How Do I Choose the Right San Diego IT Consulting Company?

When San Diego business leaders are looking for an IT Consulting Company, they often find it challenging to identify the most important criteria for assessing an IT Consulting Company. Here are five questions you should ask any IT Consulting Firm and understand how important each is to your organization.

1) What is the expected response time when we need to reach an IT technician?
For some organizations, it is critical to get help immediately. Others are more comfortable with a 2-hour to 24-hour response time. You also want to be clear about whether there is assistance available during nights and weekends. You do not want to be surprised to find out there is no weekend support when you are working over a weekend for a big presentation.

2) How are issues tracked?
If the IT Consulting Company does not have an internal tracking system to keep on top of all outstanding issues, you may find that you have to follow-up with them to get more complicated issues resolved.

3) Who from your organization can contact the IT Consulting Company?
Some support providers take calls from anyone in your organization. Others require that all contact is through a single individual from your company. While using a single contact gives you more control over your organization’s contact with the IT company, it can slow down the response time.

4) Is the IT Consulting Company a reseller for any hardware or software providers?
Many IT companies find a brand of hardware and/or software they like and become a reseller. While it may be a very good product, it makes the IT company biased when making a recommendation, because they make a profit when selling that specific brand. Other companies choose to not resell any specific brands, so that they can always choose the right product for the specific situation.

5) Can the IT Consulting Company communicate in a non-technical way?
This is not a direct question for the IT company; it is something you should pay attention to during the assessment and quoting process. Some IT consulting companies use a lot of technical jargon. If you do not have a very technical person in your organization to work with them, it can be difficult to clearly communicate with them. They may not fully comprehend your needs and you may not fully understand, and be comfortable with, their recommendations.

When you are assessing IT Consulting Companies, we hope you at least consider using Skyriver IT. However, regardless of who you choose, we want you understand the right questions to ask, so that you can find the right IT Consulting Company for your organization.

Can System Integration Save You Time and Money?

The right system integration can allow you to get more done with less people.

How much time is wasted in your organization transferring information between systems that do not communicate with each other? Salespeople put information into a sales database, finance transfers it to a spreadsheet to analyze results, marketing is gathering information from several sources, and accounting needs to enter everything into the accounting system.

Like most business leaders, you probably realize that there are a lot of inefficiencies in your organization, and you are not sure what to do about it. You may have even tried to integrate things in the past and it failed to work, costing you lots of time and money. So, how can you integrate the collecting and analyzing of all the data in your business the right way?

The key is to ask the right questions before even looking at integration options:

What are the needs of the different departments?

What are the current work flows? Should these be maintained?

Who should have access to which types of data?

How resistant are users likely to be to any changes and what are their incentives to make any changes?

How easily can the current systems be integrated or will it be necessary to migrate at least some portion of the current systems?

Benefits of Integration
If you choose to integrate your systems, you get three key benefits:

• Time Savings - your staff no longer needs to re-enter data that is already in another system. This allows your staff to get more done with less people.
• Increased Accuracy - only entering data once and automating as much as possible reduces the likelihood for error. Therefore, you can be more confident in the data when making decisions.
• Real-Time Data Access - when there is no waiting for data to be entered, you have access to real-time data to allow you to make decisions faster. This keeps you ahead of your competition.

The technology is here for system integration. It is just requires that you pause and analyze your needs along with how your systems can work together. It can often help to use a CIO Service to be sure you are asking the right questions and looking at your full range of options for cost efficient integration.

About Skyriver IT
Our mission at Skyriver IT is to professionalize the IT services business. We provide small and mid-size companies with CIO Services to help them make better IT and business decisions. If you would like to discuss how system integration could help your company be more productive, please feel free call (858) 812-9322 or visit www.SkyriverIT.com

Managed Services: Using The Right IT Person for the Job

As we talk with San Diego business owners and managers, we often get questions related to the value of Managed Services over an in-house IT person. While Managed Services can be used in place of an in-house IT person, it can also be a complement to that individual. The reason is that there are a lot of skills required to do IT well.

Common IT needs include help desk, server management and maintenance, network setup and management, computer and server backup, wireless setup, mobile connectivity and much more. Rarely is a single individual good at all of these things. So, how would you expect a single IT person to be able to meet all of your organization’s IT needs?

A Managed Services provider can assign the right IT specialist for each of your needs. For example, a network engineer can identify network routing problems and implement a solution in half an hour that could take a non-specialist several days of testing and measuring to achieve. This is not a skill set you need regularly, but it is very valuable when it is needed. The same is true of a wireless network or mobile applications.

So, be sure you are getting the right IT skill set for your IT projects. Often, a combination of in-house expertise and a Managed Services provider will give you the best results.

For more ways IT Consulting Services can help your business, visit our www.SkyriverIT.com or contact us directly at (858) 812-9322

What Are the Chances You Have Been Hacked?

