Whether a local council or a national online retailer, every organisation today, in every sector, relies on IT to keep the heart of their business beating. But organisations aren’t just relying on the technology to keep their business going; they’re relying on the people in control of the technology, too.
This reliance means that IT teams are often one of the busiest in any organisation – but they can also be the most undervalued. Far too regularly, IT teams are only in the spotlight when something goes wrong. The rest of the time, they’re working tirelessly in the background, trying to strike the balance between keeping everyday essential tech running smoothly, and working on projects that power a business forward.
As the complexity of most organisations’ IT infrastructure continues to grow, more and more, IT teams are being called upon to maintain the general health of the infrastructure (spending less time on innovative IT projects) and to keep things ticking over. In the industry, it’s known as ‘keeping the lights on’ – which means exactly what it sounds like.
Keeping the lights on is an essential part of IT in any business. Everyday tasks like troubleshooting, maintaining servers and security, and keeping the ‘IT machine’ well-oiled cannot and should not be ignored. But there comes a point when keeping the lights on starts to cost more than just your IT teams’ salaries.
The problems begin when keeping the lights on activity begins to suffocate the team and the people in it; when it starts to drain the IT budget for little or no reward; when it takes valuable time and resources away from the projects that actually grow your business, to ones that merely keep it afloat. Organisations that use their IT budget and talent in this way put themselves in the perilous position of falling behind their competitors – the ones that are using their IT team for more innovative pursuits.
As these IT teams continue to flounder, trying desperately to firefight while knowing their skills could be put to better use, it becomes harder and harder to both attract and retain talented IT professionals. After all, who wants join or stay in a team that is just treading water? A team where they don’t get to work on exciting projects that help a company achieve its goals? A team where their skills and experience are not valued, or even really needed? Low morale and high stress levels ensue.
The subsequent staff churn only compounds the problem. People join and leave. Old-timers jump ship for new horizons, and those that stay are often stressed, with larger workloads. Our recent report into the sleep patterns and lifestyle hinted at as much. 38% of the IT professionals we surveyed said they have had a bad night’s sleep because of worrying about work. 41% said they were unable to unwind at the end of the working day, and 25% said they get just 3-4 hours’ sleep on a typical weeknight.
Certain parts of business IT will always be there, and always need looking after. A good example is server maintenance. Your servers will always need to be looked after somehow, by someone. You could dedicate an entire team to server maintenance, and they could be excellent at it, too. But what would the benefit of that be? How would that put you at any advantage over your competitors?
It doesn’t.
The same servers could be looked after by a specialist managed services provider while you put together a killer IT team that has the time and energy to direct their skills and channel their passion for the job into projects that drive your business forward and help you grow.
A survey by Spiceworks[1] into the state of IT in 2020 looked at the top IT challenges organisations expected to face in 2020. The number one challenge businesses said they expected to face this year was keeping IT infrastructure up to date (50% of those asked) followed by balancing IT tasks and improvement projects (49%). 46% of those asked said upgrading outdated software would be their biggest challenge, and 39% said it would be following best security practices. Nearly every challenge mentioned can be eradicated, simply by offloading that particular challenge to someone else - a Managed Service Provider. What would the challenges be if these same organisations had outsourced those very tasks? What would the impact be on staff turnover and morale? By how much could the business grow over the course of 2020 if the IT team didn’t have to deal with these challenges and could be working on other projects? Of course, we can’t know the answers – but some organisations, those who have turned to a managed services provider to take these very challenges off their hands – do.
So now, the question to ask is, which lights do we want to keep on ourselves, and which would we be better off handing over to someone else?
Managed Services covers a spectrum of IT services, from security to managed desktops, identity and access management to managed hosting. And organisations don't have to outsource all or nothing - rather, it can be approached like a pick and mix of services, offloading the ones that take up too much time and energy for little reward and keeping any that you might want
If you're thinking about how managed services could work in your business, especially during these changing times, take a sneak peek at our Little Book of Managed Services and see what dreamy services Core offers and why they could transform - or perhaps you just want to tweak - the way you work. Click the image below to download your copy now.
[1] The 2020 State of IT: The Annual Report on IT Budgets and Tech Trends (2019)
