Shift Your Company’s Health Paradigm

Let’s break the 4^th wall and come out into the open that I am a business development associate, and as my title reflects, I am responsible for developing the business of Endsight. Coming from a much more analytical and sociological background, I have been trying to come to a conclusion as to what exactly this entails for me. I know that Endsight sells outsourced IT management, that we assign a CIO, that we have system administrators and help desk guys. But so what?

This is all spectacular and innovative for clients but unless people know what that means for them, this laundry list of services will never take on their full potential. I call people all day long, people with the same problems and issues as I do, but unless I can resolve a pain, whether it be loss of productivity, finances, or customers, people will not take the time to hear about our company. Yes they may be  interested in our service, but they are really interested in what it can DO for them. This big WHAT is stress!

People always want a quick fix for stress and inconvenience in their lives. The same holds true for IT mangement and computer support. But everything in life takes a re-adjustment of perspective for long term goals to be accomplished. To lose weight, you cannot just react to weight gain but proactively help yourself through daily maintenance. And this process is an entire adjustment in thinking that requires someone to change their daily habits and complete nutrition paradigm. The same holds true with IT support. For the burden and stress of computer, server, and application maintenance, one must shift their way of thinking.

Yes- computer support has been done, but we aren’t trying to provide the latest “fad”, but a new way of thinking about computer health and the health of your company.  Humans are subject to their surroundings and must change as they become older, as health concerns arise, as politics evolve- in a long term fashion. A business is not much different in the organic sense of change.

And let’s now come full circle to the underlying issue of stress. If humans and companies are not much different, then shouldn’t they both address the issue of stress similarly? People become fatigued, irritable, desperate, unfocused and even in pain during the onset of stress. Don’t companies then suffer from these same symptoms? 

Endsight provides an awesome service from competent people, but what we really do is shift your business health paradigm. Stress cannot be ignored- it’s the fundamental problem which seems to cause the chain reactions in our lives, and in our businesses, that we dread the most.  

Proactive Support: The Unsung Hero

When supporting a Windows network, there are really two main components that have to be addressed: proactive and reactive Information Technology support.

Many companies in our service area - San Francisco Bay Area and East Bay Area - may not realize the importance of proactive support. It provides the base level that allows reactive support to be productive. For a network to be reliable, both elements need to be in place and focusing on the reactive will only delay problems, not stop them.

Granted, some companies don’t have the resources allocated to provide both elements and simply react when things inevitably go wrong. Many IT consulting companies focus on reactive support which is cost-ineffective because the IT companies bill so many hours trying to fix problems that weren’t handled proactively.

Proactive Bay Area IT Support Will Save You Money

For example, a hard-drive fails on RAID 5 (with redundancy) but because there are still two more drives that are working, the problem goes unnoticed. So when then next hard-drive fails and the network goes down, the IT consulting company then gets to bill tons and tons of hours to ‘fix’ the network because they didn’t proactively support their network. This situation works out great for the IT provider because they make a lot of money, but really poorly for the client because they have to spend more than they budgeted for and their network is down.

That is the exact reason why my employer, Endsight, in Berkeley, CA, developed a division that is solely dedicated to providing proactive support on month-to-month rather than an hourly basis. In this way engineers aren’t bogged down with handling reactive issues and can take the time and care to adequately analyze our clients systems to prevent as many common problems from materializing. They also don’t have to worry about how many hours our clients have “approved” and thus they can actually do thorough and complete work.

While our Bay Area IT System Administrators are handling our clients’ in the proactive support, we also have a Bay Area Response Center that is situated to respond to any immediate calls. In this way Endsight has been able to clearly define the difference between proactive and reactive support and delegate tasks to either group to provide an extremely cost-efficient model that allows our clients to have enterprise level IT support and a lower total cost than those focused on reactive only.

Being Invisible is Good for Bay Area IT Management Clients

Unfortunately, the very nature of the proactive support is preventative and thus it tends to go unnoticed. This means that the better job someone does, the less likely anyone recognizes and appreciates those efforts. Companies don’t spend any part of their day thinking about their network unless they have to, so naturally if everything is going well, they won’t think about the proactive support that is being done which leads to complacency.

It takes continual involvement on our part to educate our clients in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area on the implementation and upkeep that is occurring and the active care that is being provided. Proactive support is not only great for our clients but also good for us as the outsourced IT provider because the more issues we can handle proactively, there are fewer issues we have to handle reactively.