IT Pain – From Worse to Better

Your IT pain can come in many forms.
It can look like this:

• Several independent apps, software, and hardware that carry different warranties require other patches and updates, expire at different times, and do not always work together as they should.
• Your data is a constant target for IT hackers who wish to steal, sell, or hold it at ransom.
• Having to spend most of your IT budget to replace outdated equipment or an expensive “must-have” upgrade.
• Reacting to IT emergencies instead of putting time and effort into a proactive, cohesive IT plan.

Whatever the form, every business experiences IT pain of some kind. Often these scenarios go from bad to worse, making it difficult for any IT team to build a proactive strategy and budget to prevent this pain in the future.

What would you do if you lost access to the network? See what happened when a simple firewall expired and took the network entirely off the grid.

Here’s what happened:

Going from bad to better does not happen overnight. Finding the type of IT partner with the determination, grit, and expertise to get to the root cause of an issue is not easy to find.

However, if you hold your IT partner to the following criteria, IT pain becomes the exception and not the norm.

1. Work with practitioners, not technicians.
   The difference is simple. Practitioners both practice and hold certifications in their areas of practice. They are experts. Technicians have skills to fix limited technology issues but lack the planning and big picture expertise that ties IT to the business goals, not the technology.
2. Don’t work with an IT partner that makes claims they can’t support.
   Don’t fall for lofty claims. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. If it seems much cheaper than any other provider, you’d better read the fine print for add-on pricing. Technology should not feel like voodoo, and fixing problems takes analysis and expertise.
3. The partner will gladly inherit other IT companies’ problems.
   Face it: any new IT partner will inherit a set of issues. If your IT company does not willingly embrace the problem as their own, you may be left with finger-pointing or inflated invoices for working through those problems.

BONUS: The Three Things Your IT Partner MUST Be Willing to Do:

• Jump into the problem, even the ones they did not create. They should ask hard questions and develop preventative solutions, not just a quick fix option.
• Work their butts off to fix the problems. This translates into troubleshooting IT issues and creating standards that can be measured and improved upon.
• Partner with key stakeholders to identify business goals and tie IT to a roadmap that budgets for upgrades over time.

The bad-to-better IT story only has a happy ending when your IT partner is willing to do the hard work upfront, preventing IT pain from worsening.

At Blue Fox Group, we work harder to help business leaders find more time to focus on high-priority tasks, reduce costs over time, and work from an IT Roadmap that increases margins and budgets for spending and reduces error systematically.

If IT pain is something you want to manage and reduce, partner with a team that will work harder and finds preventative solutions to take your IT pain from bad to better.