The days of your business not needing some kind of IT support for the technologies it relies on to run have passed. The question then becomes whether you should hire an in-house IT support person (or team) or hire an outside service. When making this determination, you should consider these factors.
Immediacy
An in-house IT specialist will likely be able to address issues or questions right away, in-person. In-house IT will be able to fix large or small problems without other members of your staff having to give up billable hours to work on a tech problem. However, a third-party company will have many employees that will be able to help your business during a crisis, even if your usual assigned contact isn’t available.
Internal or External Opinion
Hiring a third-party IT specialist or company comes with the benefit of them being able to look at your system from the outside and offer a fresh perspective that might not be readily apparent to internal staff. That being said, in-house IT specialists can get to know your systems intimately and use their familiarity to offer you the best technological advice based on their experience with your business and its technology. Both approaches have their own strengths.
Consider the Cost
While cost is not the end-all when making a crucial business decision, it’s certainly a factor. An in-house IT employee or team usually ends up costing more, between needing to pay them a salary and benefits. If they are only needed part-time, that can reduce cost as benefits wouldn’t necessarily have to be paid, but that could also affect availability of that employee when they’re really needed. Contracting with an Ottawa tech support company does usually end up being cheaper.
A Blend of Both
It’s entirely possible to have something of a blend of both, if you can make it work well for your organization. For example, having both an in-house IT person and a hired service can mean the hired service takes care of the day-to-day troubleshooting and technology questions from employees while your own IT employee can focus his or her energy on analyzing, developing and updating your existing systems.
Your business should most definitely have some kind of IT specialists, whether they’re in-house employees or a contracted company. Get quotes from a number of different third-party providers and estimate the costs of hiring the necessary IT employees, along with thinking long and hard of the benefits to each approach. Or try the hybrid approach, for what may be the best of both worlds.
