Allowing IT To Slip Due To Worries Concerning The Expense Is A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Doing some IT support for a business earlier this year, I was concerned by how old a few of their systems were. I originally went in to load up a printer that refused to cooperate with the computer that it was intended to be connected to. I had it working by finding a back door route, but the fundamental challenge was that the software they were operating was really elderly and was having trouble trying cope with something that was much more sophisticated.

I was back a few days later when the business owner’s pc crashed quite stunningly. It took hours to repair, eventually needing a complete rebuild but we got there eventually and I was told that the circumstance isn’t unusual. With the exception of their accounting systems, they had no IT support at all which left them exposed and meant that their computer equipment had fallen increasingly out of date. And this isn’t odd with small firms in the Black Country that are so focused on their main function that the back office work was taken for granted.

This in itself is fine, you don’t have to have the most modern systems, upgrading and renewing every year or even every couple of years, but operating systems and essential software should be upgraded every 3 years at the most. Because some suppliers, partners and customers, especially the major ones, will upgrade and as a matter of everyday business they will trasmit files and data and sooner or later, these files won’t be readable as the formats will be amended. For instance, someone using MS Office from the mid to late 90′s (and many are to my knowledge) will not cope with a file transmitted from Office 2010 and when that happens, everything to do with that partner and information will be frozen. What if it is an invoice or a substantial order? That could be very costly.

The same is true of SEO for companies who put their trade online with a costly and well written website, which looks fabulous, works perfectly and is rarely visited by customers looking to visit that could be going to that firm. Let us say a Black Country steel business is in need of a new lathe and would like to get it from a company close by the area, but cannot find a lathe manufacturer online as all their online searches list firms who are better optimised. Our lathe maker might not even be catalogues with the search engines in which case the most exact search in the world is not going to locate them and they might just as well not bother with a website at all. It could be they know about SEO which, I will acknowledge, has a poor public image sometimes, and they see it as a suspicious outgoing. But good SEO does work, is worth the money and how costly is not getting that lathe order?

Small firms have to concentrate on their main business, of course they do. But they should be kept up to date with their back office systems which means proper IT support, SEO as well as the more obvious such as anti virus software. To let them fall behind too much will eventually make the worried about outlay a self-fulfilling prophecy instead of a help to profitability.

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