We all work to make ourselves efficient. It’s the way to create more time, more capacity, more profit, isn’t it? Then we work on our team’s efficiency. We want them to achieve more, in less time.
It’s easy to understand why. The monthly financial cost of an employee to a business can be staggering. Consider salary, pension, other employment costs, equipment, training. Having any un-productive time is impactful.
Each employee also has a contribution to make – how does their network, their personality, their business acumen and operational excellence benefit your organisation every day? Do you really know the impact and cost of a key colleague being unable to work?
When you tot it all up, you’ll reach eye watering figures. And when you think about the risks which may prevent your colleagues being efficient, technology problems will be somewhere near the top of the list. Similarly, if your team is plagued by technology problems, the frustration and anxiety caused will be high up your colleagues’ list of reasons to leave.
Take Steve. He’s just been recruited into a firm of accountants. It’s another step up the executive ladder that he’s been craving. He’s earning a decent salary and has a nice company car. His manager has justified the cost – which nears £8k monthly. Steve’s raring to go.
Steve has been handed his predecessor’s old laptop. His boss, as well as being a company Director and Chartered Accountant, ‘knows about IT’. So, as well as inheriting the laptop, Steve also inherits the many frustrating issues and security flaws which contributed to his predecessor’s departure.
Eventually he gets logged-in, having taken up much of his first day and a significant proportion of his boss’ time. He’s sharing passwords for systems used to access internal and customer data in a range of insecure ways. For some reason nobody can explain, he’s only able to access some things when in the office, which is frustrating as he was offered a flexible working role. Now he’s anxious about not being able to do everything he needs to – unless he’s in the office.
Steve seems to spend a lot of time just waiting. Waiting to log in. Waiting for systems to refresh. Waiting for updates. Waiting for his boss to let him know how he can generate those reports that were expected yesterday.
He just waits …and waits. And he feels everyone, from clients to colleagues, are waiting for him.
He’s unaware that a password he’s been given – and uses for two or three of the systems he needs – was originally his predecessor’s. He’s also unaware it had already been compromised months ago, and is being used, quietly, by bad guys to access, and monitor, the systems he uses. They’re waiting for the best time to strike, either to use Steve’s email address to send countless spam emails to all his contacts, or to encrypt his, and all other company data, in order to demand a ransom from his boss.
After three or four months, Steve has decided this isn’t the position of his dreams after all. He’s looking for a new job. Unfortunately for him and his boss, the bad guys decide to strike. It’s Monday morning and following a weekend of weighing up options, Steve had hoped to type his resignation letter first thing. But he can’t login for some reason. Neither can anyone else in the office, it seems. Confusion reigns. Until his boss receives a single email, explaining that the company’s data has been encrypted and demanding the bitcoin ransom mentioned earlier, to return systems to an operational state. Steve decides to handwrite his resignation letter during the chaos.
The moral of the story?
When things are calm and stuff ‘just works’, the focus is on finding new clients and growing your business to increase profit. IT problems, at these times, can be low priority. The cost of appointing a professional, well-staffed and well-trained partner company to look after technology can appear high. Perhaps the IT budget can be cut a little? It’s easy to consider this, during ‘the good times’. But times aren’t always good, and risks are high in the modern world. To help you through the bad times, or better still avoid them altogether, you need the best IT partner you can afford.
At our Premium Plus support level, we stand by the side of your workforce, giving advice, securing users and systems, solving problems and ensuring your team is as efficient as possible. We become part of your team, relieving you of technology worries and allowing you to focus on your business. We load our service with value.
The cost of this is less than £50 per user, per month.
It’s a lot less than losing your best staff. Or a ransom. Get in touch.
– Paul Williams
