You are faced with the critical choice shared by business owners everywhere -- should you replace your in-house IT support solution with an outsourcer? They seem cheaper -- some charging only a few hundred dollars a month. They offer a wide variety of experts and promise very low response and resolution times. What's the catch?
In order to understand the differences between in-house and outsourced IT support let's try to look at your business activities through a kaleidoscope with several key component parts:
Performance
Scalability
Extensibility
Availability
Security
The only businesses that are honestly not using computing systems in some capacity are those that are consciously trying to avoid doing so. It is simply too tempting to use your cell phone to store contacts for instance, a desktop spreadsheet to compute sales figures, etc. etc. This means that your business is using computing. Computers, a bit like people, have needs. They need to be secured with passwords, kept clean from viruses, and user accounts should be kept up to date (Security); you need to know that they'll be there when you need them (Availability); you need to know that they can handle a lot more data and/or new functionality than they currently support in case your business increases (Extensibility); for the same reason as extensibility you'll need to be sure your applications can handle many more users reliably (Scalability). Finally, it helps that these machines and the software you'll be running on them are performing well (Performance).
Both in-house and outsourced IT should be using some form of help desk support software that creates tickets. Measuring the response time as well as total time the ticket is open are important measurements that are most often cited in outsourcing firm marketing materials. These sport promises of 15 or so minutes before a response and resolutions typically under 120 minutes. This is the first place to look for actual data regarding your IT support infrastructure. If you already have internal IT staff but are not using a ticketing system it is important for you to obtain and use one for a month or so and then revisit IT outsourcing question at that time. It is better to have data and not use it than to go without data to perform a comparison between the two support options.
Low response and resolution times can be very misleading. A wily third-party provider might lean you toward solutions that they are familiar with to maintain these numbers even if they are not right for your business. Also, your provider might purposefully avoid taking on difficult problems to maintain those numbers. One of the biggest sources of confusion regarding in-house and external IT support metrics boils down to the special projects problem: businesses have a tendency to give their in-house staff project work on top of support work (but calculate it all as support). This skews the internal metrics because projects take significantly longer than routine activities like account creation or software installation for instance.
Your in-house staff will understand your IT infrastructure at a level that will likely never be fully understood by any outsourcer. Next, in-house staff understand your corporate strategy and future direction of the business. Your outsourced support are mainly interested in solving your problems quickly. This can be compared to the difference between short-term and long-term memory. The fore can be highly effective but cannot be relied upon to make really big decisions.
After reading this piece you may be arriving at the conclusion that you need some form of sustained support (typically satisfied by hiring someone in-house) and outsourced IT and that would be the intended conclusion of this article. The problem arises when you cannot afford both OR when you are very new to IT support in general. In this case you should go with an IT support firm that will assign a dedicated account representative to your business that will fill the gaps that an in-house professional is meant to provide. This individual will be happy to set up your ticketing system and help guide your business to understand key terms, concepts, and information technology needs of a growing business all while keeping a sharp eye on response and resolution time metrics.
Let's recap. The first step in your business is to identify where you are actually using information technology. This means you'll have to track down where data is coming from and where it is being stored. This includes your employees and principals' smartphones; even the corporate fax machine. Once you have identified where it is all coming from look through your kaleidoscope and ask yourself whether the tools and equipment you are using meet up with your expectations in these areas. This is a good place to seek help from ForwardPhase Technologies (contact sales@forwardphase.com).
If you do not have any IT support you should contact ForwardPhase to help you set up an interim Help Desk software solution and start tracking your issues. We will help you differentiate between project and support work so that you can ensure that your metrics are comparing apples to apples.
Completely replacing your in-house IT staff with a cheaper outsourcer will likely provide exciting short-term benefits but will eventually start to cost you more as your business progresses for the same reason that as an individual you cannot rely purely on short term memory. One outsourcing vendor asked customers to divide the number of tickets by the amount they pay their in-house professionals to satisfy their claim of being the superior solution. But this completely misses the value of the knowledge about your systems that can only be acquired over time and the benefit of a deep understanding of your overall corporate vision. A honest review of your metrics will likely indicate that your existing provider (if you have one) should be reassigned from routine tasks to project work and to establishing and maintaining key IT vendor relations.