There are two types of companies in this country, those who know they've been hacked, and those who don't know they've been hacked

According to US Congressman Mike Rogers, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:

“There are two types of companies in this country, those who know they’ve been hacked, and those who don’t know they’ve been hacked.”

If your business stores important information on servers, in the cloud, or even on individual machines, you need to protect your data. This is best done by establishing appropriate procedures and having software in place to minimize the risk of being hacked as well as identify when you have been hacked. With an early warning system, it is much easier to limit any damage that could be done by hackers.

One of the biggest risks to your data is how your staff uses and stores data. To have proper protection, it is critical to have clear guidelines for how and where sensitive data can be stored. And it must work within your current workflow so that it is easy for staff to protect this data.

So, be sure your data is protected against hacking and that you have the an early warning system in place to alert you when any of your systems have been hacked.

Can We Use CIO Services If We Have In-House IT Staff?

CIO Services can be a great complement to your in-house IT staff. If you have good “get it done” IT people, then you definitely want to keep those people. However, the IT people who are good at taking care of regular IT issues are often not very good at planning and figuring out how IT can support a business strategy.

This is a great situation for using CIO Services. You can leverage the knowledge and experience of a C-level IT person to help you use IT to its best advantage — without having to hire a high-level IT person.

CIO Services can help you:

• Define your IT needs over the next 1-3 years
• Look at your expected growth and figure out where IT can minimize bottlenecks
• Choose the most appropriate application for your needs… the first time (e.g. CRM, phone service, cloud solutions)
• Ensure you are compliant with any regulations about storing and protecting data
• And much more

Using CIO Services is a great strategy for small and mid-size businesses if you want to make the most of your IT investments as well as your internal IT staff.

For more information on San Diego CIO Services, contact Skyriver IT.

Are You Losing Productivity to Slow Computers?

How much time and productivity are slow computers costing your company?

Computers slow down over time and it happens so slowly that we often do not notice it. As flexible human beings, we adapt to the increasingly long waits for the computer to boot up and launch programs. Have you ever thought about how much time and productivity it is costing your organization?

For example, a typical employee boots up their computer once a day and launches 4 programs. With a slower computer, it can easily take 5 minutes to boot up and 2.5 minutes to launch a program. If you take the 5 minutes per boot up and a total of 10 minutes launching programs times 250 working days per year, it is a total of 63 hours each year of unproductive time. And if you have 25 people in your organization, that is over 1500 hours of unproductive time for the year.

Therefore, it is worth refreshing or upgrading your computers on a regular basis. Whether you do it in-house or use a service provider, the time required to do a fresh install of the operating system can be recovered in just a few weeks of faster boot ups and program launches.

For more ways IT Consulting Services can help your business, visit www.SkyriverIT.com or contact us directly at (858) 812-9322

About Skyriver IT
Our mission at Skyriver IT is to professionalize the IT services business. We provide small and mid-size companies with the information and assistance they need to make better IT decisions. If you would like to discuss how to keep your computers running optimally, please feel free call (858) 812-9322.

 

When Should You Choose Managed Services over In-House IT Staff?

If you are a company of 3-10 people, you have typically grown beyond do-it-yourself or Geek Squad support. And hiring a full-time IT person does not make sense. That's when Managed Services can help.

As we talk to business people around San Diego, we are often asked when a business should choose managed services over in-house IT staff. Being a San Diego managed services provider, we recognize we are probably a little biased. However, managed services have a clear advantage in several situations:

1.    Not large enough to support a full-time IT person
Just about every type of business these days relies on IT to a certain degree. However, if you are a company of 3-10 people, you have typically grown beyond do-it-yourself or Geek Squad support. And hiring a full-time IT person does not make sense, because there is not enough work and it would be too expensive. In this case, managed services is a logical solution, because you can get “part-time” help and yet, an IT person is available when you need them (24×7 with Skyriver IT).

2.    Need a wide range of IT skills
Even when your organization is large enough to justify a full-time IT person, it can be difficult to find someone with the right range of skills to serve your company. A typical business needs someone who understands networks, can support individual machines (often PCs and Macs), wireless technologies, mobile, and VOIP. While one individual can learn all these things, a managed service provider can offer the right expert for each of your IT needs.

3.    Want to avoid the hassle of hiring an IT professional
Hiring an IT person can be challenging for business people, because you are looking for a skill set that you cannot assess very well. Using a managed service provider ensures that you are getting IT professionals who have the appropriate skill set for the job.

Of course, there are situations where having an in-house IT staff makes sense. If your IT is strategically important to your business, then you probably want to have in-house IT professionals. And, when you grow to a size where you can justify having a team of IT people, it can be worthwhile to have an in-house team, because different members of your team can be specialized.

For small to mid-size businesses, it is a good idea to at least look at managed services as an option to see if the skill sets and price are a good fit for your business.