IT Support

Upward Technology was fortunate enough to bring on a large new client recently. In this case, the customer had a full-time IT guy who had been there for many years and was generally well liked. He seemed competent but was a tough management challenge. We are still sifting through the details, but the departure of this IT was rocky to say the least. It has cost our new client significant time and money to just keep operations going! We will have more information on this in a follow up blog down the road. But this got me thinking, what are 4 cases for why you should never put your IT in the hands of one person?

1. The “hit by a bus” case- This is a classic and possibly most scary threat of all. What if your IT person, whether they are in-house or outsourced, just disappeared one day unexpectedly? Do you have a clear idea how your environment is set up? Do you have all your passwords? Do know why that person did what they did? If an IT crisis coinciding with this departure, like a nasty virus for instance, this could be a “go out of business” sized problem.

2. The incompetence case- If you have more than 10 machines in your environment and you are resting your IT responsibility on one person’s shoulders, we can say with almost absolute certainty that they are missing something. IT is unequivocally too complex and dense to be managed by one person.

3. The malicious intent case- This is a more rare but a serious risk we have seen before. If the IT person is disgruntled, they can create numerous obstacles, pitfalls or bugs in a system. They can withhold information or stall on following-up when needed. And these are the amicably malicious cases, if a person is motivated and clever enough they can do significant and irreparable harm to your business.

4. The management case- IT people are some of the most difficult bunch to manage on earth. They are smart, introverted and speak mostly in another language. The only way you can tell if they are doing a good job is if rarely break something. But how do you objectively evaluate them, how do you avoid getting circles run around you when you need to hold them accountable?

All of these problems are simply and elegantly addressed by the IT Services business model. If you find yourself at the mercy of a solo IT person, no matter how good they seem, you owe it to your business to evaluate a model proven to provide better results and reduce business risk! At Upward Technology we strive to improve on this model every day.