Better served, better business
Excerpt from the Sunday Business Post 5/7/20. John Bergin interviewed by Jason Walsh.
Managed services have become a mainstay of enterprise IT. But recent months have shown that service providers are the grease that has kept the wheel of business turning throughout troubled times.
If business continued at all in recent months, it was because information and communications technology (ICT) allowed it to. From remote working to collaboration to things the public is entirely unaware of – such as distributed contact centres – it was our computing, networking and storage that kept us going.
Behind this, though, there is a more complex picture. Why were some businesses better able to cope than others?
If managed services are a way of helping businesses run and control their IT systems, then it is perhaps unsurprising that one IT function that is a popular choice for contracting with a managed service provider is helpdesk.
As anyone who has ever been dragooned into providing unofficial tech support will know, users are a lot less tech-savvy than they tend to think they are.
As a result, in any organisation, ironing out the daily wrinkles – as well as dealing with full-blown problems – can soon come to consume all of the IT department’s time. Obviously this situation is unacceptable, and yet users need and deserve help all the same.
John Bergin, managing director of IT Force, said that his company’s outsourced helpdesk does a lot of work in industries where downtime is not an option.
“For us, the kind of companies taking helpdesk are financial services and professional services like accounts and solicitors,” he said. “We may not be typical of a managed service provider as we do a lot of background stuff; we have a lot in there like change management, for example.”
Bergin said that the stresses and strains endured in recent months will cause a realisation that IT matters.
“People are really beginning to realise that due to the madness that started ten or 12 weeks ago, in some respects IT has saved the day. At the very least it has raised the profile of IT once again,” he said.
This varying level of preparedness tended to correlate with the level of engagement with service providers, which in turn can be seen as a scale measuring how seriously IT is taken in a business.
“It was interesting to hear it. I don’t want to wish ill on anyone, but what you get out of IT is related to what you put into it. It’s not that we’re looking for garlands of roses, it’s just that the kinds of things that are possible shone out in the last 12 weeks,” said Bergin.
What things, exactly? Bergin said that beyond getting up and running with remote working, there was a noticeable series of waves, with demands coming in phases.
Throughout the month of march IT Force’s clients were in constant contact, and IT Force was communicating important messages, too. “People were working from home and we were sending out things about best practice, security, the kinds of phishing attacks to expect and so on,” Bergin said.
A month later, as people settled into the so-called new normal, things became normal – or normalish at least.
“By the middle of April it started to change a little. People were setting up VPNs and so on, and then they were just getting used to them. Even with smartphone technology and the likes of Microsoft Teams, people were struggling with that,” said Bergin.
This adjustment phase typically lasted until the end of April. Bergin said that this makes sense, but that another change is now under way and businesses are seeking support through it.
“Then it went quiet, but it’s starting to ramp up again as people start to open up offices,” he said.