| "For commodities, perhaps it works, but for IT you get what you pay for" Well, you don't, sometimes you just pay for overhead you don't need. My wife works at a small 15 person non-profit - I was shocked when I heard how much they pay for IT support from a small support organization. She asked what other choice they had, because they don't have anyone on-staff that can do it, and their old hardware needed a lot of support. So I put together a proposal - for less than they were paying for a year of support services, they could replace all of their hardware with new hardware (including desktops, network and printer), plus move from hosted Exchange to Gmail (for another big cost savings). I spent a weekend setting up the hardware, including automatic backups to a local fileserver plus crashplan for remote cloud backups (they had no backups at all before, just a bunch of flash drives with various bits of information). They saved money after the first year, plus they had all new and reliable hardware. They bought a block of 40 hours of support from their IT support organization and haven't even used half of that over 2 years. |
The big problem is identifying what is a good choice. If you don't know, you can't easily contract out the choice either, how do you know the contractor can or will make a good choice for you?
So the best outcome for non-technical organizations is to get lucky and know someone personally who knows what they're doing and has no ulterior motive - someone just like you. They don't really know if they know such a person. But if they get lucky and pick just the right helpful competent person to make IT decisions for them, modern technology can give them quite a lot for very little.
It's a perplexing situation.