Steps to IT Maintenance Success

Organizations, large and small, have long taken a reactive approach to managing, and even selecting their IT support vendors. And who can blame them? Normally the companies that sell the systems or software will significantly discount the support for the first year, or even few years. Then, after those discounts drop off and prices escalate, it is far more efficient to renew the contract with the OEM than research your alternatives, go through the process of assessing each, then signing with a support provider you may not have worked with in the past. Renewing through your OEM may be the “safer” choice. But in reality, this is how organizations end up spending more money than they should for the maintenance services being provided.

Support contracts are value propositions just like your product purchases, even if they may be harder to quantify. Has your services sales account manager ever told you to “maximize the value of your product investments by purchasing a support plan for them”? This is good advice, but who then, is maximizing the value of your support purchases? That is something that only you can do, and there are several important steps involved in that process. The next several entries will examine each of these steps:

1. Determine Support Needs For Each Asset
2. Research Alternatives For Maintenance Provision
3. Identify Best Suited Maintenance Provider
4. Assess Each Maintenance Provider
5. Select a Maintenance Provider
6. Administer Contracts Proactively
7. Monitor Maintenance Providers Performance

After we are done examining each of these steps, we will look forward to how you can efficiently and intelligently carry out this process.

Reducing IT Support and Maintenance Expenditures

Hello

This will serve as my first official post, and I’d love to hear from those of you in the IT world who have played, or currently play a role in your organizations IT support decisions, and consequently, the costs associated with these contracts.

I’ve spent the majority of my professional career managing support services teams. The majority of that time has been spent in support services on the OEM side. For good or for bad, I’ve listened to, discussed with, and worked to quell every customer complaint or concern imaginable. But, their challenges were usually similar, and most organizations faces at least one (and usually each) of these three:

1. Escalating contract costs and difficulty in properly budgeting expenditures given sometimes unpredictable price increases from one year to the next

2. Difficulty in managing several contracts from various vendors with different terms and deliverables

3. The time, resources, and uncertainty involved in performing a diligent assessment of alternative support providers, and the peace of mind that the quality will be high, and the price reasonable

It is my intention to help alleviate these challenges, and I have some ideas on how that can be done. But, in the meantime, I’d love to get insights from my peers in the IT community. I look forward to hearing from you