This month, I wanted to share two actual events that took place. All names have been changed to protect the innocent…

Joe is a prospect like many others. He is running a mature, service-based business with 20 employees out of a single office. All of the computers are older, and the servers are about six years old. Joe is very “techie” but is tired of having to deal with all the internal IT issues that keep coming up. Overall, however, he says things are working great.

We come in and perform our assessment and report back to Joe that all the equipment is out-of-warranty, and this can lead to issues when having to “work on” machines all the time. Specifically, the server that was cobbled and held together for the past three years needs to be replaced. We let Joe know we would be happy to take over the responsibilities of monitoring, supporting, and managing all of their business technology needs, BUT this server thing must get fixed first.

Joe says he understands and will get back to us, “that’s a lot of money, you know, and don’t think the servers need replacing”. We give Joe that meaningful nod and know he will be back to talk one day. “One day” comes a month later. Joe is in a panic. The server has gone down, and it’s not coming back up. We hear something about failing hardware, no warranty, and lost data…pretty sure we covered this already.

Fortunately, we had already put together an On-Boarding project as part of our Assessment so all Joe had to do was sign-off on this, cut the check and then wait for the server to show up! We ran over and got him working that day, but the impact to his business could have been completely avoided.

Technology Reality Check: Computer equipment needs regular replacement. It’s designed with a limited useful life and will quit working, typically at the worst possible time.

Now we move on to Jim, CEO of a large organization with 200 computers and about 14 locations. We call on Jim and he states with supreme confidence, “we have an IT guy here and are very happy with him”. We attempt to explain to Jim that we in no way want to alter his “happiness” level, but perhaps we could perform an assessment of how everything is going there and report back to him just to make sure there isn’t something we may be able to do better or differently. Jim hangs up…

Here is what I know that Jim doesn’t: there is no way in the world an organization of that size can be supported CONSISTENTLY and RELIABLILY with one person. This is not a knock against the individual, it’s just that the role cannot possibly be filled by a single person, or two, or three…what is happening is one of two things:

THING ONE: The single, internal IT guy is overworked, underpaid, and most likely looking for a new job or raise.

THING TWO: The single, internal IT guy is overworked, overpaid, and most likely looking to hire in additional help or find a new job.

Notice there isn’t a scenario where the “happiness” of the CEO stays where it is. Either he starts paying out more money in IT staffing costs, which we don’t recommend, OR he ends up with his ONLY IT resource finding a new job and leaving him with the very UN-happy situation of finding someone to take his place while his organization has zero IT support.

The call came in two days ago. Here’s how the conversation went:

“We need a bid on what it would cost for Stringfellow to run all our IT.”

“Great,” we say, “we can schedule an assessment next week and then get you something the following week.”

“No good,” they say, “our IT guy’s last day is Friday. He’s found a job paying twice what we pay on a large corporate helpdesk.” Guess now isn’t the time to tell them, “we told you so…”

Technology Reality Check: Your internal IT staff, if they are competent, will leave every 18 months or so. It doesn’t matter how nice you are to them, if they are good the demand for these professionals is too high to pay them enough to stay. Outsourcing these functions is the only way to ensure long-term stability and success for your internal IT operations for businesses with less than 250 employees.