The evolution of IT support:
I remember not long ago, I went to a florist to buy flowers for the special occasions of my loved ones. It was probably a quarterly routine and totally depended on my ability to really remember those special occasions ... a feat in itself.
Now, we have the luxury of online florists that allow us to enter special occasions in a calendar and remind you to send flowers, chocolates, fruits, etc. Automated relationship maintenance (don't tell my wife). Does it make me lazy? No. I'm just tapping into an improvement in the industry, which unleashes my brainpower for other things, usually career strategy and / or how to entertain three kids under 7 years old.
So how does this relate to IT consulting and support?
Legacy IT support methods required a technical consultant / engineer to be on site and sit in front of a server or workstation to perform reactive or preventive maintenance. This is how I started my career and it really was the only option available to service providers until Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools were developed.
The RMM tools provided the platform for the evolved service providers, the time commitment model, and the materials (i.e., hourly pay) for the Managed Service Provider (MSP) support model, which relies heavily on of RMM tools to perform preventive maintenance and is usually priced at a fixed price. commitment.
Reactive work is performed by a service desk, which often alerts the customer to a problem rather than waiting for the customer to contact the service provider.
Dataprise adopted this new model about 5 years ago after supplying the legacy model more than 15 years ago. We have seen many benefits associated with the MSP model, both for the customer and for Dataprise. Below are some of the ones that stood out the most.
Valuable conversations
Like my florist example, face-to-face interactions moved from maintenance and repair to greater digital business strategy and transformation. Instead of your team preparing a list of items to fix for the next site visit, your executive team can work with the service provider's strategic consultants to outline company initiatives that will outperform competitors and industry disruptors. .
The speed of disruption across industries over the next five years will require all businesses to digitally transform and find ways to deliver better products and solutions to their own customers. These are the conversations you should have with your service provider, not if you add more RAM to your workstation.
