Nobody remembers the Tuesday when their email worked.
Nobody goes home and tells their partner:
“You’ll never believe what happened today. I opened Excel and it started immediately.”
Nobody congratulates the office Wi-Fi because Teams stayed connected all afternoon.
And it’s unlikely that your employees will email the Managing Director to report:
“Just wanted you to know that I accessed all my files successfully again today.”
Good IT can be remarkably boring.
Things work.
People get on with their jobs.
Problems are dealt with quickly.
Security threats are stopped without becoming incidents.
Updates install.
Backups complete.
New employees arrive and have what they need.
Old employees leave and their access disappears.
The business carries on.
Unfortunately, bad IT is much more memorable.
Everybody remembers the day nothing worked
Imagine arriving at the office on Monday morning.
Three employees can’t log in.
Someone’s laptop has decided it no longer likes the docking station.
The shared drive is unavailable.
Accounts can’t print.
Outlook keeps asking one employee for their password.
The meeting-room camera isn’t working.
And somebody has just received a very convincing email apparently from the Managing Director asking them to pay an invoice.
The person responsible for IT hasn’t even finished their first coffee.
They now have six different problems to deal with.
And they haven’t been employed to work in IT.
Perhaps they’re the Operations Director.
Commercial Director.
Finance Director.
Office Manager.
Their actual job has been temporarily replaced by:
“Can you sort the IT out?”
That’s the difference poor technology can make to an ordinary working day.
IT should disappear into the background
This may sound strange coming from an IT company, but ideally your employees shouldn’t spend very much time thinking about us.
They should know how to contact us.
They should know somebody will help when they need it.
But most of the time?
They should be concentrating on their own work.
A salesperson should be selling.
An accountant should be working on the accounts.
An engineer should be engineering.
A solicitor should be looking after clients.
A manager should be managing.
The technology should enable those activities without demanding constant attention.
The best IT experience is often the absence of an IT experience.
The problem with judging IT by support tickets
One way of measuring an IT provider is to look at how many problems they fix.
That makes sense.
But there’s a potential flaw.
Suppose Provider A resolves 800 support tickets during the year.
Provider B resolves 450.
Which provider did the better job?
At first glance, perhaps Provider A.
But what if 300 of those extra tickets were recurring problems Provider B would have permanently fixed?
What if Provider B replaced unreliable equipment before it failed?
What if it spotted disk-space problems before computers became unusable?
What if security controls prevented dozens of malicious emails from reaching employees?
What if automated monitoring identified problems before users noticed them?
Suddenly the ticket count doesn’t tell us very much.
The objective of managed IT shouldn’t be to maximise the number of things you fix.
It should be to minimise the number of things your client needs fixing in the first place.
Reactive IT begins with a problem
Traditional IT support is straightforward.
Something goes wrong.
You report it.
Someone fixes it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that model.
For a very small company with simple requirements, it might be perfectly appropriate.
But imagine a business with 35 or 40 employees.
Forty computers.
Microsoft 365.
Shared company data.
Remote workers.
Several business applications.
Cybersecurity requirements.
Multiple suppliers.
New employees joining.
Employees leaving.
Customer expectations.
At that point, simply waiting for users to notice problems isn’t necessarily enough.
Managed IT should begin before something breaks.
What happens when you’re not calling us?
This is one of our favourite questions for businesses to ask their IT provider:
“What are you doing for us when we’re not contacting you?”
Because there should be an answer.
Behind the scenes, a properly managed environment may involve:
- monitoring computers and devices;
- deploying security updates;
- maintaining security software;
- reviewing alerts;
- monitoring Microsoft 365 identities;
- managing licences;
- protecting data;
- maintaining backups;
- managing user accounts;
- reviewing access;
- investigating unusual behaviour;
- maintaining configurations;
- preparing new devices;
- removing access for leavers;
- checking whether expected protection is actually running.
None of those activities necessarily create visible excitement for the client.
That’s rather the point.
Imagine two companies
Let’s look at two fictional companies.
Both employ 35 people.
Both use Microsoft 365.
Both depend heavily on their computers.
Both believe their IT is generally fine.
Company A: “Call us when something breaks”
Their IT provider is helpful.
When something stops working, somebody eventually fixes it.
But almost everything begins with the client reporting a problem.
One laptop is six years old and becoming unreliable.
Nobody knows until it starts crashing.
One employee hasn’t been receiving Windows updates correctly for several months.
Nobody notices.
A former employee still has an active Microsoft account.
