Allowing IT To Slip Through Worries Concerning The Price Is A Recipe For Disaster

Doing some IT support for a firm earlier this year, I was struck by how old some of their systems were. I first went in to connect up a printer that refused to play ball with the computer that it was intended to be connected to. I managed to get it sorted through a back door method, but the fundamental problem was that the software they were using was rather outdated and was having a job cope with something that was considerably more sophisticated.

I was asked back a few days later when the firm owner’s machine crashed quite spectacularly. It took ages to repair, eventually needing a complete rebuild but we got there in the end and I found out that the position isn’t out of the ordinary. With the exception of their accounting software, they had no IT support at all which left them exposed and meant that their computer equipment had fallen more and more out of date. And this isn’t unusual with smaller businesses in the Black Country that are so focused on their primary function that the admin work was taken for granted.

This in itself is not an issue, you don’t have to have the most recent systems, upgrading and changing every year or even every couple of years, but operating systems and essential software should be upgraded every 3 years at the most. Because some suppliers, partners and customers, especially the major ones, will upgrade and as a matter of everyday business they will trasmit files and data and one day, these files will not be readable as the formats will change. For instance, somebody running Microsoft Office from the mid to late 1990′s (and plenty are to my knowledge) will not cope with a file sent from Office 2010 and when the day comes, everything to do with that partner and work will come to a halt. What if it’s an invoice or a big order? That could be very costly.

The same pertains of SEO for businesses who put their trade online with a dear and well designed website, which looks fabulous, behaves efficiently and is rarely visited by people looking to buy that could be going to that company. Let us say a Black Country steel business needs a new lathe and would intend to purchase from a business close by the district, but can’t find a lathe maker on the web because all their online searches list businesses who are better optimised. Our lathe manufacturer might not even be lodged with the search engines in which case the most exact search in the world is not going to find them and they may as well not bother with a website at all. Maybe they are aware of SEO which, I will confess, has a poor PR image sometimes, and they regard it as an untrusted cost. But good SEO does work, is worth the outlay and how expensive is not winning that lathe order?

Small firms have to focus on their primary business, of course they do. But they need to be kept up to date with their support systems which means good IT support, SEO as well as the more obvious such as anti virus software. To let them get behind too far will eventually make the worried about outlay a self-fulfilling prophecy instead of an aid to profitability.

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