Outsourcing is the latest and greatest way for companies to cut down on operating costs. There may be a few tasks which need to happen on a regular basis, but not often enough to warrant having a full time, or even part time, employee on the payroll. Some services work well on an ad hoc basis, such as recruitment. Others work far better with a service level agreement, IT services for example. Why are IT SLAs a better idea than ad hoc work though?
One of the main reasons why IT SLAa are a great idea is because of the personal touch that you can get. Typically, when you sign an SLA, a technician will be assigned to your company. You are likely not the only contract that the technician works on, you and the technician will get to know one another really well. This means that you will get to know each other’s quirks and way of speaking. The technician will get to know how much you know about your system and how adept you are at finding the problem, even if you are not able to fix it yourself. This puts both of you on the same page and can make fixing problems easier and faster.
Another great reason for considering IT SLAs instead of ad hoc IT outsourcing is system knowledge. The technician that is assigned to you will get to know your system and how your company operates quite intimately. Once again, this can make tracking down and fixing the problem a lot faster as they do not have to start from scratch and track your company’s IT task flow each time there is a problem. This can save a lot of time and thus you can make better use of the hours that you pay for each month.
There are a lot of advantages to IT SLAs. What it eventually boils down to is that you save money in the long run. You are billed for a specific number of hours each month, but those hours are spent actually fixing the problem rather than having a technician spend the first hour you are billed for figuring out how your system works.