For many businesses, especially those under 200 staff, your IT provider is one of your most critical vendors. They hold the keys to all of your data, and when IT stops, the business stops. Despite that, most businesses I speak to take a very light touch to managing this relationship. Often the job sits with the ‘accidental IT leader’. This is someone whose real role sits in operations or finance, but because they’re so good at keeping things running, they’ve been handed a few extras. IT is one of them.
Usually the original agreement has expired, or it never had much detail to begin with, so it no longer reflects what the provider actually does for the business today. The monthly or quarterly check-ins stay focused on the operational. Tickets, outages, the printer on level two.
So how do we know if we’re doing enough for the organisation when it comes to IT?
Firstly, let’s not focus on perfect – I’ll write some more in the future about dialling in technology for your organisation. Most organisations would be well served to start with the basics; are you and your provider on the same page about what is actually happening? And are they following best practices?
One of the reasons for the uncertainty is that IT, like law or accounting, carries a serious information asymmetry. Your provider has likely spent years learning their trade, and there’s no clear guide for you, the customer, on what good looks like. But unlike law or accounting, IT doesn’t come with strict professional standards or consumer protections to fall back on.
So to break down some of that asymmetry, I want to share what I see in organisations where this relationship is working well, and some of the signs that things might be off track.
What good looks like
- You meet regularly with your account manager, or perhaps even the business owner.
- You get the sense they understand how your business works, and how their services support it.
- You receive written reports that show evidence of the work being done, in a form you can actually read and interpret.
- Your agreement is detailed, current, and you’ve read it.
- And at some point, you’ve had an independent set of eyes assess your security, or confirm the services you’re paying for are the right fit.
Signs things might be off track
- You can’t find a copy of the agreement at all. Or you can find it, and it’s under two pages, with no service level agreements and little detail about what the provider actually delivers.
- No one meets regularly with the person who manages your account.
- Your meetings are full of technical jargon, and you leave confused or frustrated.
- And the only checks you’ve seen on security or performance have come from the provider themselves.
None of these are reasons to panic, but they are signs to dig a little deeper.
Take action
We’ve built a tool that helps organisations understand what’s really happening in their IT, and whether they and their provider are on the same page. It’s called the Lumenas End-to-End IT Check. It produces a shared responsibility view showing what your provider covers, what sits with you, and where the gaps are. All in a short report you could take to your CEO or board.
It takes one hour of your time, and not knowing the answers going in is the whole point. We’re looking for accidental IT leaders who want more clarity. Two weeks from now, you could have a clear picture of where things stand and how to move forward, in board-ready language, without needing a technology degree to read it.
Find out more here, or email hello@lumenas.com if you’d like to speak with us about how to get more from technology in your organisation.
This piece was originally published here on Linkedin as part of the Leading Digital series from Longitude Advisory.