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Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, IT Strategy (30-slide PowerPoint presentation). The key drivers of Information Technology (IT) or Management Information Systems (MIS) value are an organization's IT mindset and its ability to execute. Today’s best practices show that IT value can be maximized when enterprise IT investments are aligned with business goals and IT execution is [read more]
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If you are a growing business that is dependent upon your IT systems, then in all probability, you’ll be faced with situations when you need some sort of support. You can either have a small in-house support team to take care of any IT issues or opt for an outsourced on-demand IT support service. Which option will work better for you? This article will give you a clearer picture.
Having an in-house IT support team gives you the benefit of building a core support team with specialist and in-depth knowledge of your organization’s IT setup and systems. If they are on-site, they’ll be able to step in quickly to resolve any IT issues. This can be really valuable in cases like security breaches of your IT systems.
However, there are a few disadvantages of such an approach. These are:
1) High costs
You’ll have to incur recruitment fees, annual salaries, and training costs for your support team. While this may be worthwhile if you face very high-volume support requests from your users daily, in reality, mission-critical support requests may not be very frequent. As a result, your overall expenditure on maintaining an on-site support team may be quite high, not to mention the HR policies that you’ll need to maintain for them.
2) Lack of availability
If you have a small IT support team consisting of one or two people, then you may be in a fix in case someone falls ill or is on vacation. In such a scenario, what will you do if you are faced with a critical support issue? Also, if you have an in-house support team, will they cover issues outside regular office hours? Expecting a small IT support team to be available 24x7x365 is not realistic.
Opting to go for an on-demand IT support service, such as the services offered by this company providing IT support in San Diego, has many advantages. Some of these are:
1) Reduced costs
As a business, you won’t need to keep a full-time IT support team on your payroll. With an outsourced IT support team, you’ll need to pay them only when you need them. Consequently, your overall IT costs will come down.
2) Get access to flexibility
If you have a constantly growing company, you may not be able to predict what sort of IT support you may need in the future. An on-demand IT support team will let you choose the IT services you need as and when the requirement arises. As a result, you don’t have to constantly invest in upgrading an in-house support team’s IT knowledge.
3) Get support every day, throughout the year
With an on-demand IT support team, you can access support 24x7x365 as and when you need it. You don’t need to factor in holidays or illnesses. In fact, the majority of IT support services will be available even outside of regular working hours.
4) Get access to experienced resources
By utilizing an on-demand IT support team, you’ll get access to experienced resources at a much lower cost than having full-time in-house IT support staff. You don’t need to invest time and money in developing an in-house IT support team. Instead, you can benefit from the knowledge, experience, and skill-set of an on-demand IT support team.
5) Freedom to focus on your core business expertise
If you don’t have to think about staffing or managing an in-house IT support team, you will be able to focus on running your business. After all, the more you can focus on generating revenue, the better your company can grow. An on-demand IT support team will free you to focus on making your business more productive.
You can download in-depth presentations on MIS and 100s of management topics from the FlevyPro Library. FlevyPro is trusted and utilized by 1000s of management consultants and corporate executives.
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These best practices are of the same as those leveraged by top-tier management consulting firms, like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and Accenture. Improve the growth and efficiency of your organization by utilizing these best practice frameworks, templates, and tools. Most were developed by seasoned executives and consultants with over 20+ years of experience.
