How Employee Inaction Can Make IT Problems Worse

Every business operates on a budget and every employee has a responsibility to make sure that their actions keep their company within said budget. Budgets don't like surprises, and employees don't like a busted budget being traced back to them. This reality can make things messy and expensive when it comes to doing IT the break-fix way.

For example, let's say that one of your employees is experiencing a computer issue. The employee doesn't perceive this particular issue to be a serious threat, in fact, they can still accomplish their work, it's just that their workstation is now a little buggy. The bugs from this particular PC problem are annoying and slowing down productivity, but they don't say anything about it and choose to keep trudging along on a sick computer. Why? Because they think that mentioning the problem would result in a costly call to an IT repair company.

If the IT repair company comes to the office to fix what's perceived as a minor PC issue, the company will be slapped with a major repair bill, the budget would be busted, and the employee would feel responsible for putting the company in the red because they just couldn't handle a slow computer. Even though the employee in this scenario may have good intentions when it comes to not saying anything about their slow, unstable computer, their silence may actually be making the situation worse.

This can be the case if the buggy performance was actually a symptom of a bad computer virus slowly spreading on their machine. In a situation like this, the virus would need to be taken care of and eliminated as soon as possible. The longer the virus goes unchecked, the more time the virus has to spread and disable the computer entirely. Eventually, the virus would spread beyond the employees PC and infect other workstations on your company's network, which may eventually disable your entire IT infrastructure. This would cause serious downtime and end up costing you much more than if IT was called to remedy the issue while it was in its early stages.

An employee should never be put in the place where they have to choose between using a computer that eats away at their productivity, or putting in a service request to fix the issue and potentially bust the company budget. This is why SMART Services has designed our IT service to be a flat monthly rate that includes all-you-can-eat IT repair. This approach to IT assures that your budget won't be devastated by a surprise, like a server crash or a small bug. Flat-rate IT service gives your staff the confidence that they can call SMART Services to take care of even a small technology issue without taking on the stigma of being loosy-goosy with company resources.

We're able to offer IT service with an all-you-can-eat approach because we use our managed IT services to remotely monitor and maintain your system. Managed IT services do a few things to take the surprises out of IT repair and lower costs:

• Managed IT allows us to remotely take care take care of issues before they turn into problems that can cripple your entire system.
• By taking care of IT issues remotely, we're able to save on the major time and resources associated with sending a technician to your location.
• Because managed IT is a regular expense, you can categorize it as an operating expense instead of capital expense, thus freeing up capital in your budget!

Outsourcing your IT needs with SMART Services is a much better way to go about IT repair than the old break-fix-charge-by-the-hour-and-break-your-budget model. Give your staff the ability to be proactive about taking care of computer issues by calling us at 586 258-0650 !