Yes, a technology company is outsourcing technology. Why? While it may sound crazy, I have found that it is far better use of our resources.
Instead of our Information Services professionals being bogged down by daily troubleshooting of employee issues, they can dedicate time to strategy and key projects. We achieve more as a team and it costs the same – or less.
Now, our employees have one phone number to call to access a Help Desk with a team of skilled technicians. It’s known as Managed IT Services. While it’s not a new concept, it’s grown in popularity in the past year.
Increased Adoption
The economic downturn put a spotlight on Managed IT Services and increased adoption across the business spectrum. Since its inception, small and medium size businesses that often do not have IS teams have seen the benefit of having the technical expertise that Managed IT Services provide. However, tight economic times also have sped adoption among larger enterprises that traditionally hire new staff as needed.
That is the case for Marco. While our company and users have grown significantly over the past 18 months, we have not hired any additional staff to troubleshoot issues or manage the IT experience for employees. We rely on Managed IT Services.
Our company pays Marco to provide the services – just like any other company would. Now, the Managed Services Help Desk manages the 300-plus tickets issued a month on average by Marco’s 425 users. Here are just five of the results we see by outsourcing our internal Help Desk:
1. Control Costs.
By using Managed IT Services, we avoid the costs and time of onboarding new employees to provide Help Desk support for our employees. When we do hire IS staff, we expand our team with advanced positions that focus on rolling out key company initiatives or providing specialized expertise.
I’ve seen a bottom line difference and I know we’re not alone. A recent study found that 46 percent of responding firms reduced their annual IT expenditures by 25 percent or more as a result of their shift to managed services, according to CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry. The study found that some companies (13 percent) cut their annual IT costs by 50 percent or more.
2. Focus on Strategy.
Allowing staff to focus on strategic initiatives also provides bottom line benefits. More than half of firms that responded to the CompTIA study pointed to freeing up their internal IT staff to work on projects as a major reason for contracting with a Managed Services Provider. That is the case for Marco. In the next year, that will deliver tangible results, including a PLS rollout, Exchange 2010 server upgrade and ConnectWise billing system implementation.
3. Fewer Slowdowns.
Through Managed IT Services, IT professionals proactively monitor our company’s IT infrastructure remotely, and identify any issues early and fix them – often before we even know there is a problem. Automatic triggers that range from low toner cartridges to dwindling disk space to a potential server failure are set up. Once any of the items reaches the predetermined threshold, the Managed IT professional makes the necessary adjustment before we ever face damaging downtime and lost productivity.
4. Improved Turnaround: When issues do arise, our employees get connected to a Help Desk technician faster and get their problem solved. Employees have one number to call and an advanced ticketing system tracks the resolution.
5. Better Reporting: As a Managed IT Services customer, we can see how many tickets are issued by our users, what they involved and how fast they were resolved. We also can use the advanced ticketing system from Managed IT Services to determine which issues we would like our internal team to handle and which tickets we pass along to the outsourced Help Desk.
As a CIO, I have not found a better solution to effectively manage our employees’ IT experience and allow our company to identify opportunities to leverage technology to improve our operations. I expect an increasing number of organizations – large and small – will use Managed IT Services in the next year to achieve cost savings and increase efficiencies.
