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Apex Technology Management, Inc.
1020 Market Street, Redding, CA 96001
Phone: 1-530-248-1000 or 1-800-310-2739
Fax: 1-530-243-9184
Email:info@apextmi.com |
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Support Assessment
Your infrastructure depends entirely on the support structure in place
to keep it running at peak performance and to repair it quickly when
problems occur. Constant review of your in-sourced or outsourced solution
is required to keep your support structure in line with the technology
in place and the goals of the business. Are you sure you have the right
resources supporting the right tasks? Are there tools available to make
these resources more efficient? Support services are very expensive
if done wrong, but very profitable when done right.
Your help desk is a critical piece of your IT organization. It is the
most visible connection between your customers or employees and your
IT department. Do you know if your help desk is providing answers? How
many calls are they resolving and how many are they escalating? Should
you be outsourcing your desk? These are all questions which are difficult
to answer and need to be assessed by an independent organization.
Workstation support is a science which has rapidly evolved to a highly
efficient automated process. Again, how efficient is your support organization?
Are they using hard disk loading or are they configuring workstations
for individuals? How does your workstation team respond to problems?
Do they have to fix individual workstations or are they able to provide
a hot spare replacement on a real-time basis? This is another service
to which outsourcing is often an efficient answer. However, as with
many other services, the answer is not a black and white.
Server support is an area where many organizations fall short. Often,
budgets will be setup around a quantity of resources. For example, a
company with 5 servers determines that they can pay a total cost of
$70,000 annually for server support. However, they have a database server,
a file server, a collaboration server, a web server, and an application
server. It is simply impossible to find all of these expertise's in
one person. The answer for this organization is to outsource their support
so that when they need a database expert, they get a database expert
– and when that expert has completed the task at hand they go home and
quit billing for support.
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