Blog posts in IT support

An essential IT guide for freelancers, consultants and other independent professionals

Francesca Geens runs Digital Dragonfly, a company that helps independent professionals find and use the best technology for their needs.

She's just written The ultimate guide to technology for independent professionals, a really comprehensive ebook that's packed with useful advice and information for independent professionals.

If you work for yourself as a consultant, writer, lawyer, accountant or other type of independent professional, it's really worth you hopping over to the Digital Dragonfly site and downloading this book.

At the very least it'll give you lots of ideas about how you can be smarter about how you use technology. And you might even find it saves you money next time you're looking to make an IT investment.

Download now from Digital Dragonfly >>

Of course, we have lots of information on IT Donut for independent professionals too. Don't forget to check out the three online tools every freelancer should try and this first-hand advice from a freelance writer and editor.

• Get the right broadband for your business
• Upgrade RAM to extend your computer's life
• Where to find reliable IT freelancers

The trouble with geeks

In fifteen years of IT support I've been around a bit. I've worked in big companies, supporting thousands of users as part of a huge IT team, and I've worked in small teams, supporting single-person companies. One thing that's universal is the contempt that IT people have for users.

Users are the problem

Users are nothing but a problem. They’re a blight that causes issues with otherwise perfect servers, networks and systems. At least, that’s what many geeks believe.

It's no surprise that IT departments are the most hated in many organisations. But why is this? It's not because they get paid any more these days, or that their role in the business is any more or less important than anyone else’s.

It’s because they make you feel stupid. It’s only when dealing with the IT department that most people will encounter someone with much more specialist knowledge than them at work. People are scared of the IT department. And the IT department resents everyone else for messing up its perfect IT systems.

A deep-rooted problem

This problem is bad. It’s deep rooted and it has to change. It’s completely counterproductive for everyone involved: both a company’s staff and the IT team itself.

Employees who have problems are reluctant to call IT because they don't want to feel silly. They know that as soon as they end their call to the 'senior technical support assistant' there will be humiliation and cackling. “John in accounts is so stupid that he doesn't know the difference between a back and a forward slash.”

I can imagine the mocking that prevails in IT department as I write. (It really happens – I’ve seen it first hand.) As a result, users tend to put up with problems. Rather than asking for help, they create their own workarounds, often creating more serious problems in the process.

IT people are here to help

As IT people our job is to help. We need to encourage people to call us for even the most minor things. If we don’t, the next time John doesn't call it could mark the start of a malware infection that takes down the company network. Or he might waste his time, taking six hours to do to a spreadsheet what a geek could do in five minutes.

The ‘them and us’ mentality has to stop. And when it does, users will be more productive and happier and the business will be more successful. Business owners must find outsourced IT providers or IT managers that encourage the right attitude. Because without users there are no geeks!

• In-house vs. outsourced IT support
• How to switch IT support companies
• How to make sense of IT support

Lee Wrall is founder and MD of Everything Tech, an IT support and service provider based in Manchester.

IT support is dead

Do you pay for IT support? Does your business regularly suffer downtime? Need help sorting out unreliable email or computers that just don’t work? Been sold white-labeled products just because your IT support company gets a generous referral fee?

It that’s your idea of IT support then let me tell you why I think you are wasting time and money.

There’s no reason to pay for IT support

IT support is based around the premise of fixing problems when they occur and then charging for this. It should come as no surprise that most IT companies make more money through billable hours when disaster strikes than when your network is running smoothly.

In that sense, your objectives and those of your IT company are not aligned when it comes to taking care of your computer systems.

In 2012 there really is no reason to pay for IT support. Technology is at a stage where it just should not fail. Some IT companies make a lot of money adding complexity and then charging an arm and a leg to install and support it.

Ultimately it’s the complexity that leads to downtime. Simplifying your systems and doing things the right way to start with will help you avoid this expense. If you’re like most businesses, technology is your third largest expense after wages and rent. Make your IT budget work for you.

IT support is about maintenance and advice

These days, you should be paying your IT supplier for maintenance (yes, there is still a fee) and best-practice advice. You should be paying for their help to set up systems that are going to work and not let you down.

This means that instead of calling for help when things go wrong you, can call and get help to be even more productive. Find out how to get the most out of Outlook or Word, do more with your tablet computer (such as your iPad or Samsung Galaxy Note) and get to grips with the latest features of Windows 7.

Here’s your best IT investment

In my opinion, the best IT investment any business can make is an IT audit to bring your systems out of the Dark Ages and into 2012. Here are some questions to get you started:

• What IT problems recur again and again and why haven’t they been fixed?
• How old are your computers?
• What version of Windows are you on?
• What version of Microsoft Office are you using?
• Are your staff properly trained in the software they use everyday?
• Is your email reliable?
• Is your data backed up? Do you know how to access and check your backups?
• Are you managing shared documents effectively?
• Are you and your team able to work productively on the go?
• Are you making the most of technologies like cloud and mobile computing?

