Thinking about outsourcing your tech support?

Here's a few points to ponder.

For most small businesses, supporting the technology used in their company can be a true burden. With just enough technology to be troublesome, the small business begins looking for technical help, often recruiting friends, neighbors, sons, daughters, (sometimes all of the above!) to tinker with their equipment and systems. Others attempt to cut costs by hiring freelance techs from Craigslist.com or other such websites.

While saving money is always a good idea, there's a "big picture" when it comes to tech support which the small business owner/manager should always consider:

• Is the person actually qualified?

In the quest to cut costs, many people go with the notion that someone who "tinkers" with technology can get the job done in a business environment. While that's certainly true in some cases, when it comes to business networks/computers/servers/etc, it's mostly not true. The average "tinkerer" doesn't have the experience that a professional technician has, and is usually unaware of better, more reliable, or cheaper ways of doing things.  (There's a whole catalog of tricks and knowledge that comes with spending years working with business technology.) At first glance, the price of using a "tinkerer" can seem like a money-saving choice, but that inexperienced person can easily cost a company even more money with mistakes or misconfigurations that need professional help to fix, not to mention causing the company downtime in the process.

• Is the freelance techician going to be there in the long run?

As professional technicians, we know firsthand how much more time-consuming (and therefore expensive) it is to clean up after someone else. When systems are configured wrong from the start, or multiple people have had a hand in maintaining a system over time, it almost always becomes a confusing, inefficient, and disorganized mess. In the end, it usually costs more to fix the work of amatuers and freelancers than it would have to hire a professional to set up and maintain it from the start.

• Is the person reputable?

Since computers are now at the heart of everything, a technician can have access to almost any information related to a business, including customer information, bank information, social security numbers, email, etc. Is it really a good idea to trust a freelance technician or an amatuer with such information?

• Who supports the freelance technician?
  

Another thing to consider on a practical level is - who will the freelance tech rely on when faced with a problem he can't resolve? No technician knows everything, and for better or worse, computers, networks, and servers are always full of surprises. Even the best technicians routinely get faced with knotty issues that need a second set of eyes to resolve. Most freelance technicians don't have anyone but themselves in these situations, and a closely-kept secret is - they bill the customer for time spent learning to resolve the problem. In contrast to that, a professional tech support firm normally has multiple technicians and a pool of resources to turn to, resolving a knotty problem quickly and at minimal expense to the customer.

So in summation - as complicated as today's technology has become, is trusting your technology and information to an amatuer really a good idea in the long run?