Is your Managed service provider a strategic partner?
Steve Ballmer’s quote challenges organisations to look at their technology investment as far more than a mere necessity. The organisation that views its technology requirements as no more than a cost centre does so because it cannot see its importance and its potential to create and achieve growth and change. The operationally mature organisation is one that understands its technology requirements and ensures they are met as effectively, yet efficiently, as possible. This in turn empowers their business growth.
I’ve recently spent a lot of time speaking about the operationally mature organisation – the one that has a clear understanding of its technology requirements and has a clear strategy to meet them. But the other part of creating an operationally mature organisation is managing its ongoing needs. Frequent technical challenges will undermine even the most mature organisation. At Majestic, we call this ‘Business As Usual Services’.
So what does business as usual services look like? Well, it can be something as simple as taking a call from a user who’s having a particular issue, but more importantly, it’s working on preventing those issues from happening in the first place. And that’s really the essence of a managed, proactive service as distinct from a reactive service. We take a lot of the guesswork out. We have pieces of software and devices installed on our client systems that enable us to gain insight into the heartbeat and wellbeing of various systems that exist inside the organisation, be it hardware or software.
We try and stay one step ahead of problems by continuously monitoring and having people involved in our business that are always monitoring the health of our client systems. This means that we can be proactive about both identifying and rectifying issues before they become highly problematic, often before the client even notices their existence.
Majestic’s business as usual services are designed to reduce the downtime associated with technical failure. When business as usual services work as they’re designed to, organisations don’t even notice them, and that’s the way it should be. However, this also creates a temptation for organisations to cut back on those preventative measures associated with them because ‘everything is going well’.
A recent study by Gartner Australasia estimated that IT downtime costs business more than $46 million per year and that businesses often between $13,000 and $46,000 an hour through systems downtime, depending on their size. These losses include losses in productivity, time and resources but the lost reputation associated with those failures can be an even bigger, issue. That is why preventative measures, and business as usual services, are so critical.