Nobody has reviewed it.
A strange application has access to Microsoft 365.
Nobody is monitoring it.
Several users receive regular phishing emails.
They delete most of them.
One doesn’t.
An old mailbox forwarding rule exists that nobody remembers creating.
Everything still appears to work.
Until one day it doesn’t.
Company B: managed IT
Their employees’ experience is less exciting.
They arrive.
Log in.
Work.
When somebody has a problem, they click the support icon or telephone the helpdesk.
Behind the scenes, however, their provider knows which computers it manages.
It knows which protection should be running.
Updates are monitored.
Security systems are reporting.
Microsoft 365 identities are protected and monitored.
Backups are maintained.
Suspicious activity is investigated.
Old access is removed.
Ageing hardware is identified before it becomes an emergency.
The employees experience:
Very little.
That’s the success story.
Prevention doesn’t look impressive
Suppose we identify that the storage on a user’s computer is becoming critically full.
We resolve it before the machine stops working properly.
How much downtime did the business experience?
None.
Suppose endpoint security identifies malicious activity and blocks it.
How much ransomware did the employee experience?
None.
Suppose an unusual Microsoft 365 application is discovered and removed before it is abused.
What did the Managing Director see?
Nothing.
Suppose we identify that ten laptops are approaching replacement age and build them into next year’s budget.
How many emergency hardware purchases does Finance have to deal with?
Hopefully fewer.
Preventative IT has a marketing problem.
Its successes often look exactly like nothing happening.
Cybersecurity has the same problem
You can physically see somebody repair a broken computer.
Security is different.
How do you show somebody an email they never received because it was blocked?
How do you show them the account compromise that never happened?
The ransomware that didn’t execute?
The malicious application that was removed?
The suspicious login that was investigated?
The data that remained safe?
Good cybersecurity isn’t about producing dramatic-looking dashboards.
It’s about reducing the likelihood that the business experiences the drama in the first place.
“Nothing happened” can be a very good monthly report
Imagine a monthly conversation with the person responsible for IT.
No serious security incidents.
Backups healthy.
Devices reporting correctly.
Updates deployed.
No major recurring support issues.
No unexpected administrator accounts.
No critical hardware failures.
Everything is stable.
That can sound underwhelming.
But imagine the alternative report:
Three employees lost half a day.
A laptop failed without warning.
Nobody knows whether the backup worked.
A former employee still had access.
Finance almost paid a fraudulent invoice.
A cyber incident is being investigated.
The first report suddenly looks much better.
Fast support still matters
Proactive management doesn’t eliminate support.
Technology will always occasionally go wrong.
Employees will always need help.
Someone will forget a password.
An application will misbehave.
A printer will decide it’s Monday.
That’s why response time still matters.
When an employee cannot work, every minute matters to the business.
For the employee, the quality of their IT company may be judged almost entirely by:
Can I get hold of somebody?
Do they understand my problem?
How quickly can I get back to work?
That’s perfectly reasonable.
Managed IT therefore needs both sides:
Prevent as many problems as possible.
And:
Respond quickly when something still goes wrong.
The person responsible for IT should have less IT to deal with
For a 25–50 person organisation, there’s usually somebody internally who ends up responsible for the relationship with the IT provider.
They may not be technical.
Nor should they need to be.
Perhaps they’re a Commercial Director.
Operations Director.
Finance Director.
Office Manager.
Their role shouldn’t involve spending hours every week:
- Chasing support tickets.
- Coordinating suppliers.
- Checking whether problems have been fixed.
- Dealing with individual employees’ computer issues.
- Trying to understand security alerts.
- Working out which laptops need replacing.
- Wondering whether backups work.
The IT provider should remove that burden rather than become another supplier that needs managing.
A good relationship should feel more like:
“We own the IT problem. We’ll keep you informed.”
Good support reduces noise
Think about the internal noise poor IT creates.
An employee tells their manager.
The manager tells the person responsible for IT.
They contact the IT company.
The employee is asked for more information.
The internal manager follows up.
Someone asks whether it’s fixed.
Someone else has the same problem.
Another ticket is raised.
Multiply that across 30 or 40 employees and IT starts consuming management time even when the individual problems are relatively small.
A good managed service should remove as much of that friction as possible.
Employees should know where to get help.
The helpdesk should deal directly with ordinary user issues.
The internal IT contact should become involved when their business knowledge or authority is actually required.
That’s a far better use of everyone’s time.
