I feel the need to address a situation I have run into for quite some time in my recent years of working with small businesses. This issue is the small business owner who starts up their business thinking they can do it all. While it is very commendable to attempt such a feat but if you are a small 1-5 person shop it is highly unlikely that you will have the time to concentrate the amount of time necessary to every aspect of your business. Given my experience is in the Technology side I will address this area.

You may think you know your stuff in relation to IT or you may even have expertise in a certain area but trust me, you do not know enough. To correctly implement a company network and manage it, you need a highly qualified individual to work for you full time, or a good outsourcing alternative. Let me take the time to highlight a few things that could come in useful for a small business owner. You may think it is common sense to know all of this but trust me; common sense is not so common after all. I run into more and more businesses today that are doing one of these things, a combination of two of them, or (sadly) all of them.

Just because you set up your home network does not mean you can handle your business’ network. When your son, daughter, nephew, niece, cousin, etc. set up their personal web page they did not get a certificate in the mail from the local university making them a web development expert. And finally my favorite; please, and I say again please DO NOT look for the most computer savvy person in your company and make them your IT director. This does an unbelievable amount of more harm to both your company and this person in the future. Not only does it put a person in a position they are not qualified for (one of the worst things you can do to someone, in my opinion), after a year or so of occupying the position they may believe they are qualified for the position. This is detrimental to them in two ways.

First, whenever they run into a problem they do not know how to fix they will have to call in an outside consultant, who will charge top dollar to diagnose the problem and more top dollar to have an engineer to come in a fix the problem. The ill-advised IT Manager now thinks they have fixed the problem and will use it in their future as a point on their resume. This leads to my other point. If this person leaves your company and applies for a similar position in another organization, they will be shocked when they are asked specific questions in interviews about what they did in the past position and find they were not at all what their title claims they were. Now this person is left in a bad position as they do not know what positions they are indeed qualified for.

While the Internet is an amazing invention and has unbelievable capabilities, it has become a very dangerous place. New viruses, worms, Trojan horses, denial of service (DoS) attacks, etc. are happening daily and you do not have the time or expertise to combat them along with running your own business. Be proud if you are IT savvy, but do not be ignorant and risk your business as well as your family’s well being because of foolish pride.

Think about this in another light. You may be handy around the house and with a variety of tools, but does that make you a carpenter, landscaper, mechanic, or plumber? You probably installed an air conditioning unit this summer when it started to get hot outside, but does that make you an HVAC engineer? The answer is clearly a no, yet so many business owners these days do not think of IT that way. Why? Good question. I do not want to claim I have the definitive answer for this, only a hypothesis. My opinion is that because IT, in its current capacity is still relatively new to the small business. Not everyone understands its worth and importance, well at least until they do not have it anymore. They feel that since they can check their email and use the Internet they are now capable of setting up or maintaining complex IT infrastructures. Think about this; if your computer and company network shut down RIGHT NOW, what would you do?

Brian Duke is an experience sales professional with New England Data Services, a data center located in the Boston, MA area that offers managed services such as collocation, dedicated servers, remote data backup, and T1/T3’s.

You can find out more about NEDS by visiting http://www.neds.com or emailing Brian at bduke@neds.com

Tags: Entrepreneurship, IT Director, IT Investment, IT Outsourcing, IT Services, Managed Services, Networking

Share This

Related Posts

• My Working Currency Trading Information
• Surviving The Commodity Markets, Part 1 - Trading Guidelines For Different Account Sizes
• Powerful Article Marketing - Uncover 3 Authentic Steps To Make Money With Article Marketing
• The Following Takes Place During The California Presidential Primary
• Ebook Writing - Announcing 6 Profitable Ways To Breakthrough With Ebook Writing