IT Support: money for old rope?

Paying for IT Support is like paying for garage services, or an electrician.  It's magic, you don't understand it, and there is the potential for you to be charged for things you didn't need.  So how do you make sure you're getting value for money? 

Buying IT Support

1. Stabilise your network.  Before investing in an IT Support service, get your network stabilised.  A ‘one off’ network audit/health check and resolution of all current issues will pay back within a year.
2. Measure your demand.  Monitor how many technical problems you have (whether user problems or actual system failures) over a fixed period of at least a month.  Decide how important each system is, and what the impact of a system failure would be.
3. Fix your budget.  At the moment this will be a ball park, and defined mostly by existing expenditure or cash flow restrictions.
4. Tender.  Clearly state what service you are looking for, the number and type of systems and the necessary response/fix times as appropriate.  Use your contacts to get recommendations, and Google to identify potential suppliers.  Ask for and talk to reference customers, and check the contract thoroughly to make sure the service is clearly defined.
5. Monitor.  Make sure any ‘SLA’ or response time  in the contract is adhered to.  Talk to your staff to see if they feel the supplier is responsive and helpful.  If the company doesn’t perform, use the contract as leverage to make sure they do; and don’t be afraid to drop a poorly performing supplier.

Caveats

1. Avoid up-selling.  Ideally, separate your IT Support supplier and IT Hardware/Software supplier to avoid the potential for ‘up-selling’ you hardware on the back of a system failure.
2. Buy hardware with a manufacturers 3 year warranty, fixing your hardware support costs for three years.  All you should pay for now is small labour charges per fault.
3. Only pay once.  If you are paying a charge per call (or per visit), and a problem recurs, say when you report it the second time that you’ve already paid for this to be fixed once, and you don’t expect to pay again unless you caused it to recur.
4. Charges for anti-virus definition and patch updates.  Some things shouldn’t be charged for, and anti-virus definition updates and Microsoft patches are two examples.  Both are built into the respective software, and designed to run without intervention, so don’t pay a company to do this for you every month.

Follow these steps, you should find your IT Support provider is a real asset to your company, rather than a drain on your budget!