Displaying items by tag: IT Support

Thursday, 01 December 2011 07:50

Top 10 Criteria for Selecting an IT Consulting Company in Los Angeles

Having an inside view of the IT Consulting industry in several cities, we wanted to share some of the pitfalls that business owners fall into when selecting and IT Consulting Company in Los Angeles market. Whenever we bring in new clients that are switching from another IT solutions company, we learn a little more about what typically goes wrong. Based on this experience we have put together a quick list that can help business owners steer clear of poor response time, lack of experience, poor knowledge, limited capabilities, lack of value added services, high pricing, poor organization, and more.

1. Years In Business - This seems like a non-merit based criteria. However, this speaks a lot to the staying power of a company. In computer network support industries, companies that do not deliver a consistent service with stable response times and problem solving capabilities do not stay in business as a company for longer than 2 to 3 years. This is a big issue in large metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles where there is an overabundance of IT techs who claim to be good. It is important to be able to deffirentiate between claims and the facts.

2. Staff Selection Criteria - If your potential IT provider tells you that they rely solely on years of experience and/or certifications for selecting their staff, then this is an indication of potential future problems. We have interviewed hundreds of candidates over the years and have a good understanding of what works. Strong analytical skills are a prerequisite in this industry, much more so than certifications or decades of experience.

3. Staff Contracting - If the staff that the IT services company uses are not dedicated full time employees, than that indicates that the organization does not dedicate resources to staff training, development, and is also a potential security risk.

4. Operations Department (Helpdesk) Organization - It is critical that there is a very high degree of internal organization within the IT support company because in this field of work the most important elements in delivering a quality service is full retention of all the voluminous information about systems and works being done and communications among the staff, management, and clients. This is a much more strenuous environment in this respect than many other service industries.

5. Large Customer Base Similar to Your Business Needs - Believe it or not, a provider with a large customer base is good indication. As long as that large customer base is similar in needs to your organization, this can serve as an indicator that this IT company is doing things right. This is also an indication that the provider will have much more depth and breadth of experience and be more creative with solutions to infrastructure related needs.

6. Comprehensive IT Offerings - IT companies that deliver a limited pool of services can not grow with or even meet the current needs of the client. You don’t want your IT support to be learning on you how to solve problems and how to implement a new system that your business needs. A company that has experience in supplemental IT offerings can support your business needs on any issue. General products to look out for are, Cloud Hosting, Managed Services Platform utilization, Anti-Virus integration, off-site and on-site back up synchronization, data replication services, Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) management, Voice over IP (VOIP) support and implementation, Server Management, and much more.

7. On-Site Service - If the provider is prepared for expedient on-site response, then you could be in for a lot of hurt. In large cities such as Los Angeles it is easy to find IT contractors. Many IT service companies can get someone out to you once in a while, but if they are not locally staffed with the trained in-house staff members, they can’t help you when your servers are on fire. They can’t help if this is a big picture issue and they send a local person who is not familiar with your environment.

8. Multi-Tier Support Staff - If the staff that supports your firm does not have multiple tiers of support than that is also an indication that they do not have the depth of knowledge and experience that is so good that they want to make tiers to keep them away from the everyday troubleshooting tickets. Truly talented and proficient staff is usually not on the first line of support and are available for serious problems to be escalated to them. You as customer definitely should want an IT Consulting firm that has that kind of expertise so that when you are in a deep technical hole, they will be able to solve it.

9. Multi-City Presence - Business network support firms that are able to replicate their success in multiple geographic markets and are successful for a number of years demonstrate even a higher level of management and organization sophistication. This is evidence that their abilities are superior and should strongly me looked at. However, there is a downside here. Some such companies have become bureaucratic in their systems and have grown beyond their abilities to be effective. This issue needs to be evaluated on a trial basis.

10. Proof of Work - The real test is to have a provider perform several small projects with multiple communication steps in each. This will give you a feeling of their technical abilities and even more importantly their information sharing and communication systems. Also, if they are not willing to do such a trial is a testimony to their knowledge of weaknesses in this area.

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.

Bomgar Analysis and Review at TTIG

As it is natural for us to continuously improve our processes and methods of operation, we tend to look at, test, and analyze many different tools that will either further our efficiency goals or not. This time we did a review on Bomgar, a good tool for remote control of desktops, servers, and mobile devices.

Benefits and Features
Bomgar specializes in delivering easy, efficient, multi-platform, remote accessibility for entities that have a lot to lose. Hence, security is a it’s forte. This explains why it’s customer base is in fortune 500 companies, state governments, national universities, Fortune 500 banks, insurance companies, and of course a large portion of the top IT support companies. You get the idea.

Each licence costs a one-time fee of around $2000. In return, Bomgar provides an IT engineer secure access to the target device within 10 seconds, through either screen sharing or command prompt mode. The later methods allows the engineer to work in the background, a mega benefit for not disrupting work and increasing productivity. This platform allows for support of Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPad, Android, and telnet/ssh devices.

Security
Because this is a hardware device based system, there is a greater proprietary control ability over its security. Bomgar uses 256-bit AES SSL encryption and is the only remote support device to pass Symentec’s Product Penetration Security test.

The trade-off to remote support security is the obvious scalability limit of a hardware based system, thereby driving up costs for large, multi-location entities. That, however, is always the equation and should be well understood by professional IT managers.

Backup Solutions

The TTIG managed backup solution is a safety net on steroids, providing daily motoring and confirmation of the integrity and safety of all data under management. Step into controlled environment of TTIG Disaster Recovery and Data Redundancy Planning.

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Security Solutions

In today's world of data vulnerability, we provide your organization with the best security practices, continuous risk assessments and even managed security monitoring when necessary. Our approach is comprehensive, our solutions increase security. Control Your Data!

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Managed IT Services

We centralize our IT Management Process to ensure complete situational awareness through continuous client communication, network monitoring, alerting, and preventative network maintenance. Managed services allow for reduction of downtime through a highly proactive