Directive Blogs

As the backbone of modern business, an effective technology department is less of a cost center and more of an essential investment. But what exactly makes up those line items in your IT budget?

Understanding the different categories of IT expenses is crucial for strategic planning, controlling costs, and demonstrating the true value of IT to the rest of the organization. Let's break down the major types of expenses that form a comprehensive IT budget.

Do you know what one of the most frustrating budgetary issues you run into is? One I’ve heard about quite a bit is the rush to spend every allocated cent in the IT budget before these funds are redistributed to other departments.

While the instinct is understandable, we want to reinforce that you should never make IT purchases solely to meet a spending benchmark. Instead, all invested funds should be directed so that you see returns.

You want to know what’s scary? Anytime your company’s IT fails and you’re left wondering if you can afford a new piece of hardware or the maintenance to fix what’s broken. When you rely on break-fix IT, you’re basically living in a horror film; you never know when the slasher is going to leap out of the shadows and strike. With managed IT, you can sidestep the scaries and know with confidence you’re taking care of your business’ future.

Here are three reasons why managed IT is the superior option for managing your technology solutions.

Most of us have at least heard that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In other words, proactivity is pretty much always the better strategy. Despite this, we’ve observed that many businesses still avoid investing in their IT until something breaks—the exact opposite of proactivity—and wind up losing in terms of downtime, recovery time, and reputation, along with the financial implications these factors introduce.

This is precisely why we’ve designed our services to serve as preventative measures against the root causes of downtime, helping you be more proactive and reduce overall costs.

How much control do you really have over your IT assets? Oftentimes, businesses will consider other priorities, like sales, operations, and customer service, before they focus on IT systems and resources. The problem with this is that it creates a significant burden for your business, both in terms of the hidden financial drains and serious security vulnerabilities that undermine your business’ stability.

In the movie Moneyball, Billy Beane and the Oakland A's changed baseball forever. Faced with a tiny budget in the early 2000s, Beane ignored traditional scouting and used data to find talented, undervalued players. This sabermetrics approach allowed a small-market team to consistently beat rivals with much bigger budgets, proving that data, not just money, can lead to success.

Today, those same principles apply to every business. In a competitive world, companies of all sizes and industries can use data to make smarter decisions, optimize resources, and build a stronger business for less.

Does your business really still use that old fax machine? Chances are, it’s just taking up space and costing your business valuable time, money, and resources that would be better spent elsewhere. Let’s look at how a fax machine can actively hold your business back, both in terms of operations and budget.

The more you’ve invested in anything, the more critical it feels for you to get a return on that investment. So, what happens if you keep pouring money into these efforts in the hope that it will eventually work out in your favor?

These kinds of skewed choices come about thanks to the sunk cost fallacy—the tendency human beings have to be swayed toward illogical decisions based on what we’ve already spent. 

Let’s discuss how to avoid this in your business by working through the logic, free of the emotional context that the sunk cost fallacy introduces.

Surprises can be exciting, but one part of your business where you don’t want them is in your IT. A server crash, a wireless connectivity outage, or a security threat can all create multiple surprise problems that you simply aren’t ready to handle—particularly in the realm of your wallet. Instead of spinning the wheel and gambling on your IT bill, you can instead treat your IT like a predictable utility cost, and it’s all thanks to proactive managed IT services.

Do you have your finger on the pulse of your business’ subscriptions? Not many business owners do, and it can negatively impact operations and budget lines. This tech sprawl can get out of control, which is why your business needs a plan to combat it. Thankfully, we’re here to help you get your subscriptions under control… both the known and the unknown.

Business owners have a lot of duties and responsibilities, and while you can hire a lot of people to cover some of the more stressful ones, it might feel strange to outsource your company’s technology management. You know IT is important, so that’s why you feel like you have to do it yourself, or at least in-house, but in reality, you’re the last person who should be working with your technology—and we’ll explain why.

There’s a specific stress that comes from the disconnect between the money you invest in your business IT and the value that comes back from it. Sure, you know what the money is being spent on… but that’s a far cry from knowing how these investments are shifting the needle.

Let’s discuss the importance of understanding what your IT is telling you and when you need to demand more information… politely, of course.

With cloud computing, your business has access to tools that fundamentally change the way work takes place. Several of the biggest reasons to adopt the cloud include flexibility, efficiency, and scalability. How are you planning to use the cloud to add or remove resources to your business initiatives as needed? Today, we want to share how scalability works and how your business can fully leverage it with the cloud.

As necessary as it is, business technology tends to be expensive, especially when things go wrong. Historically, these costs took the form of capital expenditures, which meant they were inherently expensive and unpredictable by nature.

This is precisely why it is so important to shift your business IT to an operating expense. Let’s explore why this is the case and how to implement this change.

How long has your workstation been in use? How long does it take to boot up, to access your user profile, to load the documents you need to work on?

It can be extremely tempting to put off any investment into new hardware… after all, it still works, doesn’t it? Well, depending on your answers to the above questions, it might not. Don’t fall into the classic trap of relying on hardware that is simply too old to support your needs. It’s more expensive than you’d think.

In business, it’s tempting to think, if it's not broken, don't fix it. This is especially true for technology. Your computers turn on, emails go out, and things seem to work… so why bother with constant maintenance?

What if I told you this safe approach is actually draining your profits? It’s a hidden expense, and understanding it can completely change how you see your IT.

It’s easy to look at your business phone system and think to yourself, “Well, the old girl is doing the best that she can,” as if it’s a beloved senior work horse with arthritis. We’ve mentioned this in a previous blog about how Otsego county businesses have been left in the dust with these older phone systems, so most business owners have no idea that they have been missing out on a ton of really great innovations.

In this post, we’re going to talk about some of the more advanced integrations that a cloud-based phone system can bring.

Many—we’d go so far as to say most, at some times—businesses have a pretty concrete view of the role that their IT plays in operations: cost center, money pit, necessary evil.

Something we’ve realized, however, is that these impressions are simply warning signs that a business’ technology strategy and approach need some attention. Let’s identify three signs that might be all too familiar to you, and address what can be done to change course and help turn your IT into a contributing part of your overall productivity.

Nothing is more frustrating than when technology should work, but doesn’t for any number of reasons. Of course, it’s also expensive when your technology doesn’t work, which means you’re incurring costs during this downtime period. Today, we want to address the consequences of downtime and what you can do about it to minimize its impact on your business.

Deals are great, aren’t they? Offering some money and getting more than you’d expect in return… It’s the next best thing to free. It’s also really nice to get something fast.

Not so fast, though. As nice as they can make things seem, “cheap” and “quick” aren’t often synonymous with “effective” or “valuable.” In fact, selecting the presumably easy route regarding your business technology can ultimately lead to bigger problems in the form of something called tech debt.