How do small and medium enterprises use outsourcing to strengthen IT management?

Many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) begin to invest for more complicated IT infrastructures, which gives great opportunities to IT resellers. But if their IT products can not work effectively, their clients will not trust them any more. It is a must that IT product resellers should provide handy infrastructures and applications in order to maintain a long-term relationship with their clients. From this perspective, they must ensure that their customers have good IT management tools, or, the better way is to provide them with one-stop services.

A latest report from Quocirca shows that SMEs are increasingly dependent on technology. More than half of the staffs in SMEs are computer users and most of the enterprises provide several locations for these users to access network management. On the other hand, almost two thirds of the SMEs open their IT systems to external users such as consultants, partners and clients.

The dependency on technology indicates that IT failures will cost SMEs more. However, the report finds out that only a quarter of the SMEs surveyed are satisfied with their IT management ability. Many SMEs feel they have little control on such basic resources.

The most disturbing thing in daily work is how to keep outlying facilities, such as printer, working effectively. From the weekly or monthly work record, software update, reliable internet access, personal computers maintenance and the general access all bring up problems afflicting SMEs. This is because the SMEs lack internal technical staff to manage these problems. Many SMEs don’t hire technicians to address all these issues, so they always rely on the IT staff appointed to do this IT management work as a second duty, and then the staff will be gradually deviating from its original work of duty.

IT management tools can assist SMEs to mitigate the impact. One third of the SMEs with no management tools state that they are not satisfied with their IT management capability; it is not surprising to hear that. Some SMEs use IT management tools developed by themselves and they are sort of satisfied. Only those adopted professional management tools keep their IT system under their real control. Those tools include applications for controlling their business sets or some open source code tools.

Those most satisfied companies which use miscellaneous IT management tools, in other words, IT management tools with all-around function for SMEs are extremely rare. Among these satisfied companies, many outsource their IT management work to a third-party, which is usually referred to as the third-party value-added resellers (Value Added Reseller, or VAR). Currently about 25% of SMEs say that they are using outsourcing, and the larger the SMEs are, the more likely they are to adopt this method.

There are many benefits to do outsourcing. VARs can provide in-depth expertise which most of the SMEs do not have. VARs can invest on advanced enterprise management tools which can then be put into services for many customers. Moreover, they can control these management tools remotely and such external management tools have been accepted by a majority of SMEs.

Then why the number of SMEs accepting this service is still relatively small? The problem is that SMEs have to sign a service level agreement, which makes them feel that they assume all the risks during the cooperation. They think the risks should be shared between partners. However, VARs who are confident to share risks with their customers still need more confidence and encouragement, because if they failed, they would have to face the consequence of punishment.

These issues all contribute to the impeded service in practical use. Only 42% of VARs indicate that they will provide IT management service. This figure will keep growing because SMEs will become more and more dependent on IT technologies like large enterprises and they will invest more on the products that can help them manage and maintain IT technologies. Perhaps IT management service should become an indispensable part of IT infrastructure and application supply.