Stage 1 - Managing IT for the non-technical manager - Basic Infrastructure

Many business owners are frustrated that their computers don't just run. Everybody tells them that they need to become more technical. Everybody that tells you that is wrong. You don't need to be more technical. You need to understand how to manage Information Technology so that it supports your business.

The first stage of managing IT is the basic infrastructure. Before getting any value from IT, you have to buy hardware and software. This doesn't do anything for you except give you access to tools that will help you run your business. Managing IT at this level means that it has to work.

Those who are uncomfortable with technology, or just don't want to spend their time there, tend to ignore it, or "delegate" it to some junior technician in their business. Typically this person is technical, is comfortable with playing in technology and will find a way to fix problems that come up.

What they won't do is manage the reliability of the technology, because they don't have the experience to do that. You will get a reactive situation. Problems will occur, and your staff will be unproductive during those times. The bigger problem will be that you don't know what is lurking. Since the technology is not being managed, you won't see a problem until it occurs. Then it will likely have a significant impact on your business. A client of mine recently experienced a 3 day outage due to a minor problem with the server. It took 3 days to diagnose and fix. During that time, their activity didn't stop, but the business processes did. They couldn't invoice and it took weeks to catch up.

Trying to hire someone to support IT in your business is a real challenge. You can't pay high salaries, so you get a junior person. Hiring a senior at a high salary doesn't work either. They just get bored and leave.

Contracting with an outside supplier seems to be a good solution. If you "delegate" the support to the outside supplier, you may be somewhat better off. You no longer have to worry about hiring, training, etc. But if that's all you do, you will not gain much benefit unless your supplier is managing IT for you and not just reacting the way that your staff did. And unless you have defined the goals that they are managing to, you still may be subject to failures that could have been prevented. (the client mentioned earlier had outsourced IT support).

You need to set goals for your supplier, that leaves you in control, but lets them manage the support on a day-to-day basis. Each business will have a unique set of targets, but the goals will fall into the following categories:

1. Asset management: What hardware, software and other components do you have? What did they cost you? Are they up-to-date? Are they properly licensed? Upgrades are often required to software. Some of these drive hardware upgrades. If you have this available, it will cost you less to get an assessment of future upgrades and may also prevent problems, or ease recovery from major problems.
2. Risk management: This includes anti-virus, security, non-business use. This area is the source of many problems. If managed properly, you can prevent problems from occurring, or at least identify them more quickly, speeding up recovery.
3. Backup management: Do you have backup? Does it work? How would you recover from a failure? Many businesses have difficulty focusing in this area, because of day-to-day pressures. You can define the needs once and have your supplier commit to this area on a day-to-day basis.
4. Reliability management: Do you track service incidents? Does your supplier? What is the business impact? What can be done to prevent these incidents? An analysis of these inciedents will identify actions that should be taken in one of the other areas.

Setting up these management processes, a one time event, will mean that what you spend on software to run your business will have the opportunity to provide the return on investment that you were looking for.

It will also reduce your frustrations, and provide you with the feeling that you are in control, not just subject to the whims of computers or computer technicians.

This first stage is the foundation. If your technology infrastructure is not stable, the only thing taht you will accomplish by putting in more software is to increase your frustrations and opportunity to be affected by failures.