Can IT be managed by one person?

For small businesses, the short answer is “yes” if you plan your IT systems and services correctly.

When you have that one IT person who has all of the IT knowledge for your company, you have a serious single-point-of failure issue if that person leaves or, perish the thought, takes a vacation. Quite often the one IT person is stronger with infrastructure support, but may be lacking experience – or time – to manage Help Desk services and business application issues.

There are two primary strategies you need to have in place in order to manage IT with a single resource:

• A Managed Service Provider (MSP) that takes care of supporting your IT infrastructure such as phones, PC’s, servers, networks, etc. With an MSP, you pay for a service that will have many subject matter experts working on your account for a flat fee each month. Most MSP’s also offer Help Desk and Disaster Recovery services along with Data Center Hosting.
• Externally hosted or SaaS (Software as a Service) applications that do not require technical IT support to maintain. When you move to this type of an application, you can rely on internal functional experts to field questions from other users and train new employees. Functional knowledge of an application shouldn’t fall on IT as your internal employees should know how to use the systems and manage their data.

Once you move to an MSP service and SaaS application model, your IT employee should transition to a “Broker of IT Services” role. This type of resource would have broader IT experience, good planning and project management skills, strong business acumen, and supplier management skills. If your one IT resource leaves the organization, you still have MSP resources and application experts to keep IT running while you look for a replacement.

Are you ready to transform your IT organization? Let us help you with an initial IT assessment and plan to transition to the one-person IT model.