The most important question you need to answer is what your customers measure you on. Everything else can be contracted out to the right resources and should be. Here’s a great example that is core to your operations but invisible to your customers.
Author: Howard M. Cohen
“If you want something done right, do it yourself!”
We all said that or heard it said throughout our lives. But as we grow into management, we come to realize a few things that oppose that argument.
For one, we come to realize our own limitations, that we’re not the best at everything. This suggests to us that it would be better to delegate certain actions to others who are more capable.
Another limitation we eventually embrace is that we each have limited bandwidth. There’s only so much we can do ourselves. Only so much we can take on without risking burnout.
On a more nuanced level, we come to realize that customers measure us only on a small subset of all the things we do day in and day out. These are usually actions that relate directly to what we do for customers. That said, we come to understand that there’s no reason to invest in becoming better at things customers will not be measuring us on. It’s far more efficient to find a provider who can do those things for us at a reasonable fee, and its likely to end up costing less than training our own people to do them.
IT is Core to Your Operations, But Managing It Is Not!
Information technology (IT) is definitely core to your business, and the more central something is to your business, the more you feel driven to focus your own energies on it, to make sure it works well. This is the purest manifestation of “if you want it done right, do it yourself!”
But that’s wrong.
Think about it for a moment. If your business weren’t involved you’d agree that the right person to do something is someone with proven expertise at doing that thing. Find an expert.
That is just as applicable when your business IS involved. The best person to do something is just that, the best person to do it. The most qualified person or resource.
Applied to IT, it’s just as valid. If you want your IT managed most efficiently, safely, and productively, seek out expert resources with long experience managing IT environments like yours. You are most likely to find them outside your organization.
Ask yourself, what do you know about hiring IT personnel? Do you know how to evaluate them? How to determine their level of expertise? How to manage them and incent them? If you’re like most business leaders, that’s not part of your expertise.
When you engage an external resource, you’re engaging the entire company from top management to junior staff and everything in between. You can easily investigate their track record, obtain opinions from existing customers. At worst, if you must replace them, its relatively easy to fire them. Easier than firing employees.
Begin at the Beginning
If your business is anything other than an IT company, look outside for the resources you need to deliver the best services.
A great example of this strategy at work is Azure cloud services. Rather than build and maintain your own network, you choose to use one built by the most reliable provider in the world, Microsoft.
When you’re ready to load new applications and new workloads to Azure, follow the same strategy. Turn to a proven expert to manage the entire process, and to provide the ongoing management that keeps those workloads working now and in the future.
Every member of the Idenxt team is a highly reputable, broadly respected member of the Microsoft EcoSystem with years of proven experience and expertise. Idenxt automation is also proven, with a foundation in Microsoft provided and Microsoft approved software and best practices.
Call Idenxt today. If you want Azure done right, delegate it to Idenxt!
To learn more, contact us here.