Recurring problems shouldn’t become company folklore
Most offices have them.
“Oh, that printer always does that.”
“Teams never works properly in that room.”
“You have to restart it before opening the accounts system.”
“Don’t use that Wi-Fi network.”
“Sarah’s computer has always been slow.”
People laugh about these problems.
Then they build workarounds around them.
Eventually the workaround becomes part of the company’s unofficial operating manual.
That’s not ideal.
A recurring problem deserves a different question:
Why does this keep happening?
Sometimes the answer is obvious.
Old hardware.
Poor Wi-Fi coverage.
A bad application.
Incorrect configuration.
Insufficient resources.
Sometimes it requires investigation.
Either way, closing the same ticket repeatedly isn’t the same thing as solving the problem.
Growing companies eventually outgrow reactive IT
This often happens gradually.
When a company employs five people, one technically capable person may be able to help everybody.
At ten employees, perhaps a local IT person visits when needed.
At twenty, the environment becomes more complicated.
By thirty or forty employees, things can look very different.
There are more devices.
More Microsoft accounts.
More applications.
More data.
More employees needing support.
More starters and leavers.
More security exposure.
And a greater cost when systems fail.
The IT arrangement that worked perfectly well when the company employed eight people may simply not be the right model when it employs 38.
That’s not necessarily anybody’s fault.
The business has changed.
Its IT needs to change with it.
What should good managed IT feel like?
For the Managing Director:
Predictable.
For Finance:
Budgetable.
For the person responsible for IT:
Under control.
For employees:
Easy to get help.
For the security of the business:
Watched.
For everyone:
Boring.
Because exciting IT usually means something has gone wrong.
Seven signs your IT may be creating too much noise
Ask yourself whether any of these sound familiar.
- Employees regularly complain about response times
They’re waiting too long to get back to work. - The same problems keep returning
Tickets are being closed, but root causes aren’t necessarily being addressed. - The person responsible for IT spends too much time chasing the provider
Your IT company has become something else to manage. - Nobody can clearly explain what happens proactively
Everything seems to begin with a support ticket. - Hardware gets replaced when it fails
There is no real lifecycle planning. - Cybersecurity is difficult to explain
You have products, but nobody is completely sure who is monitoring them or what happens when an alert occurs. - You’re not confident what would happen during a serious incident
That’s worth discovering before one happens.
None of those individually means you have a bad IT company.
But several together may suggest the business has outgrown its current support model.
Ask your employees one question
Here’s a simple test.
Ask several employees independently:
“What’s it like getting IT help here?”
Don’t ask the IT provider.
Ask the users.
If the answers are:
“Pretty easy.”
“I just call them.”
“They normally sort it.”
“I click the icon and raise a ticket.”
“I don’t really have many problems.”
That’s encouraging.
If the answers involve sighing before they’ve even started speaking, you may have learnt something useful.
Ask the person responsible for IT another question
Now ask them:
“How much time do you spend managing IT problems?”
This can be even more revealing.
For a growing organisation, one of the benefits of outsourcing IT properly is not simply access to technical skills.
It’s giving management time back to the business.
The Commercial Director shouldn’t be acting as an unpaid IT service manager.
Good IT isn’t about technology
Not really.
It’s about outcomes.
Your employees can work.
Customers can communicate with you.
Information is available.
Systems are secure.
Problems are dealt with.
Risks are managed.
Technology supports the business rather than interrupting it.
That’s why we don’t think the best measure of an IT provider is how technical they sound.
It’s how effectively they make technology somebody else’s problem.
We call it Frustration Free IT
At Bitwise-IT, our aim isn’t to make IT more interesting.
Quite the opposite.
We want it to become something our clients spend less time thinking about.
That means looking after the technology in the background.
Protecting users and devices.
Monitoring for threats.
Planning ahead.
Supporting employees when they need us.
And taking ownership when something goes wrong.
If we do all of that well, most employees should have a remarkably uneventful relationship with their IT.
And we’re completely comfortable with that.
Because good IT is boring.
Bad IT is unforgettable.
Has your business outgrown its current IT support?
Bitwise-IT provides managed IT and cybersecurity services to businesses across Essex and beyond.
We particularly work with organisations that have reached the point where technology is too important to be managed reactively, but they don’t want or need to build a complete internal IT department.
If you employ around 25–50 people and the person responsible for IT is spending too much time dealing with IT, we’d be happy to have a conversation.
The objective isn’t to give you more IT.
It’s to give you less IT to worry about.
