IT on the Cheap – Don’t do it!

With IT, as with most things in life, to some extent you get what you pay for. The more you put in the more you’ll get out.

Dr Logic’s MD, Roman Marszalek, shares his thoughts on why trying to save money by not investing in your IT infrastructure will, eventually, come back to bite you.

There are known knowns and known unknowns…

Indulge me for one minute whilst I quote Donald Rumsfeld “….. there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know”.

With IT, as with most things in life, to some extent, you get what you pay for.

The more you put in the more you’ll get out. Let’s say you hire a gardener to cut your lawn. He cuts the grass and on the surface, it all looks great. But the lawn is full of moss and weeds which will keep coming back and eventually take over the good grass. Or you have an old car. It’s a great car – it starts, it drives, it stops. But how safe are you, how efficient is it compared to new cars with better fuel economy or even electric?

The main IT problem is that what you’re getting is not always visible. If you’re getting loads of IT issues and your IT support team is flat out fixing things all the time, it’s probably a sign that things are not good with your infrastructure, you’ve got ageing hardware or software and you need to invest. Then you get those that have invested and consequently see very few issues or outages, everything works seamlessly, people don’t moan about IT – it’s suddenly noiseless. So people start to think that they don’t need to spend any more money on IT because it’s all working fine. But of course, that’s because they’ve invested to get it that way!

Investing in IT

It’s easy to say “budget holders are just cheapskates and they don’t care” but that’s a mistake. Every FD, MD and CEO wants the best for their company, but they’re just not aware that their IT set-up, if not adequately invested into, will be holding them back.

It might be a lack of knowledge about how utterly brilliant great IT can be; not fully understanding the art of the possible; too busy to tackle recurring problems and so the default has been to apply workarounds that will, eventually, come back to bite them.

We had a client who was using a fairly antiquated teleconference set up. It was cutting edge stuff when they bought it but their IT Manager was the only person who could set up a meeting, so if he was on holiday or off sick, well, no meeting. But things have moved on significantly with web-based platforms like Zoom and this client knew they had to do something, so called us in. We were able to implement Zoom for them, but after talking at length we also felt that it was the right time to move their core IT systems to the cloud. This was done pre-Covid – and I’m so glad that we’d had the chance to have that conversation and that they’d had enough faith in our recommendation to reconsider their IT budget and invest at that time. It meant that when their team of more than 70 people had to leave their office, en masse, as we all did, they were able to continue working. We could have just “cut their lawn” i.e. set up a new video conference system and the client would have been happy and we got paid.  But we see our job as going above and beyond; we helped them understand the art of the possible and how investing in a cloud migration project was going to provide a strategic and operational advantage.

Good to Great

A good IT support company will keep your IT set-up safe and working. A great IT support company will take your business forward, deliver commercial and operational efficiencies, automatically manage devices, provide security to protect against malicious attacks and act as your own IT Consultant who’ll develop an IT Strategy which will support your company’s objectives – and implement that strategy for you.

Ultimately, what I’m saying is that lack of IT investment will eventually hold any company back, and cost that company money – either through inefficiencies or lost income.