It seems like we go through phases when Clients or prospects begin asking whether they can do some of their own network support. Of course this really starts coming up more often when the economy is in a poor condition. We always try to get our Clients to take on some of the basic day to day support tasks. For instance, why pay us to replace a mouse or keyboard. In some cases, if the Client has a little more technical expertise we will help them take on higher level tasks. However, when it comes to items they may affect the security or reliability of their network, we draw the line.
Most often these requests are based on perceived costs. “If I do the task myself I don’t have to pay you and therefore I save money.” In the case of lower level tasks that may be true. However, in higher level tasks it may not only be untrue but can also be disastrous.
First, let’s think about pure cost. Over the years I have had doctors, lawyers, business owners and other high level people attempt to do their own network support. Let’s say that an IT Pro charges $100.00 per hour. A problem occurs on the network. The doctor, lawyer, business owner does his/her own troubleshooting and tries to resolve the issue his or herself. Let’s even say they get things going. Perhaps it took several hours, maybe a day, maybe more. So we saved the cost of the IT person, right? Probably not. Consider this. How much is the value of that doctor’s, lawyer’s, etc time? In most cases, the value of that persons time far exceeds the $100.00 that the IT Pro would have charged. Beyond that, how much faster would the IT Pro have solved the problem? If we just estimate half the time, how much is that in downtime cost to the organization? Do you know how much it costs your organization for every hour of downtime?
Another perhaps even more serious consideration is even if the network is up and running again, what might you have missed? Perhaps the hard drive is failing and simply turning the server off and on cleared the immediate problem. Everyone goes back to work and after a few minutes, hours, days, or weeks it goes down again. This time this system will not come up and after more time is spent trying to fix the problem you call in an IT Pro. What he or she finds is that not only is the hard drive now completely dead, the backup has not been running since the original issue. What is the cost of all that lost work?
While it is true that Clients have the capability to fix simple IT related problems, in most cases the perceived cost savings by trying to handle more involved IT issues is simply not there. And in some cases the results can be disastrous.
