Outsourcing Your IT

Many companies outsource their IT needs. That is, they don't have any internal IT staff and bring in outsiders to handle that aspect of their company.

Depending on your company and its size, outsourcing your IT may be a good decision. If you happen to be one of the many companies that outsources IT, I have a special assignment for you. Call your IT service provider and say, "I know we call you to come in and fix whatever's broken, but we'd like you to come in for a little extra time and see what else might need to be fixed that we haven't ever called you about."

Why do this? Because one of the problems with outsourcing your IT needs is that the IT professional comes in and just fixes what you called them for, and then they leave. This is actually in the IT provider's best interests, because it guarantees they'll have a steady amount of work from you.

However, you're better off having them come in, tighten up all the hatches, and get things running right.

Recently I was at a company in a southern state. This company outsources 100 percent of their IT needs to a local firm. They have 30 machines and pay approximately, $200,000 a year to the IT firm. That's a lot of money for 30 machines.

Even though this company outsources their IT, they have an IT professional there on site at least four days a week, and more often five. As I watched this IT professional work, I saw that all he was doing was running around and putting out fires. So I sat down and had a security review with the person. We looked at the systems and everything else.

During the first part of the review, where I sit with the IT professional and we have a tabletop discussion, he gave me lip service, saying, "Oh, yeah, we do that."

But when we went out into the business and started looking at the servers and the workstations, I quickly learned that everything he told me during the tabletop meeting was a bunch of nonsense. Some of it he knew was nonsense, and he was hoping I wouldn't notice. But for much of it, he truly wasn't aware of some of the problems we found.

For example, the computer the HR Director used had six spyware Trojans on it, numerous viruses, and the operating system hadn't been patched since it was installed two years ago. Of all the computers to have vulnerable to hackers, HR's computer would give unscrupulous people lots of data to work with.

Later, I met with the CEO of the company and asked him, "Do you trust your IT service provider?"

He replied, "No, not really."

I said, "Well, the guy here today is very competent. Why don't you let him go ahead and put the needed patches and tools on your computers?" And I gave him a very detailed list of about 27 pages explaining what needed to be done. I also explained that once he got all these fixes in place, he would no longer need the IT provider there as often and would save well over half to three-quarters of the money he had been spending on IT needs.

That got his attention.

So by all means outsource your IT if you need to; just make sure you allow the IT professionals to do their job and keep your computers safe and clean.

Action Item: If you haven't had a vendor-neutral third party evaluate your IT systems recently, do so now. Yearly is a good frequency for this kind of evaluation.