Enterprise Technology Services

Most companies look at their computer systems as a necessary evil.  Crashes, slow connections, slow email, long loading time, reboots and the attendant frustration are all viewed as unavoidable to doing business.

Did you know that the average desktop PC will become compromised within the first day of it being hooked to the Internet?  The current state of malware will increase 336 percent per month for the rest of the year.[1] Most people do not even know their PC is infected with some sort of malware, they only notice that it is time consuming to get work done.

In an average small business with poorly-operating systems, an employee could lose up to two hours per day to computer foul-ups.  That is one quarter of your payroll sucked into your computer system’s poor design and maintenance.  “One survey of 6,000 users suggests that 5.1 hours per week are wasted by people struggling with their computer.”[2] An employee earning $35,000/year would cost you well over $4,000 annually in lost time.  You can do the math; just multiply each employee’s hourly salary by 5 for the week, then by 52 for the year.

As a business owner or executive, your time is much more valuable than that of your employees, so much so that a financial value would be extremely difficult to assess.  However, what is certain is that your employees lost time, exponentially, adds to your own lost time.

Employee morale is based on production.  If your staff cannot create their product in a quantity and quality they are happy with, morale will go down and so will your profits.  Some employees will go so far as to do extremely damaging things to a system, not as a malicious act, but as an effort to solve problems interfering with production.

Often small companies, in desperation, will either pay hefty consultant fees at  hourly rates, or buy new computers when their current systems get too slow.

The machines that help information flow rapidly are tools that must be maintained, but a small business owner must assess several things when dealing with technology.

Budget:  There is a fine balance between the information obtained and the cost of maintaining the machines that create that flow.  Many of the standard programs are extremely expensive and often not compatible with their own older programs.

• Many small business owners think they are forced to buy expensive equipment that has too little or too much capacity.  Small business servers/enterprise servers, exchange servers and backup and disaster recovery solutions are prime examples.

Time:  IT maintenance takes time and education.  Unless your business is IT, your time might be better spent on promotion, marketing, management, etc.

Education/Training:  Even if you are an MCSE[3] or even a Linux contributer, do your really have time to research the best solutions for your company?  In order to adequately run systems in your office, you should have dedicated quite a few years of your life to learning technology.  Furthermore since the technology is continuously changing, research into the newest advances in required.

…Tomorrow:  What to expect from your information technology, really.

[2] http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/b_shneiderman_2.html

[3] MCSC:  Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer