This Is How to Efficiently Manage Your IT Estate as an SME

For business owners, there are countless different departments, moving parts, and teams that you have to manage effectively in order to have a fully functional business. This could cause you to feel like you need eight arms and eyes in the back of your head to manage - especially if you run a small to medium-sized business. 

It is possible that you will not have a team of managers looking after each department for you, leaving you to stretch yourself thin over a number of different areas of the enterprise.

Of course, if you are leveraging IT solutions to enable your business to function, then managing and maintaining an efficient IT estate is crucial.

However, this is, understandably, far easier said than done. While great strides have been made in years recently to make IT solutions more user-friendly, automated, and simple to integrate into an existing system, they still require constant management. 

Thankfully, this doesn’t have to be as hard as you might think. In fact, once you have the right support team in place, you have taken the time to create intelligent systems that are simple to operate, and trained your staff on how to use and manage these solutions, the process is relatively straightforward.

This is how to efficiently manage your IT estate as an SME:

Enlist the services of an IT support team

When you are dealing with running a small business, it is easy to believe that everything should be hard. It’s almost as if you want to do it all by yourself to prove that it can be done efficiently and that you have overcome adversity in some way.

Well, this approach is admirable, but it might not always make sound business sense. In fact, you should be looking to leverage the expertise and manpower of third-party companies to manage your IT estate effectively. 

For instance, you could work alongside a company that offers business IT support services. This way, you can outsource the daily management of your IT systems to a team of experts instead of investing time and money in creating your own in-house team.

Make sure your systems are as simple and efficient as possible

If you want to (of course!) make it as easy as possible to manage your IT estate, then you should take the time to set them up in the correct way.

By this, we mean constructing the systems from scratch in a way that makes them simple to use, efficient, and devoid of gaps in cybersecurity. 

This makes your life considerably easier as an SME business owner. 

Train your staff in operating and maintaining the system

As a business owner or manager, it is your responsibility to build a team that can effectively manage the IT systems for you on a daily basis. 

Like any element of your business, if you want your IT estate to be efficient and easy to manage, you need to make sure that the relevant team members know how to use it.

This means training your team properly, checking in on them to see if there are any areas in which the system can be improved, and ensuring they can work autonomously without any productivity worries.