Someone sent me an email about my blog and the small business in which she works. She wrote, “Level 2 sounds like my workplace. It drives me insane that we have no in-house IT person. I feel that any business over a certain size should have at the very least a part-time in house IT person. I think it is very difficult for a smaller, less ambitious business to ever reach a ‘level 3′ collaborative mindset without IT support. Businesses like that don’t have the resources or the ambition to get truly quality IT support, so I think the relationship with support becomes a lesser (and costlier) version of in-house support. I know the mindset at my workplace is that we are only paying when we have a problem, but not only do we often have problems, we are also only troubleshooting, never innovating, so we’re not only paying too much to maintain the status quo, we’re also failing to exploit a lot of growth and quality. Drives me crazy!”

There is a lot of wisdom in her comments - most certainly for smaller businesses, but also for large companies with ’small thinking’ about IT. The notion of outsourcing selections of IT services is absolutely fine - perhaps even essential to reaching high Business-IT Maturity (a good topic for a future post, methinks!) But, I strongly believe there are some aspects of IT that cannot be outsourced without giving away the farm. There are IT services that are purely “keep the trains running and the lights on” kinds of things - back-up and recovery, preventive maintenance, bug fixes, updating computers and networks, and so forth. These are services that can be fairly easily outsourced. There are other services that are about finding and fulfilling opportunities to use IT for business value - solving business problems, if you will. The “fulfilling” aspects of these services are relatively easily outsourced, but not so the “finding” aspects. For this to work well you need either or both of:

1. Business-savvy IT professionals working closely enough with the business to really understand the business problems (or the business customer’s problems!) and the opportunities for IT to solve them.
2. IT-savvy business professionals working closely enough with the IT folks (whether in-house or outsourced) to really understand the business problems (or the business customer’s problems!) and the opportunities for IT to solve them.

Small (or small-minded) business can rarely afford path #1 above, so they have to go down path #2. The conundrum is, how did they get to be IT-savvy? Ultimately, this is a function of business leadership. In today’s information- and technology-intensive world, I don’t think you have a right to be a business leader without both being IT-savvy yourself, and being determined that the other business leaders also become IT-savvy. The one thing you can never outsource is your responsibility to your stakeholders (your customers, employees, owners) to understand and fully leverage information and IT for advantage.

My emailer’s message is telling - by under-investing in IT, they are in a vicious cycle. IT does not work properly, therefore IT is an evil to avoid, therefore we should spend less on it. As I like to say (though not an original quote!) - businesses get the IT they deserve!