Discuss these points with your current IT provider. Make sure you’re happy with the answers – and if not, shop around. There are lots of IT support companies out there and it’s important to find one that’s going to work with you and think proactively about your business.

Anyone selling you ‘IT support’ without considering these things is not being honest with you about what’s really possible.

IT support is dead. Long live small business IT consultancy! Ok, it’s not so catchy but it’s going to make your working day a whole lot better.

• How to switch IT support companies
• What to ask when choosing a support company
• Find an IT supplier near you

Francesca Geens runs an IT consultancy called Digital Dragonfly, which specialises in one-person businesses. She is especially interested in productivity and the use of information technology to improve people’s day-to-day business lives. She is setting up a new kind of IT company for small businesses to firmly challenge traditional notions of IT support. Are you ready to Be Nimble with your IT?

Find out more from these IT suppliers:

• Dell
• Acer
• Apple
• Samsung
• Microsoft

20 inspiring and insightful Steve Jobs quotes

1 “What made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world”

2 “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

3 It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

4 “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

5 “Things don’t have to change the world to be important.”

6 “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying ‘we've done something wonderful’, that's what matters to me.”

7 “We don’t do market research. We don’t hire consultants. We just want to make great products.”

8 “The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people – as remarkable as the telephone.” (speaking in 1985)

9 “Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple, but it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

10 “My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other's negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people.”

11 “What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

12 “I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year. It's very character-building.”

13 “You can’t just ask the customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

14 “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.”

15 “You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

16 “When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

17 “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

18 “Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”

19 "I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders' meeting, everyone in the auditorium stood up and gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe that we'd actually finished it. Everyone started crying.''

20 “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

The changing face of IT management

This is a guest post from tech blogger Jason Slater. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter.

The first business computer in the UK was LEO (Lyons Electronic Office). Designed and built for J. Lyons and Co, a catering and food company, it ran its first real program in 1951. LEO was based on the EDSAC computer (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) which was essentially a large calculator that could run pre-designed programs.

In those days a computer easily filled a room and ‘bugs’ were real bugs which would creep in and overheat the delicate vacuum tubes.

In fact, computers were few and far between, so queues to use them were a common sight.

Even into the 1960s (with machines such as the GEC 4000) and the 1970s (with the Xerox Sigma-5), the computing team was primarily engineering based.

The dawn of the desktop

In the ‘80s, many of us witnessed the dawn of the desktop computer. And it really was the desktop computer; it was pretty much tied to the user’s desk by a cable which needed to be plugged into a wall data socket. In those early days you couldn’t even move the computer without ‘parking’ the hard disk heads first.

The desktop computer created a need for IT departments full of people who knew the ins and outs of computers. They were the heroes who could rescue your work after you decided to lift the computer to clean up split coffee, without realising the movement would cause the hard disk heads to mash up the magnetic surface they were meant to be reading. (Should have parked them first.)

The changing IT department

IT departments are more devolved now. They’re more distributed and closely aligned with business strategy. You don’t see IT staff walking around with screwdrivers in their top pocket. They may not even have formal IT qualifications, particularly if IT support functions are outsourced or operated from a central location.

Computer issues are different today and they require different responses. Take the constantly shifting landscape of security threats. This is one of the most challenging areas for IT management.

In the mid-80s the biggest problems often came from users themselves. But now, now problems come from the outside - and they don’t stick to office hours. For instance, dealing with incoming spam email can be a headache.

In the past, the IT department may have been able to watch for specific words or phrases in emails, or spot spam by the address it was sent from. Spammers are more sophisticated now and make it a constant struggle.

Zero-day threats are a major problem too. No matter how up-to-date you keep your security software, you won’t necessarily be protected from threats that haven’t made it into the security software’s list yet.

Now we work everywhere

With the rise in mobility and cloud computing, people are being encouraged to work from anywhere at any time. Out of office hours (and often even during office hours) they use their own equipment – from broadband lines through to smart phones, tablet computers and printers.

It’s hard to provide support when everyone’s using different equipment. And you have to think differently about where your data actually resides. The IT department (or your IT person or IT supplier) needs to think strategically. It is almost impossible to provide a complete support and governance package with such diverse equipment and standards in operation.

(The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park is planning to rebuild the EDSAC computer. If you have a particular interest in EDSAC you could take a look at the EDSAC Simulator from the University of Warwick.)

(Image from Flickr user armaggesin under a Creative Commons attribution licence.)