The way a typical IT MSP operates

Satya Nadella expresses the importance of technology in business, both in meeting your organisation’s imperatives, as well as enabling and supporting it as it changes and grows.

Through strategic and considered planning for technology improvements – not only in terms of your operations but importantly change management, your organisation will be better placed to maximize the benefits of technology investments. In turn, longer term benefits can be realised too. 

When a more mature, larger enterprise engages a service provider or partner such as an IT MSP, they have a certain expectation about what their service provider or their partner is going to assist them with. That expectation has come about through years’ worth of their own experience in understanding what they’re buying and what constitutes good value for them.

What I’ve seen in my years within the industry is that this way of working doesn’t really apply in small to medium sized businesses. Whether we’re talking about for example, the healthcare sector or for not-for-profits, this statement holds true.

The majority of the service providers that are delivering services in a small to mid-market have grown out of a technology grassroot. They’re typically owned by an engineer, somebody from a technical background, who woke up one morning and said, “I don’t want to work for Company X. I’m going to go and do all these things for myself.”. They start their business and they’re incredibly good and incredibly passionate about what they do. For the most part they deliver a really good technology outcome for their clients.

But, although they do deliver that great technology outcome, they’re missing something. What they are missing is the bridge between the business and the technology, specifically, where technology investment should be made to deliver the best outcomes for their organisations overall. They don’t really take a holistic view of the business that they’re trying to support, not because they’re bad people, but simply because they’ve just never been there. They’ve never been involved in delivering advisory services, at board level or at an executive level, to organisations that are looking to make an investment in the right areas. That manifests itself in several ways that aren’t necessarily the best use of their client’s money.

Majestic’s Organisational Maturity Model assigns a business state, using the way in which organisations operate in terms of their organisational governance, their management structure and systems, operating processes and integration of IT tools and services used to support the organisation’s growth and development as a metric. An organisation that fails to engage with an MSP that takes a strategic approach to growth will never mature beyond being one of the 75% at level 2 or 3.