If computers are essential to running your business, and I don’t know many companies today that this is not true of, then your next hire should be us. I came across an article on just that subject in the latest Entrepreneur magazine. In this particular article the writer is advising companies to hire a full time IT person, and while I don’t disagree with that, I would suggest if you have 100 employees or less, hiring just one in house IT person will probably not be sufficient.
When you have a company to run, trying to build your business and maintain a functioning computer network at the same time could be disastrous. Computer outages can take one person out of circulation for days if it is an intermittent problem
Add to that the fact your company is running vital software packages for sales and lead tracking as well as the software required to keep your company running and NOT having an IT professional on your team is simply a bad situation.
The writer in this post on Forbes Magazine is making the case for hiring a full time IT person, or staff, as the case may be. While he is making the point for bringing on a full time IT person, there are many points in what he writes that would apply to hiring Unified Technology Solutions as your full time IT department, and even if you already have an IT person, having our services as a backup to your IT guy is always a good idea.
Give this a look and see what you think:
“…The reality of doing business in a Web-centric economy means that you have to learn how to tame all of those electrons. You have to be able to deal with the intricacies of Web sites and data storage, and not let your systems get summarily swamped. And while plenty off-the-shelf products appear deceptively “plug-and-play,” managing IT eventually will require professional chops.
The big question: When to hire that IT guy? Prominent minds disagree on this subject, but there are two basic schools of thought.
The first argues that entrepreneurs should hire an IT professional immediately. This urgent view applies mostly to companies that depend on technology for their very livelihoods–say, a social networking site like News Corp.‘s MySpace, a blog (like my own) or a company hawking an entirely new technology, such as a voice-over-Internet Protocol carrier.
“I’m surprised by how many start-ups out there don’t make IT a high priority,” says Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the Web development company responsible for WordPress, a popular weblog software platform. “There’s a big competitive advantage if you have someone who owns [your IT] and thinks about it all the time.”
The second school sees IT more as a tool to optimize performance rather than as a core competency of a business. Most entrepreneurs are in this camp. They feel they don’t need to hire a professional geek immediately, but at some point later on when growth (measured in revenues, employees or site traffic) calls for it. “ Which can be a big miscaculation.
You can read the full text of this article at Forbes.com…
What I took away from their article was this: IT should not be the ast thing a growing company thinks about implementing. In fact it should be one of the first things. To run an effective company in today’s business environment, its important to have good tools at your disposal, and functioning computers, a strong network and software which helps your company run better are three of those things. Without a presence to manage those three items, company owners are going to struggle.
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When I was a very small child, there was a song about Clouds sung by Judy Collins. I loved the song, but I never quite understood it. The Verse I most remember is this one: