Displaying items by tag: IT Support Los Angeles

Monday, 24 October 2011 08:13

Why is ITIL Important in Selecting Los Angeles IT Consulting Companies

It is one thing to claim that a regional IT Consulting company is good at what it does or that “hundreds of satisfied clients can attest to its success.” It is another to backup those claims with real methodology that is consistently successful, replicable, and transparent, even in a large market such as Los Angeles where there are so many IT Consulting companies. Then the question arises, how does a prospective client determine IT Consulting firms that have raised themselves above the amature line from those that have not.

One possible answer to this questions can be separated into its components. Companies in need of outside IT support need a very high degree of qualified IT staff availability, consistently high quality of troubleshooting, and the highest degree of IT network design and proactive planning.

Scenario
We can use an example to demonstrate how this would work. Let’s say a company is looking for an IT Consulting company in Los Angeles for one of its regional offices located in the Los Angeles area. The local office has around 40 machines that have several servers, including a data server, a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), an Exchange Server, and several Virtual Servers running application servers such as MAS 200 and a bar code / electronic paper storage server.

When the IT manager is tasked with selecting a local IT Consulting and Support firm, the question arises of what should the criteria be and how do we identify a Consulting firm that is truly looking our for our needs from the ones that just know the terminology. After interviewing several candidates, the IT manager is no closer to the answer than before the process began. The IT manager asked the IT Consulting candidate firms if their staff members have MCP or MCSE or CCNA. Having dealt in the past with professionals possessing these certifications, the IT manager does not have a strong feeling that these criteria will provide assurance of success. What he or she is left with is, just a hunch and a personal feeling of who would do a better job, but not a real answer.

Solution
To truly resolve this intellectual impasse, the Los Angeles based regional office needs to ask itself a few questions based on the type of IT network that it is running and the it stated goals.
Based on its current IT system, this company needs to identify a Los Angeles IT Consulting firm that can ensure:

Timely updates to all physical and virtual servers (timely means that as these updates appear, the impact of their deployment is assessed by a qualified team and scheduled for deployment shortly after they become available)
- The timing of such deployments have to be planned in accordance with the understanding of the operational environment of the local, sister, and parent offices.
Proactive planning of computer network design and structure to ensure best practices in intrusion security, permission security, data access security, and operational efficiency.
A streamlined and timely bilateral communication system between all the pertinent technical and administrative departments with the client’s operations with the IT Support firm’s decision makers and operations managers.
Continuous preventative maintenance and support activity to minimize IT network downtime and inefficiency both at the entire network level, server levels, and nod levels.

Besides these operational goals, the local office would be wise to look for a Los Angeles based local IT Consulting company that can:

Improve customer satisfaction through a professional approach to service delivery
Improve IT services through the use of proven best practice processes
Improve ROI of IT expenditures
Improve delivery of third party services such as ISPs and others
Improve morale recipient staff
Increase productivity of client’s own local IT staff
Reduce cost of IT system training
Improve systems/ applications availability
Reduce cost/ incident
Reduce hidden costs that traditionally are not easily visible
Improve asset utilisation
Be a clear business differentiator from competitors (be a strategic enable for business profitability)
Closely align to commercial business services and products
Provide greater visibility of IT costs
Provide greater visibility of IT assets

Without some sort of a magic wand, how would a potential client, such as our IT manager be able to truly test and/or identify an IT Consulting firm in Los Angeles that delivers these results in deed, not in word? We arrive at an answer, a commitment to an IT services provider standard that encompasses it all. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a standard of performance that an IT Consulting firm should ascribe to and adhere to in order to provide the client with the above goals on a consistent basis. While this standard of performance and a methodology that is not perfect, it give companies much better indicators of what to expect from a potential IT provide. At least, this approach could serve as a viable and operationally pragmatic starting point for an informed selection criteria.

Selecting IT Consulting Company in Los Angeles

The challenge of selecting an IT Consulting company in Los Angeles is composed of multiple layers that must be understood prior to making a decision. It would appear at first glance that this formula would be the same in any region, however, practice proves otherwise.

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.

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