General IT Support Firm Selection Criteria
Most small businesses looking for an IT provider make a series of mistakes that often lead them toward a path that endangers their infrastructure, data security, and operational abilities (up-time). A wrong approach almost always leads small businesses to have to look for new IT support providers again.
Step 1 - Criteria
It is of paramount importance to have a predefined selection criteria with pertinent questions prior to the commencement of the interviewing process. Unfortunately, that is not the practice that is used by a predominance of small businesses looking for an IT Company.
Case Study: As an example, we will use a company we dealt with in West Los Angeles. The approach to the interview process was just asking general questions based on the course of the discussion and not having any list of relevant questions based on the specific needs of the company. The result was that out 10 potential IT services providers that were interviewed, the interviewer was simply overwhelmed by the volume of personal impressions, having no hard data to compare the candidate IT Consulting companies against each other on an equivalent terms. The result of this endeavor was that the computer network experts that we selected, did not live up to the needs of the customer because those needs were never matched during the selection process. A year later, the customer was doing the entire process from scratch.
The client has a responsibility to match its needs and the IT Consulting company’s capabilities in:
- Security standards desire
- Proactive management of the network versus only responsive work
- Standards of response time to predefined failure events
- Speed of response capabilities for remote troubleshooting and for on-site repair
- Network design abilities
- Anti-virus protection and data backup management standards
- Size of the support team
- Level of organization with the IT Support company
- Level of supervision and quality control within the IT Support company
Step 2 - Interview
The inter view process has to be replicable, consistent, and standardized to have the same scenario and questions be answered by all providers. This will allow for apples to apples comparison among all the IT Consulting companies.
Geographical Considerations of IT Support in Los Angeles
Despite the fact that the general evaluation formula works everywhere, the considerably large supply of IT services companies in Los Angeles area has made the pre-selection process very labor intesive, if a quality provider is to be picked. This is because it is almost a sea of providers of all types of sizes, proficiencies, abilities, and specializations.
One solution to overcoming this obstacle is to first contact computer network support companies that have demonstrably invested a lot of effort and money in internal system development and process building. Consulting is a labor intensive industry and the more the IT support firm has done to standardize best practices and its internal operations, the better their service will be. These companies are obvious by the amount of effort they invest into their web site, the quality of content that they produce, and of course the quality and volume of current client recommendations. Good providers will have plenty of client recommendations right on their site. This is an issue specific to Los Angeles because it is so large.