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As a result of the ever-growing sophistication, capacity and power of IT, the necessity of managing it sensibly and professionally has become vital. The level of expertise involved in this management has also increased dramatically to such an extent that it is unreasonable to expect people who do not specialise in IT management to perform it. It is therefore imperative that any company making extensive use of IT either has specialised IT staff or has access to such specialised staff to assist it in the management of the company’s IT and to offer support and assistance to both management and end-users.
The primary focus of IT management is to pro-actively ensure the adherence to standards, policies and procedures to ensure reliability, accessibility and serviceability of the company’s IT infrastructure. It must therefore be differentiated from IT support which is a reactive service attending to situations that have already occurred and have already negatively impacted on productivity. While the need for IT support will probably never be completely eliminated, it is a fact that effective IT management dramatically decreases the requirement for IT support and also dramatically decreases the associated cost to loss of productivity.
IT management aims to establish and maintain strict policies with regard to the implementation and usage of IT, which in turn leads to the creation of a stable, predictable and reliable IT environment within which users may perform their tasks and, in so doing, contribute to the achievement of the company’s
The associated prohibitive cost of establishing an IT department consisting of an IT Manager and supporting technical staff makes the implementation of such a department impossible for any small to medium enterprise.
What most small to medium enterprises end up doing is to use the services of individuals in the enterprise that seem to be knowledgeable regarding computers, but soon realise that this approach soon leads to chaos because of lack of knowledge on the part of the employee. This is due to no fault on the part of the employee, but rather a failure on the part of the employer as the employee was not originally employed for this purpose.
If the enterprise however decides to employ a support technician, management soon find that the technicians’ skills are very different to that of a true IT manager. IT Management is a pro-active planned, approach to support the enterprise core functions and these skills are acquired only through experience, training and knowledge of this specific field of expertise witch makes these skills expensive to acquire in the enterprise.
When outside help is attained, the approach is to use suppliers of different services on an ad-hoc basis. This leads to a fragmented service and suppliers pointing to one another’s service as the problem when IT related issues arise. Often these suppliers will give conflicting advice on what will resolve a specific problem. This leads to the loss of confidence in the quality of service that is being rendered by all parties and a loss of confidence by staff in the equipment that they use every day to serve the enterprises goals.
The formulation of a cohesive strategy aimed at attaining a holistic, well-informed and well-managed approach to the utilisation of the company’s IT resources needs urgent attention. The hidden costs of entrusting the management of a strategic resource to inexperienced individuals, with the associated potential for irrecoverable data disasters, justifies a serious consideration to outsourcing the IT management service to ensure an efficient and reliable IT system.
As outsourced IT management service providers does not rely on a sole income from one enterprise, costs can be spread between enterprises while all benefit from the expertise.
TLS IT Solutions offers such a service and the details can be fully discussed and agreements made at a proposed meeting.