IT has become a way of life.  We now rely on it for most of our day to day activities.  The biggest challenge for an IT company such as ours is to convince our customers about the value of the IT systems they use.  So how do we measure the value of the IT systems in a business? Well for a start we can ignore what the computers, servers and printers cost.  That’s not the value we are interested in. That’s for insurance companies to worry about.  Let’s look at a typical transaction made with a business on a typical day.

Customer emails an order to your business for items; I am using a distributor of plants in this example, one of our customers.  So the customer orders 10,000 plants via an email to you.  You get the email on your laptop/Workstation/Phone and forward the email to a colleague, or raise the order on your internal systems.  The colleague opens the email/internal system, prints the order for picking and picks the order.  Your colleague sends and email back to you to say the order is ready for dispatch.  You then arrange the delivery using your internal system or a courier’s website.  An invoice is then created in for example Sage to send to the customer.  Customer receives the plants and pays the invoice.  This invoice is entered up on the system for example sage as paid.

The first thing to notice is how much of the process involves your IT systems but the scary reality is if your systems had failed you may never have even received the order!

 In these tough economic times it’s important to ensure that the last challenge you need is your own IT systems.  IT failures can be avoided using preventative, proactive monitoring like ours ensuring that potential failures are picked up and solved before they cause you any downtime.

Your IT systems are the most valuable part of your business.  Without them you would not be able to do business.