What should my IT staff be able to do in an SME?

I run a medium-sized business with 30 staff. What is a reasonable expectation of what my IT person should be able to do?

In an ideal world your 30 person business would hire one IT expert and that one person would be able to:

• Keep all the PCs, laptops and servers running
• Monitor all your printers and keep them maintained, unjammed and topped up with consumables
• Configure all your mobile devices
• Administer all your business applications
• Teach all your staff how to use your IT systems effectively
• Redesign and fix any systems that aren’t working properly
• Let you know when your systems need refreshing and manage the projects to refresh them
• Give you high level strategic advice on where your business should be going with IT
• Answer every question from every staff member about any aspect of IT, no matter how complex or plain dumb, with patience, intelligence, plain English and a sense of humour.

Now give them a small budget to buy the right equipment, and away you go, right? Wouldn’t that be great! And every now and again, once in a decade you find someone who is SO brilliant that they can do all that as well as play foozball with the rest of the team, and guess what? After 12 months they go off to get a high powered career in the corporates. Or to do massage therapy – it never seems to be anything in the middle.

The problem you are experiencing is very similar to the problem of building a house. You need an architect, a builder project manager, a carpenter, an electrician, a tiler and so it goes. Just because you want a small house, doesn’t mean you need fewer tradies, it just means you need only part time resources for each of them. But each of them needs exactly the same tools and training to do the job well for a small house or a large mansion.

IT is just as specialised and requires the same sort of classification and distinction. In the case of IT, the roles are:

• Help Desk technician / 1st level support
• Network Engineer / 2nd level support
• Senior Network Engineer / 3rd level support
• IT Architect
• IT Consultant / Strategist
• Trainer
• Business Analyst
• Programmer
• Systems Designer

Just because you are in charge of a small enterprise, doesn’t mean you can afford to (or deserve) mediocre inputs on any of these aspects of IT. A generalist handyman can do a fantastic job of maintaining the house that you have, and that’s fine given that a house has a lifetime of about 15 years before it requires significant renovation. And they tend to have been built properly in the first place.

But IT environments need to be refreshed every three to four years and generally speaking you want to do the infrastructure and the applications separately – so a major architectural review needs to happen every 18 months with a good chance that something significant and strategic will need to change. And if any aspect wasn’t properly designed in the first place, your handyman is unlikely to have the tools or training to fix the underlying cause.

Also, since the last time you looked, the technology and options available have radically changed, so you need to start from scratch with what business purpose you serve and what IT is required to support that purpose. Your handyman, who (hopefully) has spent the last 18 months stabilising your house to get rid of all the glitches, is not going to be positioned, trained or perhaps even interested in upsetting the applecart and starting again.

So if you are having trouble getting the results you need from your IT, and you only have one or two (very stressed) IT people in your organisation, this might be the reason why.

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