3 Initiatives That Every IT Department Wants to See

If you’re one of the small businesses that has the resources to devote to an internal IT department, then you know how difficult it is playing at help desk with the rest of your employees. Their role is crucial to helping those who are less tech-savvy, but there’s always the chance that even your IT department will be stumped. That’s not to mention the fact that your help desk could be filled with potentially-avoidable requests.

Here are three ways you can save time on IT maintenance by taking some simple measures to limit how many support requests you actually get.

Invest in Employee Education
When you implement a new technology solution, there is usually a period where you’ll train your staff on how best to use it. However, it’s inevitable that your IT will receive support requests from your workers asking for information on how to set up or use new technology. This eats up too much time and resources that would be better spent elsewhere. Of course, the first step is to re-educate your employees as much as it takes for them to get a firm grasp on their technology.

This extends far beyond new technology solutions, including educating your employees on all kinds of security best practices. Teach them how to properly set up and manage an email inbox. Show them what potential threats look like, and how to avoid them. Doing so can make them more autonomous, which will relieve your IT department of a significant burden. This kind of professional development is useful in general, so sell it to your team as such.

Implement a Documentation Center
Some problems are so commonplace that you’ll receive requests for assistance for the same thing multiple times a day. When it goes this far, it becomes a frustrating waste of time. Unfortunately, this is par for the course with IT support, so it makes investing in a documentation center an appealing decision. A documentation center is a central location where documentation can be stored for various practices (if not all of them). Rather than spend time scheduling out these repetitive tasks, just direct your staff to the documentation center… as long as it’s a relatively simple process, that is. This can save your team time and money that would otherwise be wasted.

Outsource Your Help Desk
While employee education and documentation centers provide employees with tools they can use to resolve their own problems, the fact remains that they’re still going to turn to your internal IT department for tasks regardless of whether or not they can fix them themselves. Therefore, the only real way to eliminate this burden is to completely outsource your business’s IT support to a third party provider. Besides, it’s likely the case that your internal team is so preoccupied with help desk support that they can’t get a chance to innovate and implement new cost-efficient solutions, and they might even have trouble keeping up with preventative maintenance like regular security patches. Instead of forcing them to cut corners, it’s better to just outsource your help desk’s responsibilities to a managed service provider.

In these types of situations, Computerware would be delighted to assist you. Our trained technicians can help your team with any IT hiccups they run into and allow your in-house team to more effectively do their jobs. After all, they didn’t become technicians to keep setting up email inboxes--they should be able to use their expertise to create innovative solutions for your business. The extra boost can give your business the edge that it needs to succeed.

To learn more about managed IT services, reach out to us at (703) 821-8200.