Are You Still Paying by the Hour for IT?

There is a well-known proverb, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” which evolved over time from the original words Plato wrote in The Republic: “Our need will be the creator.” We are living in an era where changes and improvements in technology come at us faster than ever. As usual, these quantum leaps are born out of our needs, spurring new inventions.

Over the course of human history, wars Like WWII demand great and rapid strides in technology. The drastic and hurried way that the modern workplace changed after COVID from office-centric to remote-centric showcased the fact that many patched-together technologies began showing their age – especially in network cybersecurity and Information Technology. Old models just couldn’t keep up.

If you’re not keeping up with the technological innovations that are boosting reliability and productivity, you are clearly falling behind. As Stewart Brand, a writer and editor of The Whole Earth Catalog once wrote: “Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.”

It's time to ponder which one you are: The steamroller or the road?

CEOs and administrators don’t need to become technology experts – any more than they need to be auto mechanics or tax preparers. For many people, a great byproduct of financial success is the ability to pay other people to do those chores. You just need to be able to trust them. Which brings us back to the issue of trustworthy, knowledgeable, and reliable IT.

If you want to keep abreast of the times, the very least you should do is to STOP buying IT by the hour because it’s a losing proposition – too much money for too little return. At a minimum, a good Managed IT Services firm will know your network needs and the technologies which will keep you operating at peak efficiency.

BUT…

A TOP-NOTCH Managed Services Provider (MSP) will also know your business inside and out. They will know what you do and how you do it, which allows them to be able to recommend technologies of all types – not just those affecting IT, but those that affect your unrelated processes. This may take the form of new inventory control software, to shipment tracking, to court docketing for attorneys. Let the technology guys keep you informed of the best technologies.

It's time to stop wasting time and money buying your IT by the hour. Hourly-billed IT goes by the industry name of Break/Fix, and the fundamental difference between Managed IT Services and Break/Fix is the basic mentality involved.

What is a break-fix model?

The Break/Fix mentality is 100% Reactive. Just like the name implies, it reacts to something that broke down. This creates a tiresome ‘waiting game’ for the customer:
Customer network/workstation suffers a breakdown and calls IT.
Customer waits for a call back from IT.
Customer waits for IT to arrive.
Customer waits while IT troubleshoots the issue.
Customer waits for IT to effect a repair.

Remember that while all this waiting is going on, the affected network or workstation is down, and productivity comes to a full stop.

This loss of productivity can bleed over into other workstations if the employee, who now has nothing to do gets ‘chatty’ with coworkers, slowing their productivity.

The entire Break/Fix mentality is based on producing billable hours. Billable hours are the enemy of productivity and cost-effectiveness for the client, but the are quite friendly to the Break/Fix ‘IT Guy’. There is no reason to fix things quickly or permanently, and there is no reason to perform preventive maintenance. The Break/Fix profit comes from recurring client visits.

It's rare for an average Break/Fix purveyor to maintain an IT help desk or provide remote monitoring and repair, which routinely monitors the network and effects repairs remotely and quickly – there aren’t enough billable hours with that kind of speed and efficiency.

A routine look through the roster of the local IT community will demonstrate how the ranks of the Break/Fix IT ‘Guys’ are thinning. Impactmybiz.com provides an excellent overview of why Break/Fix is dying out HERE.

What are the benefits of IT managed services?

Unlike Break/Fix, a Managed Services Provider (MSP) is governed by a Proactive mentality. The client pays a fixed monthly fee, so the impetus is to set up the network to require the least number of human hours to maintain it. Many future issues, logjams, or equipment failures are predictable and preventable.

Predictive support allows an MSP to spend as little time as possible on your network by using tools that most Break/Fix guys do not have the resources to employ: Automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Managed Endpoint Security and sophisticated ticketing (a client’s call for service opens a ticket) and network reporting wherein every issue and repair the network has ever had can be viewed at a moment’s notice and prevented in the future.

This is not to say that all issues can be prevented. Any MSP worth its salt knows that every time Microsoft issues an update, there is a high probability that something somewhere in the system is going to go wrong (Thanks, Microsoft!). So, while not being able to prevent it, the MSP knows this happens and can certainly predict it and be prepared to root out any issues caused by the update and solve them quickly.