- Not having an IT plan or budget for the year
Modern workplaces are now heavily reliant on IT . When business IT fails business stops, workers are sent home, communications cease, invoicing to customers stops, unfortunately though the costs of business continue to incur.
Good management by default must include IT management and the provision of the funds necessary to ensure that vital infrastructure is reliable.
Managers who don't make provisions for IT budget items experience stress when unbudgeted costs start to roll in as they inevitably do. This often introduces tension between the manager and the IT professionals involved.
- Ignorance of the many skill levels and specialties in the IT Industry.
It is not important to know what the skill levels are, but most important to know that there are many skill levels and specialties in the industry. We naturally assume that proficiency with PC operating systems equates to competency in other forms of IT . It does not.
Significant differences exist between consumer electronics & computing and business computing.
IT enthusiasts should not build or maintain business networks and systems and should be avoided at all cost.
This point is also relevant when planning major software purchases or implementations.
The natural assumption is that software engineers are capable of advising on broader network issues.
This is rarely the case. Software providers should work in consultation with the network administrator\ engineer.
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Fail to ensure a reliable back up solution is in place.
Retrieving lost data is expensive and there are no guarantees of success.
Microsoft statistics show that most businesses that suffer a major data loss through hardware or other failure go broke with in two years of that event.
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Allowing multiple administrators on a network.
This is usually done for convenience sake. The risks involved in doing this are very high. If a server & network are configured correctly it is a finely tuned mechanism and should only be administrated by suitably qualified individuals who understand how it has been configured.
A server network is not a PC. Simple changes if performed by those with out knowledge can have multiple consequences which can de stabilize a network and cost thousands of dollars to rectify. It is your own interests to ensure that there is one administrator and that no one else has the administrator access codes.
If the network has been set up correctly and is stable any changes required should be reasonably minor in both time and cost.
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Choosing IT support because its cheaper.
You can't cut corners where IT is concerned. If you save a dollar today on a solution or support , it will cost you two dollars tomorrow to deal with some secondary issue that the cheap solution creates.
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Buying consumer machines for business use.
There are two channels of distribution with-in the IT industry. Consumer electronics distributed through retail outlets. The business channel distributed through industry resellers servicing business.
Usually specific models are unique to each channel and not available cross channel.
One simple but important difference is that the operating system installed on retail machines is normally the HOME EDITION. If you are buying computers for a business environment you should avoid Home edition operating systems because they have only very limited networking ability. They cannot be installed onto a domain.
Businesses that buy the home edition thinking that they are saving $100 usually have to pay up to $300 later for a new operating system plus installation costs, once they need the machine attached to the domain.
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The SATA server.
SATA servers are a great solution for small organisations with just a couple of users. They are much cheaper in fact they can be purchased for about the same money that would buy a reasonable PC.
The SATA technology is designed to provide data at high speed in short bursts. This is fine for one or two users but as soon as the number of users increases to five or more the demands put on the machine become continuous and the technology is unable to reliably deliver, the system slows down.
SCSI on the other hand is triple the price but is designed to deliver data at high speeds continuously.
If you want high performance and a cheaper longer term solution, your only choice is to use SCSI .
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Purchasing server installations by obtaining competing quotations.
Get three quotes and choose the middle priced quote.
Sounds like smart business but its actually the opposite.
With IT, there really is no advantage to obtaining multiple quotations unless you know the abilities of all the individuals and ensure that each quote has the same content. If you were buying a commodity that demonstrated constant properties whether you buy it in one place or another sure! A competing quotation makes sense.
You should not base such decisions on price but on the ability of the company to provide a successful solution. Once you are satisfied that they can produce a successful outcome you may compare differing technical proposals, but be aware that each proposal will have positive and negative features and the cheaper proposals normally have more limitations. If you have a company that you trust, it is better to ask them to revise the technical specifications of a quote to lower the price.
Many server quotes are also incomplete. Unless you know what to look for you wouldn't spot it.
For instance, there are dozens of items and systems with-in a server environment required to be configured. All quotes should exhibit a detailed list of these items that will be included for the price.
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Just Ignore it. Its working alright at the moment.
Ignorance is bliss - the problem is that although it may be working at the moment the day will come when that old server stops. It's as sure as the sun coming up tomorrow.
Can your business afford to close down for up to a week, spend 2 - 4 thousand dollars to get the old machine working again and business running while the new server is ordered and installed? You are effectively spending money twice. We see it all the time.
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Dabbling in IT.
A little bit of knowledge can be dangerous. This is very true in IT . Managers who dabble in the IT are often much more productive doing what they do best, making money for the business instead of using their time to dabble in the IT . If you have the right people looking after your networks they will do a job in a fraction of the time that that it would take a dabbler who may be highly skilled in other areas.
