As your business grows, you’re going to be busy; hiring new employees, making sure that your business processes scale and your costs don’t grow faster than your profits. It’s also time to start thinking about your IT in a different way.
Instead of needing someone to make sure the PCs in the office work, it’s important to think strategically about technology and how it can add value to your business – without IT worries taking over the time you should be using to run your business.
But as IT gets more complex, the skills involved become more specialised, and thus more expensive. From having someone whose main job is simply keeping a few desktop computers running, you move to needing someone with an understanding of infrastructure, servers, email and more. This is where it becomes complicated.
Value Added Services
From servers and storage, to mobile working technologies or perhaps document management systems, deciding what’s right for your business can be a daunting task. But depending on how large you expect your business to become, it may not be worth hiring someone with that level of expertise full time. That’s where outsourcing can bring real business benefits.
While it is common for businesses to sign up with a third party to support the IT you already have, it usually makes more sense to outsource strategy as well as maintenance to one supplier to take full advantage of their expertise.
Outsourcing packages are a great way to control your IT whilst also helping to keep costs under control. The availability of fixed price contracts allow you to budget your IT spend throughout the year, without any hidden extras or surprises along the way. Plus, as you are outsourcing to experts, you are buying into a proven track record and a service level agreement.
It also means that with a combined IT support package, you can rely on the constant care from someone at the other end of the phone 24/7. Giving your IT team less to worry about and leaving you with more time to concentrate on your business.
Alternatives
But it doesn’t have to be a clear-cut one or the other scenario. A move to cloud computing can be a great halfway house that allows you to manage your IT systems in-house, without all the costs of supporting each individual piece of software.
As applications are accessed over the internet and managed by service provider, you don’t need to employ a dedicated team of IT support staff to handle any problems. Everything is fixed off site, keeping downtime, and stress, to a minimum.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a great example of how working in the cloud can help you keep your costs down. Instead of running a customer database in-house, an external company can manage it for you. By keeping your systems updated regularly, data can be managed and stored, giving you maximum productivity in-house without additional spending.
And, because the services are hosted by the company supplying them, this gives your businesses greater flexibility and control over which pieces of software you use, and when. Then, if your business grows or your circumstances change, you can expand, or cut, your usage to match, on a cost per use basis.
Your business decision
The right mix of what technology to run in house, which to put in the cloud and which to outsource will vary for every business depending on what IT systems you already have (and how well they work), how complex your processes are and how much customisation it takes to deliver what your business needs.
Taking the time to get your IT right will give you happier, more productive staff with access to the information and tools they need to do their job better when and where they need it. What you save on supporting out-of-date systems, you can spend on what you really want to be doing; innovating and growing your business.
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