Fire Your IT Staff and Hire an IT Consultant

I have been work­ing in the Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy field since 2001, back when an A+ Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion still had a hint of mean­ing. I left the cor­po­rate IT world three years ago, because from a busi­ness stand­point hav­ing on-site IT staff seemed rather use­less. I would not apply this prin­ci­ple across the board, but I would take a good look at my IT depart­ment and refine our IT processes.

Out of a team of five peo­ple, you are pos­si­bly get­ting 20 hours of pro­duc­tiv­ity from each per­son every week. So if a staffer takes home $600/wk, they have really com­pleted about $300 worth of work.

Keep­ing IT Staff On-Site is Expensive

How much do you pay for one com­puter tech­ni­cian to stay at the office for 40hrs every week? How much do you pay for his ben­e­fits pack­age? How much do you pay to pro­vide heat and elec­tric­ity to his work space? What about his lap­top, black­berry, soft­ware, and repair tool? How much did you pay Mon­ster, Craigslist, and Career­Builder to adver­tise the oping posi­tion he filled, and how much did you pay your HR depart­ment to find “The One.”

The aver­age is $50,000/year, but it can eas­ily spike past $100,000 for senior levels.

Tech­nol­ogy has elim­i­nated the Need for On-Site Staff

Did you know that if you review the way you look at IT you could go from a staff of 10 or 20 down to 1 man­ager. And save on util­i­ties, equip­ment, and etc in the process?

Con­sider cloud com­put­ing, more reli­able soft­ware and oper­at­ing sys­tems, on-site war­ranties offered with the leas­ing and pur­chas­ing of equip­ment, and it becomes clear that you might already be pay­ing an IT per­son $60,000/yr to sit at the desk and look busy.

IT Con­sult­ing Groups are Effi­cient, Which Saves You Money

A good con­sul­tancy group is effi­cient off the bat, because all of that employee paper­work and resources are free for other uses. You no longer pay for IT man­age­ment technology.

Con­sider us. We pro­vide off site servers that serve mul­ti­ple pur­chases, inte­grate war­ranty into the lease or pur­chase price of the equip­ment, off­set the cost of remote backup and repair ser­vices, so in essence our cus­tomers do not think of IT any­more, which is the direc­tion you should be head­ing in. Where as your IT depart­ment brings this to your atten­tion on a daily bases.

The day of on site IT is over, and if small and mid-sized busi­ness endure another dip in the econ­omy you will see how expend­able that depart­ment really is. IT is one of those if busi­ness is run­ning right I’ll keep them sort of depart­ments. But if things get tight I’ll research and tighten up processes to cut the staff in half, and then cut it in half again.

Nobody likes to see IT Con­sul­tants com­ing in, because the ax usu­ally doesn’t fall far from the tree, but if com­pa­nies become effi­cient with tech­nolo­gies they can stay afloat longer.

But hey I’m an IT Con­sul­tant, what do I know? Ask your­self is my IT man­ager, or his staff mak­ing sug­ges­tions to save the com­pany money and be more effi­cient? No, I didn’t think so. That is the major dif­fer­ence, as a con­sul­tant my sole job is to think of how to be effi­cient, the more money I save a com­pany the more I am needed. The more cost sav­ing prob­lems I solve the more I am loved, and we all could use a lit­tle love now and then, not to men­tion extra money.

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http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/162868/save_with_an_online_exchange_server.html