Sadly, nine out of 10 IT outsourcers only ever audit your equipment, and never your business
This article focuses on the frustrations of three real clients, now onboard with Bedroq, and the lessons they’ve learnt in their desire to make sure their team get excellent IT service. Our collective experience has given us insights into hundreds of different types of business, and we recognise that on the whole, IT outsourcers let their clients down in three ways…
- They fail to deliver even basic end-user support
- They don’t provide strategic advice in line with specific business goals
- They aren’t aligned when it comes to helping you get the best return on every pound you spend on IT. In fact, they aren’t even on the same planet
So how do you make sure this doesn’t happen in your business?
In this article we will set out three golden rules you should follow, to ensure your internal users get excellent quality of service from IT.
Rule 1: Make sure your IT provider knows how your people work
Not every business works in the same way, taking the time to understand your business processes and team objectives is critical. Sadly, nine out of 10 providers only ever audit your systems and never your processes or team objectives.
“Over the years I got increasingly more frustrated with IT outsourcers not understanding my business. I was always getting dragged into making decisions based on my understanding of the business and how we use technology rather than getting on with my day job.”
“Until I signed with Bedroq, most of our frustrations came from our outsourced partners not understanding our business. We needed a partner that understands how we use our systems and networks and the importance of them in doing our job and build a shared language and common understanding”.
Group CTO, 300-user global professional services business. (Number of IT outsourcers he’s worked with in the last five years, two!)
Rule 2: Make sure your IT provider focusses on how to make your team more productive
Sometimes it is the little things that have a major impact on someone’s ability to do their job. Little things can quickly turn into significant bugbears because they never go away. These are the kind of disruptive problems that users get fed up chasing and just live with. Do not stand for “learned helplessness”
“When I disconnected my laptop from the docking station Microsoft Outlook always just stopped, and I either I had to close down and restart Outlook or sometimes restart the laptop.” “Three times they told me they’d fixed it, but they hadn’t because the next time I’d undock the problem was still there.”
Finance Director, sales and marketing (Number of IT outsourcers they’ve used over the last five years, three!)
Rule 3: Make sure your IT provider communicates, communicates and then communicates some more
One frustrated IT manager was constantly chasing for updates on issues. Every three to six months, Exchange was going offline and for over a year, the business was experiencing an issue where it took up to ten minutes to log into Active Directory. Problems happen and things go wrong, but most people can live with that if they understand the timeframe and process for putting things right. The lack of communication was a big problem for this individual because it consumed a lot of his time simply chasing ticket updates.
“Everybody told me these were not particularly complex problems, but we continued to suffer from them, and our frustration was compounded by the fact there was very little communication of what they were doing to fix them and by when”
IT Manager, private equity (Number of IT outsourcers he’s used over the last three years, one – just increased to two!)
How do you make sure you don’t experience these issues in your business?
The big question is – why do so many traditional IT outsourcers continue to fail their customers when it comes to delivering the basics? None of the issues discussed above are rocket science, they should be fixed quickly, and if your outsourcer doesn’t have the skills in-house, they should bite the bullet and buy the skills in to fix them.
Just like a good football referee, the IT service provided by your outsourcer should be invisible to your organisation – keeping the lights on just happens, but when things go wrong users get their issues resolved quickly.
Fundamental to excellent Service Management is mindset. Specifically, everyone in your outsourcer’s service desk team should know your business and see their role as helping you meet your business objectives. Here is a little tester for you – the next time you bump into one of their engineers ask them what their responsibilities are. If they respond with to “fix stuff” you know you are in trouble.
So in summary, the key piece of advice
Get your outsourcer to meet with each department to understand what they do, how they do it, and who their internal and external customers are. Once they understand the business at a high level, they can document all the technology behind it. Only then will they know how much of a priority your systems are and the impact on specific teams and the bottom line if they are offline.
How to improve your IT performance?
We see ourselves as an IT Performance Management business, we review the current performance of IT in our clients’ businesses and provide clear steps to improve it. Quality of Service is just one of the Seven Rocks we believe are fundamental to having a robust technology framework. If you’re in any doubt as to the quality of service you are getting from your current provider, let us run a short diagnostic to identify areas of improvement.
Get in touch with Mark Flynn, [email protected]; 07948 611697