What are Managed Services? (Part Two)
Welcome back for a continuation of the discussion around IT support and managed services. If you missed the first round, you can catch-up here. Now onto the next installment…
As noted before, some changes in the standard IT support model over time had led to a decrease in general customer satisfaction and an increase in overall business costs. The reasons for this are discussed in the previous article, but it was clear that something had to be done.
Evangelists in the IT support world started looking to change the overall support model, and in particular, the model for Tier-3 support. In case you’re not familiar with the Tier system, essentially Tier 1 is the lowest Tier and Tier 3 the highest support in a company. Tier-3 individuals have the most experience with a product or system and are closest to the ‘architect’ level of expertise.
One of the determinations was that not every company could find, or afford, to have a staff of Tier-3 resources for each system. Thus the idea of external support (individuals or companies) was born. This was initially called Tier-4 support, but the industry ultimately adopted the term Managed Services, to represent this concept of support that was:
External to the company
Tier-3 experts in a particular system or group of systems
Integrated into the company support process
Paid on a retainer, ticketing or hourly model
The upside of this system was that companies didn’t need to try and have experts in every potential system. They could simply contract with another party to provide high-level expertise in some systems, while allowing in-house staff to focus on day-to-day issues usually managed by Tier-1/Tier-2 resources. For larger issues such as system outages, upgrades, migrations and patching, they could send the work to the third-party managed services experts.
Now, at this point you may be thinking that managed services is just a rebranding of the off-shore support model mentioned in my earlier article. But there was one important difference. The focus of Managed Services is on high-level employees who fit the Tier-3 level of expertise, but usually focused on a specific system or group of systems. This results in support staff who generally are:
Motivated product experts
Seasoned staff who are more immune to turn-over woes
Higher Cost resources
The last bullet above may seem more like a ‘con’, than a ‘pro’…but while resources (and their support contracts) are generally a little pricier, the turn-around time on issue resolution and results is faster. So companies have found that the hidden costs around downtime, system update outages, and other areas of lost time (and therefore cost) have decreased.
Additionally, it is important to note that another key feature of managed services is the concept of proactivity. When managed services was conceptually launched, it was also generally launched with monitoring and metrics based utilities. The goal of these programs is to alert the managed services partner about systems issues, errors and outages before end-users become aware. This allows the managed services provider to catch issues early, and resolve them (either directly or programmatically) prior to a greater impact to the end-user community.
So in conclusion, the pivot in traditional support models allowed IT departments to focus on support around the core areas of the business where it was critical they have all levels of expertise. For the numerous ancillary (but still important) systems where it was cost prohibitive for them to staff at the same levels, managed services allowed them to bridge that gap, while still maintaining quality around systems delivery.
In the final part of this series, I’ll discuss iArch Solutions approach to support and managed services, and show examples of the options and tiers available to our customers.