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Brendan advises businesses on how to effectively use technology to increase their company’s efficiency, profitability and security. Brendan is focused on:

1. Making IT systems work2. Ensuring businesses have

fast/effective support3. Providing top notch advice on

technology

Connect with me:Twitter: @BrendanHoweLinkedIn: ca.linkedin.com/in/brendanhoweTDCNet blog: http://itsupportblog.tdcnet.ca

About the Author:Brendan HowePresident & CEO, TDCNet Inc.

The Big Question………..……………………....…4

Benefit #1: Things Work Better………………..6

Benefit #2: Faster, More Effective Support ……………………………………………………...…....8

Benefit #3: Better Advice………..……….…….11

Benefit #4: Eliminate HR Issues………..…….13

Benefit #5: Save Money..………..……….…….14

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Should you outsource your IT support or have it in-house? That’s a question businesses ask all the time.

If you are running a business (or not-for-profit organization) that is growing, one of the areas that can be a roadblock to your success is technology. The way you did things in the past is likely not going to get you to where you want to go.

As any organization grows, it discovers things that are not that scalable and need to change. How your IT systems are managed and supported usually falls into this category.

In-House or Outsource:The Big IT Question

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We have countless examples of businesses where they grow to a certain point and then all of a sudden they start experiencing regular computer problems. Common symptoms are:

• Systems go down regularly

• Staff complain about things being slow or frequent problems when they work

• Support is slow and ineffective

• Management has little faith in backup and disaster recovery systems

• Lack of strong advice about technology delays upgrade decisions or leads to poor ones

If you are a senior executive dealing with any of the above, you probably know you need to make a change. However it is a big decision whether to outsource or have an in-house person manage your IT systems.

There are five main benefits to bringing in an outside team to manage and support your network.

5 WAYS IT OUTSOURCING CAN BOOST PRODUCTIVITY & SAVE MONEY

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Don’t we all just want our stupid computers to just work? I know I just want to turn mine on and get my work done without error messages, crashing or slowness.

Internal IT staff usually don’t have the resources to make your servers, network and computers work reliably. Often an internal IT person will spend most of their day firefighting issues that come up and that prevents them from doing the critical proactive work to prevent problems.

Benefit #1:Things Work Better

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A strong external team will use advanced remote monitoring and management systems that have extensive automation to prevent problems. Things like Windows updates and security patches are managed centrally and done in the middle of the night to prevent problems.

An outside team will perform other regular maintenance on computer systems to speed them up and implement best practices in areas such as backup and disaster recovery to ensure your data is properly protected.

The net result is that you experience fewer IT problems, staff members are more productive and morale is improved.

5 WAYS IT OUTSOURCING CAN BOOST PRODUCTIVITY & SAVE MONEY

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Bringing in an outside team isn’t going to prevent all computer problems. There will always be a need for some support. As any company grows, there are more requests that come in for new user setups, computer upgrades and day-to-day problems such as hardware failures or software issues.

Benefit #2:Faster and More Effective Support

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Over the last 12 months, the TDCNet Help Desk has handled 10,380 support requests with an average response time of under an hour.

When you have an internal person they can handle some of these requests, but what happens if two people have an issue at the same time? Your internal person is also unlikely to have expertise across all platforms and the experience dealing with a wide variety of issues.

An outside team can give you a Help Desk that normally only a big business would be able to afford. You get access to multiple technical staff with various levels of experience to better support your needs.

5 WAYS IT OUTSOURCING CAN BOOST PRODUCTIVITY & SAVE MONEY

Source: TDCNet PSA system, November 2013

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The result here is your colleagues spend less time dealing with computer problems and are able to deal with IT issues quickly and effectively, instead of them becoming a major roadblock.

5 WAYS IT OUTSOURCING CAN BOOST PRODUCTIVITY & SAVE MONEY

It can be a transition for many businesses to move to receiving support remotely but they frequently find out it’s as effective (and in some cases faster) than getting onsite support. And any outside team will also have people that can come onsite when issues require it.

