Smart Dolphins can lower the costs for most Vancouver Island businesses dependent on IT.

So many representatives of organizations we meet with have no idea what their IT costs are. Without a clear understanding of annual IT costs, how can a business create a budget for the coming year?

Common IT costs:

• IT support (outsourced IT) or labour (internal IT person/team)
• Downtime (lost productivity, lost business, and stress)
• Opportunity costs from unnecessary technology problems
• Risks, like data recovery following a ransomware attack
• Capital costs, such as hardware and software
• Cybersecurity insurance

Overspending on IT is also common problem. Many organizations have not invested in good IT planning and have managed their IT haphazardly. In the long run, this ends up costing businesses more money.

At Smart Dolphins IT, we help you create an IT roadmap (yes, this includes a budget) that strategically aligns with your business goals.

Unfortunately, when business leaders make decisions about their IT, they focus on the more tangible costs – the vendor costs. The rest of the costs listed above are more intangible and tough to quantity. So business people, with their understandable limited perception of their needs, think they can minimize their total costs by minimizing the obvious tangible costs. They often simply look for who will charge the least and ignore how those IT support professionals might lower their overall costs. Of course, if labour/vendor cost was the only criteria, you wouldn’t need anyone – you wouldn’t spend a dime. But there are obvious, tangible needs that everyone knows need servicing: a lost connection, a server down or a project. Everyone knows there is some “cost to doing business” here.

What is optimal? The optimal IT solution would factor in all the above costs in a way that minimizes them. The rub, however, is to realize the minimum cost, you need to spend more to do the things that will lower your overall IT costs. Proactive IT support takes process, skilled experts, tools, time and money. Most know that changing their car’s oil makes more sense than buying a new motor every few years. The same logic exists to spending a bit more now on your IT for the sake of your future technology.

Smart Dolphins has the right people, using the right tools, performing the right tasks that result in reducing the total costs related to IT.