Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

IT – Evaluating your options

David Grenda, founder, Grenda Computer Consulting
Part 2 in a series or articles on IT and Small Business.

In this installment, I’d like to discuss approaching support options that are available to you as a business owner. Since many of you reading this have probably had the same thought at this moment, I’ll get something out of the way for you now. The cost of computers and the expertise to support them is real and sometimes substantial. You are going to have to pay the cost of support one way or another. Believe me when I say that a proactive approach is much better for your business than a reactive one. I have seen more than one client pay thousands of dollars in time and effort making up for completely preventable loss of company data in a computer crash.

The level of support you need is obviously in proportion to the complexity of your computing environment. If your environment is very simple and you are comfortable with the basics, you can probably handle things yourself. However, the danger here is that your computing environment’s potential to help your productivity will always remain at the level of your comfort to manage it. Even a single computer has capabilities to manage information that most people never recognize.

Since by far most businesses are outside the do-it-yourself arena, the subject now becomes which support option is right for you. In the broadest sense, the options begin at the question “In House? Or Outsourced?”.  It may seem like a fairly easy question to answer as you think about your own situation, but it’s not always based on the size of your business alone. In the next couple of installments, I’ll discuss the pros and cons of each approach.

Here’s something to remember. Each business computing environment is different. Each environment has unique technical issues, user issues, management constraint issues, etc. Therefore the evaluation of support options involves much more than skill and cost. The support provider will gain a unique insight into the depths of your business information processing. They will ideally become expert in the nuances of your particular environment.  This is something you want. When you have a serious IT support issue, the last thing you need is a trans-Atlantic voice you can barely understand asking you scripted questions. We’ve all been there. You want someone who is going to know you and your environment.

Posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Business, Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.