Leading executives, managers, and experts from SMBs and large enterprises share their insights and perspectives with bMighty on a host of IT issues, challenges, and opportunities that small and midsize businesses face.
Defining IT services sounds like a luxury for smaller businesses with limited staff and resources and lots to do. But according to Hank Marquis, director of IT service management consulting at Enterprise Management Associates and a former managing partner and the CTO at itSM Solutions, defining IT services is the first step in ensuring that your IT department not only functions and keeps your business up and running but also can contribute to your business' success. As Marquis points out, every business has access to the same tech tools -- it's how you use them that can give your smaller business a competitive advantage. bMighty spoke to Marquis to learn how small and midsize businesses can begin to see their IT departments as business partners and let them help the business take on their larger size competitors -- and win.
bMighty: Defining IT services seems like a "big company" task. Why do small and midsize businesses, with small IT departments, have to do this?
Hank Marquis: Small and midsize businesses have to take into account that they need to define IT services. It's more a question of maturity than size. The IT manager in an SMB has all the information. I just worked with a small real estate firm that had a small IT organization, but the IT guys had no idea what the agents did. Management and users there felt like IT was a necessary evil and it's important for them to understand why management and users felt the way they did -- because they were really not friendly or forgiving. That's what I mean by maturity. A more mature organization has an understanding of what users do. But they also don't understand that those agents are sitting in a car trying to get directions to a house and the server is down.
Search our database of 200,000 solution- provider locations by business activity, technology, vertical market, and customer size. Find a technology partner NOW.
