How can you manage your IT equipment without a CIO?
Managing its IT equipment is a key issue for any company, regardless of its size and business sector. Providing your employees with appropriate and high-performance equipment is a guarantee of productivity. The challenge of managing this equipment is all the greater in these times when the vast majority of employees are working from home. Many large companies and SMEs are now choosing to outsource this task in order to improve efficiency and reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO). To explain…
What does managing IT equipment involve?
A company's IT equipment includes laptops and desktops, of course, their accessories (mice, keyboards, screens, etc.), their devices (printers, scanners, graphic tablets, external hard drives, etc.), servers, the cloud, network equipment (wi-fi base stations, etc.), computer data, software, applications and licences, as well as mobile devices (smartphones and tablets).
All these resources need to be maintained, developed and optimised to meet the company's needs and help it to grow.
Managing IT equipment therefore includes:
- Acquiring the equipment;
- Renewing equipment according to its life cycle;
- Maintaining it;
- Keeping the IT system secure;
- At times, training employees in the use of this equipment.
Some companies have a dedicated department, headed by a CIO.
The role of CIOs is:
- technical, since they need to have excellent knowledge of the IT environment ;
- strategic, because they have to manage all data analysis issues as data is increasingly important to companies ;
- managerial, as they lead the company's team of technicians in charge of managing the IT equipment.
But what can you do if your company does not have a CIO or even any dedicated IT specialists? Outsourcing the management of your IT equipment to a specialised service provider can be a good option.
👉 Also read: What can you do with your old IT equipment?
IT equipment management: outsource to reduce your TCO
If you do not have a CIO, you can outsource the entire management of your IT equipment to save time in these time-consuming tasks, so that you can focus on your core business and, above all, reduce your TCO.
What does total cost of ownership include?
TCO refers to all the costs associated with the acquisition of a product throughout its life cycle. It includes direct costs, such as for buying or leasing the equipment and maintenance and development costs, but also indirect costs - salaries of dedicated staff, their training, premises, etc. These ancillary costs are harder to quantify, particularly when they are linked to technical failures and equipment obsolescence and the resulting loss of productivity.
The importance of TCO for IT equipment
Calculating the TCO is essential when it comes to IT equipment. Basically, this equipment is subject to often planned obsolescence and maintenance needs. You can assign an expert to deal with this time-consuming task, in order to identify non-essential costs (software licences that the company no longer uses, duplicated tasks, etc.).
After outsourcing the calculation of your TCO, you can go further and outsource the entire management of your IT equipment. This is often more viable and more cost-effective than managing it in-house. Indeed, even the best of CIOs cannot get through as much work as a complete team of experts. Generally, this reduces IT failures and lets you focus on tasks that bring real added value to your business.
Operating leases: finance your equipment while outsourcing its management
One of the most effective means of outsourcing has to be operating leases. It involves leasing the IT equipment you need for a long period of time from a financing organisation, while benefiting from related services.
You do not pay to own your equipment but to use it, through specified monthly payments. Most importantly, you no longer have to answer the inevitable technical questions that arise when using IT equipment. The monthly payments include many services, such as the recycling of old equipment, sourcing, financing, management of the actual devices, recovery and refurbishment. Your TCO is therefore perfectly controlled since you know, every month, the amount of the lease payments.
👉 Also read: Opt for operating leases and focus on your core business.
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