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There are both hard costs and soft costs associated with a full-time IT person.”

Benefit #3:Better Advice

Business owners and senior executives are always looking for strong advice. You are an expert in your industry, but you are not a legal expert so you have a lawyer. You are probably not a tax expert, so you have a chartered accountant.

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5 WAYS IT OUTSOURCING CAN BOOST PRODUCTIVITY & SAVE MONEY

The same goes with your IT systems. You wouldn’t have the legal assistant at the law firm you work with give you advice on a big contract or acquisition yet many businesses do the equivalent with their IT. They have the same guy fixing basic computer problems that gives advice on an IT plan that is supposed to support business growth.

Bringing in an outsourced IT team will give you resources to senior-level people to guide your technology decision-making based on best practices and experience working with many companies. This advice will give you the confidence you are making the right decisions to keep up with where technology is going and prevent your systems from being obsolete two years from now.

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We ALL know about HR issues. Staff calling in sick, showing up late or having poor performance. For any member of staff, you are responsible for training, performance reviews and raises. When you have a single IT person, vacation time becomes a huge problem because when they are off, who looks after the computer systems?

Imagine never having to deal with HR issues? When you outsource your IT, you at least eliminate that from your day. You don’t have to worry about training, vacation, advancement, sick time or any of the 100 other things that come with managing people.

You can just focus your energy on other areas of your business!

Benefit #4:Eliminate HR Issues

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Benefit #5:Save Money

Last but DEFINITELY not least, there is a big opportunity to save money outsourcing your IT both in terms of hard costs and soft costs.

The table below shows the average hard costs of hiring an IT person in the Greater Toronto Area – it’s almost $80,000 per year!

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Item Cost

Salary $65,000

CPP – employer contribution $2,356.20

EI – employer contribution $1,247.57

Employer Health Tax (EHT) $1,267.50

Vacation Pay $2,600

Employee Benefits* $3,211

Training** $2,703

Total$78,385.27

* The Conference Board of Canada puts the cost of employee benefits at 4.94% of gross salary. That includes extended health care, dental plan, life and accident insurance, disability and casual absence or sick days.** The Canadian Federation of Independent Business found the average small and mid-size business spends $2,703 on training per employee per year (Canada’s Training Ground study, 2009).

Many people expect that if they have an internal IT person on staff issues will be dealt with faster and things will be more efficient as a result. The opposite is usually the case. This person ends up getting pulled in so many directions between systems administration, executive-level support, user support, planning meetings, purchasing, vendor management and anything else technical anyone thinks of.

The result is response times are slow and because they are spending their days fighting fires, systems administration of your network starts to get neglected. That leads to more problems and your team being less efficient because they are dealing with computer problems. It can also lead to increased downtime and business risk if your backups are not being managed properly.

5 WAYS IT OUTSOURCING CAN BOOST PRODUCTIVITY & SAVE MONEY

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Here are some of costs of computer problems to your business:

If the average salary of a member of your team is $50,000 per year, that breaks down to roughly $25/hour. When you add employment costs (usually about 20%) that leads to an average burdened cost per employee of $30/hour.

At a 50 person company where everyone deals with one computer issue a month where they lose an hour of productivity, the cost to that company would be $1,500 per month.

If you had two hours of downtime company-wide a month because systems administration was being done poorly, that would cost you an additional $3,000 per month.

So if you have an internal IT person, their direct cost is close to $80,000 per year and the associated costs of this approach would be a further $54,000 per year.

By hiring a single IT person to manage all the IT balls you have up in the air, you are frequently setting them up for failure and in this example the true cost would be $134,000 per year.

That doesn’t include the effect frequent computer issues and downtime have on morale or the stress and aggravation they cause your team.

5 WAYS IT OUTSOURCING CAN BOOST PRODUCTIVITY & SAVE MONEY

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If you’re interested in outsourcing your IT support, click the link above to request your free network audit. We’ll take a detailed look at your systems and develop a FREE IT plan.

FREE NETWORK AUDIT AND IT PLANhttp://www.tdcnet.ca


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