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Do You Have an IT Staff?


No? You might be in the majority.

Tech company CDW recently conducted a survey regarding business growth and the role that information technology (IT) plays in small businesses.

The survey, which resulted in CDW's "Small Business Driver's Seat Report", identified growth and technology issues that small business owners consider among the most important.

A Lack of IT Staff

A couple of interesting stats coming from the survey are that only 15% say that their company employs at least one dedicated IT professional. 34% of responding small business senior executives say that they are responsible for IT decision-making and support issues themselves.

"Small business owners have always needed many skills at the outset but then they learn to organize and delegate as their businesses mature - which has never been an easy transition," said Maria Sullivan, CDW vice president for small business sales.

"The Small Business Driver's Seat study found that the added challenge of leveraging IT apparently creates a management inflection point at about 50 to 100 employees. When a company reaches this size, IT mastery becomes an essential driver of business growth," added Sullivan.

When a company grows toward the 100-employee mark, it tends to view IT more as a strategic investment when compared to those with fewer employees.

IT Can Still Be Managed   

Even without a dedicated IT professional on staff, someone's got to take care of it.

"Small business owners and key personnel do not all need to be IT professionals - they only need to be astute in how they manage IT," says Sullivan. "There are associations, publications, analysts, and vendors that can be valuable resources as a company grows, and the study shows that high-growth businesses tend to hire their own IT professionals early."

The full 2008 CDW Small Business Driver's Seat Report can be found here.

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About the author:
Chris is a content coordinator and staff writer for SmallBusinessNewz and the iEntry Network. Subscribe to SmallBusinessNewz RSS Feeds.

Comments

Managed Services and Outsourced IT Good Solution

Small and medium sized businesses are continually challenged with how to obtain enterprise-level IT functionality without incurring the high-cost and hassle of managing IT in-house.  Many companies are turning to managed service and hosting providers to fulfill their IT needs.  And if you think about it, outsourcing IT makes a lot of sense.  If your business' core competency is not information technology, and if you don't have an expert on staff, does it make sense to attempt to manage an on-premise solution?  That's like generating your own electricity.  Clearly you need the IT functionality to operate and compete in the marketplace, but that doesn't mean you have to struggle with doing it in-house.  When you outsource IT, you have an entire team of IT professionals running your network.  SMBs cannot generally afford to hire an entire team, nor do they want to be cash-strapped with infrastructural hardware purchases and unexpected expenses.  In fact, many hire a systems administrator with good basic skills, but who may be challenged with the multitude of tasks required to keep a network running smoothly; employing advanced network security solutions, providing round-the-clock monitoring and troubleshooting, seamlessly and effortlessly updating software and implementing patches and hot fixes, designing and implementing a disaster recovery plan, supporting secure-remote access, and providing user helpdesk support.  Even if your system administrator can miraculously manage all of these tasks, you're still laying out large capital amounts toward infrastructure and software costs. If your business is not focused on technology, has multiple computer users, and requires enterprise-level technology to operate smoothly, outsourcing IT to a hosting provider such as ITonCommand http://www.itoncommand.com might make much more sense.  Instead of you buying and managing hardware, paying for Microsoft software licenses and hiring and managing an IT staff, ITonCommand hosts your data and applications on their servers located in state-of-the-art facilities manned 24/7/365.  And their service INCLUDES Microsoft Office Standard Edition, the ability to host any other Microsoft application--and most other business software--and automatic upgrades, updates, patches and fixes.  Outsourcing IT helps you ensure your business is running the most current versions of Microsoft throughout your organization, and that your network is built and maintained using best-of-breed technology on an enterprise-class infrastructure and managed by certified, professional IT engineers.  Certainly something to consider. 

Comment

Now that's how you market in a blog comment ;)

I-T outsource company(Sharma Infoway).

hi firend,

My self harish solanki. i am working in IT company last 9th month. my company is start last year 1-Aug-2007. This company i am first employ our company. When Company start one employ  now this time company employ is 20. Company groth is very well now this time. Company work is find all over word like USA, UK and other country. this portfolio is define on page

http://www.sharmainfoway.com/portfolio.html

 

Harish Solanki

www.sharmainfoway.com

Managing is always a difficult part, well it has many advantages

Better to have your OWN IT staff for growing SMB strategy:
                                    This article clearly explains my situation here. We are having a Web Designing & SEO, SEM contract with http://www.americarx.com which is an Online Pharmacy Shopping site in USA. We had the contract with them since 2004, now they want us to do their coding part also. For which i have Zero experience. Being a Pharmacy Graduate I never had any Tech code senses.  By gods grace I am having good marketing abilities which have taken this website from 200 orders level to 600 orders daily. Now I am in a situation where I do not want to loose the contract if I say NO and will not the part of your tech thing. So I decided to float my own techie wing in India. Now I am in a situation of Transferring knowledge from previous Tech team. What ever our first comment says that is right. Even though we see many advantages and disadvantages in having our own tech team, I personally vote for it. You can really watch your website architecture and the way it is working with real time programmers coding. Especially when they add new features, updates and modifications, you can directly manage the bug fixing which was taking more time and process previously. Making them understanding what exactly we want with our site is more easier than before in real time discussions face to face. So it is better to have our own IT team for SMB owners who want to see the growth exponentially in this competitive environment. So I decided to start 3SSOLUTIONS.COM for AmericaRx.com requirement.

AmericaRx.com Shop Online Pharmacy for Health & Beauty, Home Health Care, Skin Care & Baby Care Products.

Search Engine Optimization , Search Engine Online Marketing

Thank you for a chance to show our comment
Vasu.M

 

Welcome to INaVid.com

Hi Dear I m working In IT Company Last 2 Year And My Company Employer more than 50. My Website Is http://www.Inavid.com

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