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This post was contributed by CentricsIT Global Services Executive Don Pettingill and Account Executive Evan Arison. Pettingill and Arison work from the CentricsIT office in Charlotte, NC (USA).
Technology organizations continuously struggle with the short term incremental needs of their incident and request management service offerings. The challenge to deliver high quality consistent outcomes continues to increase in difficulty as organizations grow globally and attempt to align a plethora of vendors and service providers to cover the spectrum of physical presence needs present within IT organizations.
Today, it is not uncommon for a mid-sized global organization to have more than 50 technology partners to cover their geographic footprint and have the right repository of skills needed to address any need. Technology providers have continued to become specialists within given technology disciplines further complicating the services processes.
Approximately 30% of IT tasks require physical presence, from break/fix activities all the way to scheduled installs, moves, adds, and/or changes to the existing environment.
To ensure proper coverage, organizations must have end user providers, connectivity providers, data center/data closet providers, hardware providers, cloud providers, application providers, on and on it goes. One final twist – skill levels. Information technology tasks vary greatly in the skill level needed. Installing an end user device requires a different level of skill than does building user profiles for a migration from one operating system to another.
Adjusting to This Demand for Field Engineering Services
The market has attempted to address these fragmented needs through investment in and development of freelance market platforms for organizations to leverage, find talent, engage the talent, pay the talent, etc. Unfortunately, this does not solve the underlying issues around finding, vetting, managing, and paying contingent resources.
Operationalizing and managing these processes inside an organization tends to diminish the value proposition of expected costs reductions through consumption of On Demand labor. Resources must be added to procurement, vendor management, IT ops, etc. to ensure ITSM services appear homogenous to the lines of business across the organization. Furthermore, this management overhead tends to erode the expected freeing of time of valued and skilled technology employees to address more strategic organizational endeavors.
A Global Extension of Your IT Team
CentricsIT understands the dynamics at play here and began the building of a global IT consumption-based offering in late 2012 – On Demand Engineering. Our mission is straight forward: Create a model whereby no matter what the technology asks, no matter where service is needed (or even when), the right skilled and right priced resources arrive, stay as long as needed (hour, day, week, month, year), and complete the assigned tasks. To do this, we realized we needed to build three business lines – deskside, connectivity, and data center/closet resource pools consisting of various skill levels to address the simplest as well as the most complex of asks. Our algorithms internally ensure service delivery aligns with service orders; i.e., we will not send a connectivity engineer to perform a racking and stacking of 4U servers in a data center.
The result is our global coverage of more than 100 countries with contingent technology labor all on one platform with consistent pricing (hourly/SKU) aggregated on one invoice at month end.
CentricsIT becomes an operational extension of our clients’ technology needs ensuring complete transparency of each order to include updating of our clients’ ITSM platforms.
SmartHands Bridges the Gaps with Field Engineering Services and More
Across the globe, organizations are aligning with CentricsIT On Demand Engineering offering to provide contingent quality IT services. Our clients cover the spectrum of industries today to include Pharmaceutical, Manufacturing, Healthcare, IT Services, Banking, Retail, Financial Services, VARs, Energy, and Managed Providers.
A global staffing organization headquartered in London has 15 global offices, and the IT staff has been challenged with managing each office with consistent services, pricing, and quality outcomes through vendors, as no office could justify full time IT staff.
While evaluating our model, a critical outage occurred in their Cape Town South Africa location involving application servers within the staffing company’s HP and Windows 8 environment. CentricsIT dispatched a qualified technician to isolate the failure and immediately begin problem resolution efforts. The Windows 8 environment had become corrupt, damaging a critical storage array device driver and causing Windows 8 to fail at boot-up.
Our technician isolated the device driver at fault, downloaded the proper driver based on equipment information, and returned the client to 100% operational effectiveness while maintaining continuous communication with the client’s services center, ensuring full transparency into his activities.
This staffing organization now has the CentricsIT On Demand offering deployed across its entire company.
Your current IT Tech-to-employee ratio and list of tasks at hand may seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Putting your IT team under more pressure, setting unrealistic timelines/expectations, and paying for “bench-warmers” is not the most efficient option. Let CentricsIT be the helping hand needed to manage your technical support.
With the 2018 fiscal year past its six-month mark, how are programs, projects, and critical initiatives coming along within your organization? Contact Evan Arison to see how SmartHands can work for you.
