Due to their size, small to medium businesses usually don’t get the amount of IT support they really need. From our experience, most SMEs either don’t have any IT support staff at all or are relying solely on the capabilities of a one-man IT department.
Unfortunately, there’s not much difference between the two. Having only one IT support staff is as good as not having any at all. Here are some of the problems you might face if your company is relying on only one IT support staff:
New implementations don’t happen fast enough
It takes a team to set up an IT system properly. So if you are using only one person, that person has to juggle a lot of tasks in between and that stretches out your project timeline.
Your IT is as good as the capabilities of that one IT support staff
New developments are a constant in the IT industry. If you have only one IT personnel, chances are that he or she wouldn’t have the time to keep up with the latest technology. Do you honestly feel safe knowing that your company’s entire IT setup depends solely on the limited knowledge of an individual?
Your systems won’t improve much, especially if your IT support staff doesn’t have any prior management experience
That’s because they wouldn’t have the skills or experience to see the big picture. Without that vision, all that person will be doing for your company is basic patching – sticking a temporary solution over the issue and not nipping the problem in the bud.
Little to no R&D
Again, if your IT support staff is overwhelmed with support requests and new implementations, it is highly unlikely that he or she will have the time to research on new technology to develop better tools for you.
Increased manpower costs
On the other end of the spectrum, if the IT setup for your company is fairly simple and you don’t get a lot of technical issues to deal with, you don’t exactly need an IT support staff to be in your office all the time. So why are you paying someone to fill in that role?
Ideally for SMEs, one way to get around this problem is simply to outsource their IT department. It is more cost-efficient and you will get access to a whole team of IT experts who can help to improve your systems further.
If you would like to know more, we have listed down the 6 benefits of outsourcing your IT department.
[…] is not uncommon to see SMEs being supported by an in-house, one-man IT department (Read this: The problem with a one-man IT department). However, this is extremely inefficient, especially during times when new implementations are […]