No news is good news in IT, right?
Technology is generally supposed to function behind the scenes. When you become aware of technology’s presence during your workday, then, it is almost always because something is going wrong.
This puts your IT provider in a peculiar position—if your systems are well-oiled and healthy, it might not seem as though the engineer is actually doing anything. Not only that, but the entire reason you outsourced was to remove technology from your plate altogether.
So how are you to know if you’re really getting any value out of your IT investment?
Evaluate your provider based on these factors:
1) How do your engineers record the details of their interaction?
IT is complex—there’s no way around it.
If your provider isn’t documenting what they do in a systematic, repeatable manner, don’t expect them to come through with information when you ask them for it (and while you’re at it, lower your overall service expectations, too).
Imagine if your doctor didn’t keep record of your medical history. Yikes!
2) How does your provider communicate information internally?
If I have a document that intricately and flawlessly lays out the configuration, composition, and function of your network and I keep it locked in a filing cabinet at my home, how much good is that document doing you?
Documentation is useless if it cannot be easily shared. What is your provider’s Client Management System? What tools have they provided to make it easy to share information across employees? What forms of information are included in this documentation? (Just emails? Phone calls? Visits? Invoices? All of the above?)
The more, the better.
3) How do they give you a report on what they did?
The crux of any good relationship is communication (yes, even in IT).
Not only should your provider communicate what has been done (whether it’s on-premise, remote, or otherwise), but they should let you know what is left, what problems they uncovered, what patterns they’ve seen, and what they recommend moving forward.
The best providers will do this, and also allow you access to information on-demand through a client portal or a similar platform.
In a perfect world, your provider showed you examples of these reports before you ever signed on for their services, and their references confirmed that they’ll follow through with all of their promises.
But, if you happened to skip those steps during your vetting process, stick to these three questions to make sure that your IT team is putting your money where their mouth is.