Collaborative Consumption is a phrase that seems to have emerged recently from business consultancy and literature. It's a phrase that was invented elsewhere, but actually we've being doing it in the IT industry for years, just under a different name. As usual the IT industry used a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) to describe it. In the IT industry we called it an MSP service, where MSP stands for Managed Service Provider.

IT Support As Collaborative Consumption

Instead of employing a whole IT person many businesses share IT resource with other companies by outsourcing it - in other words Collaborative Consumption. The vehicle for sharing this resource is an IT Services company that acts effectively as a pool of resource that you can use as you need it.

The 7 The Benefits Of Collaborative Consumption For IT Support Services

If you decide to go down the collaborative route instead of hiring your own IT person here are the benefits:

Access to an entire team of IT knowledge rather than being restricted to the knowledge of a single IT Support engineer.

1. You do not require the knowledge, skills or experience to manage IT support engineers.

2. You don't need to spend the management time to manage IT Support engineers.

3. You are not paying for idle resource if you don't have enough work for a full-time IT Support person.

4. Conversely you have access to a much bigger pool of IT Support resource. This allows you to quickly and inexpensively scale up to deal with the peaks of requirement beyond a single in-house IT Support person.

5. No coverage issues during holidays and illness.

6. Continuity of service as you don't need to worry about an employee suddenly leaving.

7. The Extra IT Support Benefits Of An MSP Service

Many businesses pay for their IT Support on an hourly basis - the IT Support industry calls this Break-Fix. Basically it means that the IT Support Company only fixes what's broken - no prevention, no maintenance. And if it takes a long time for them to fix the problem, then you pay a lot. And if they need to return to fix it again you pay again, and again, and again.

The 4 Additional Benefits of an IT Support Managed Service

The alternative is an MSP Service. With a Managed Service you pay a fixed price for an agreed range of IT services - usually all the services to manage and maintain your network on a proactive basis and provide you with unlimited help desk facilities for your staff. In our heart of hearts, even if we can't always prove it, we all know that ultimately problem prevention is cheaper than cure.

That's ultimately why purchasing your IT Support as a managed service is cheaper than just buying hours. Here are the 4 main benefits of a Managed Service over and above Break-Fix:

1. Fixed monthly price.

2. Proactive maintenance that prevents many, but not all, IT problems happening in the first place.

3. Use of IT management systems that you would never know of or be able to afford just yourself:

Automation

Monitoring

Load balancing

Knowledgebase

Speed of operation

4. Faster fixes and less downtime because the IT company knows your system and is proactively managing it for you.

All of this translates into less downtime, less unbudgeted expense and ultimately lower costs. So in summary, buying IT Support time is more cost effective than doing it yourself in-house. You can decide how far you want to go down the collaborative consumption route. If you go the MSP route you get more than collaborative access to time - you get all of the lower cost service by leveraging the expertise and systems if your IT Support Company.

To get more information about IT Support and services, log on to Ziptech Services Ltd.

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