Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Outsourcing versus In-House – Intro. to Series

David Grenda, founder, Grenda Computer Consulting

Introduction to series on IT.

I followed my father Emil Grenda’s footsteps into my career in IT. He is from the generation of folks that put a man on the moon mostly with slide-rules and chalk boards. He told me when I was starting out that if someone with gray hair took the time to tell me something, I should take the time to listen.

Having dispensed a fair amount of my own gray haired advice on IT now, I’ve watched the evolution of business computing from the onset of the PC. It’s been at times a dismaying story. If I could choose one piece of advice above all others to impart to a business owner, it would be this: Get qualified IT support, don’t try to handle this yourself.

Today’s business computing involves a multitude of facets from the hardware and software, to network and internet issues, to threat protection and data security. I can’t count how many clients I have been involved with after they have had a well meaning friend or relative “help them with their computers”. Sometimes worse are the clients who have had an IT expert come to help them and then leave, only for them to discover they have inherited a non-standard mess of support solutions.

In my next few installments, I will examine the issues facing business owners in getting qualified IT support. I will discuss the various options that are available and how to implement them in the most productive manner. I will address such issues as how to evaluate your enterprise to determine what level of support you need, where to get it, how to structure the arrangement, what IT related support issues are important, and which ones are designed to sound important but do very little. I will cover topics that apply to everyone from a sole proprietor to the Fortune 500 executive.

In the end, you will be able to implement an IT support structure for your organization that will keep you running smoothly. You can spend more time on your business and less worrying about your technology.

Posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 9:14 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.