When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
SMBs mostly just don't have any care or interest in anything but results.....
Actually that's the problem. SMBs almost never care about results. Just look at SW threads. Are people producing good results? Rarely. Do their companies care? Even more rarely. SMBs make bad business decisions, this is often what causes them to remain SMBs. One of the biggest things is acting emotionally instead of logically and seeing results as "what they wanted to see" rather than "what was good for the business", if they bother to measure the results at all.
Few SMBs have any capability to even know when they are getting good results. This is why many VARs pretend to be MSPs and screw SMBs up and down and the SMBs thank them for it. This isn't a niche case, this is the most common case.
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
There's so much variation in SMB needs that it's positively ludicrous to even begin to suggest that standardization past a very basic point is going to make things better. It won't. All the specialists in the world dealing with weird crap takes more and more time, making their expertise less and less valuable until the specific specialist has experience with that particular piece of weirdness.
In the real world, though, this isn't true. SMBs are insanely uniform, to the point of absurdity almost. They are way too uniform for their own good. As an MSP, it is actually very frustrating just how uniform SMBs are and demand to be. SMB IT has, through necessities of scale, pushed the SMB market into cookie cutter solutions that often make little to no sense and offer, at best, no competitive advantage for the SMBs.
How I see SMBs, is the polar opposite here. They should be treated more uniquely, but the lack of leveraging the specialists necessary to do that and eschewing the use of competent MSPs has left them without the resources, scope of experience and access to drive necessary to have the unique variations that would make them more valuable.
Specialists actually make having variation a lot easier, not harder.
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
The problem is that the market seems to disagree with your thinking.
Consumer markets, of which the SMB mimics, don't do what is good for them. So it is very much how you look at the market. Companies doing SMB IT well (with MSPs normally) tend to succeed more often. I see the market very much agreeing with my assessments.
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
The problem with SMB and IT has always been poor business decisions, not necessarily poor IT.
IT isn't really a separate thing from the business. Bad IT and bad business decisions are really one and the same. Often the issue is shadow IT, with managers who know nothing about IT seizing control of IT decisions and being in charge of IT without admitting it and the IT person with the title actually being lower on the totem pole than people realize and the actual IT happening elsewhere in the organization. Even ten person companies have this problem.
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Experts = expensive in the minds of most businessmen I've ever met.
This is purely an SMB problem. MSPs at least have the benefit of abstraction and showing lower cost via TCO whereas internal IT staff can only be seen as salaries. MSPs have a huge advantage here.
Outside of the SMB, enterprises see experts = cheap. Because they actually look at numbers instead of resenting people being paid to be "smart" when they are not.
-
@scottalanmiller Structure naturally impedes flexibility by design. Not sure how you're getting that adding structure somehow increases flexibility when by the very nature of structure, it is by design intended to reduce flexibility by adding rigidity. That's not to say that some rigidity is good, but the larger a structure, the more rigidity becomes necessary to maintain efficiency, ultimately reducing the flexibility similarly.
SMBs problem isn't too little flexibility, it's too much flexibility. My argument is that you seem to not understand the issue with SMBs, since you keep saying they're too rigid when that's the complete opposite. The problem is that SMBs tend to lack enough structure, while larger organizations lose flexibility due to size and scale necessitating increased levels of rigidity. SMBs suffer from too many options and not enough expertise to find their medium. Your position seems to be swinging wildly the other way by offering far too much rigidity to allow many SMBs the freedom they need to adapt as quickly as they often need to.
You keep saying good MSPs, but THERE ARE NONE anywhere remotely close to a lot of businesses. It doesn't matter if there are some if they're half the world away. Scale does matter, but greater scale does not automatically mean better just like how you seem to think that small scale can only be bad is also false. There's a reason most highly creative organizations are not that large. IT is an anomaly in that respect, because the technology is so advanced, it takes a lot of resources to create things; however that is not the norm in many (possibly most) cases.
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
It doesn't mean they don't understand that experts also = good at what they do... but if the MSPs aren't convincing them of the value of doing IT properly, whose fault is that?
It's the fault of the business people for needing others to teach them their jobs when it isn't the job of those other people to do so. There is no excuse for incompetent people being in business, they have no one to blame but themselves.
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Experts = expensive in the minds of most businessmen I've ever met
No. The SMB expects you to be an expert anyway. They just won't pay you what you are worth. You see this anytime anything goes wrong at all.
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller Structure naturally impedes flexibility by design.
I don't agree there. You need structure to be able to do design. Lacking organization just makes for inefficiency.
-
@wirestyle22 said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Experts = expensive in the minds of most businessmen I've ever met
No. The SMB expects you to be an expert anyway. They just won't pay you what you are worth. You see this anytime anything goes wrong at all.
They really don't. They rarely even expect competence.
-
@scottalanmiller No, it is the job of experts in a field to teach businessmen who are not experts in the field of the value of their trades. You have that stated incorrectly.
-
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@wirestyle22 said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Experts = expensive in the minds of most businessmen I've ever met
No. The SMB expects you to be an expert anyway. They just won't pay you what you are worth. You see this anytime anything goes wrong at all.
They really don't. They rarely even expect competence.
Every job I've ever had they expect me to know every aspect of everything, always.
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller No, it is the job of experts in a field to teach businessmen who are not experts in the field of the value of their trades. You have that stated incorrectly.
The problem here isn't an MSP teaching a businessman the value of their trade. One, that's the job of a salesman. Two, any business person who gets advice from a salesperson is a freaking moron and has no place in business. Three, knowing business value is THE job of business people, needing the MSP, which is the IT company, to do the business work for the business people is totally wrong.
With that logic, IT must run the company and all non-IT people should be fired because only IT does anything.
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller No, it is the job of experts in a field to teach businessmen who are not experts in the field of the value of their trades. You have that stated incorrectly.
Expert plumbers don't ever teach the value of hiring a plumber. Same with electricians. Same with lawyers, accountants, doctors, etc. No field of experts, anywhere, feels the need to do the job of core management and teach management skills before being hired except IT. This is very wrong.
Teaching the general principles of business to business people so that they can't not fall all apart is a pretty big red flag that our thinking isn't right.
-
@scottalanmiller Perhaps the average SMB goes under where you are, but it's about 50% nationwide for almost all major industries, except ironically in the Information Industry. There's an inordinate amount of them in some parts of the United States that survive much longer than in others. Part of the reason is that enterprises run them roughshod with sheer size and monetary absorption power, meaning they must be creative, or fill niches that are not filled elsewhere.
The Northeast is pretty saturated because it's old and well established, the South and Midwest are not.
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller Structure naturally impedes flexibility by design. Not sure how you're getting that adding structure somehow increases flexibility when by the very nature of structure, it is by design intended to reduce flexibility by adding rigidity. That's not to say that some rigidity is good, but the larger a structure, the more rigidity becomes necessary to maintain efficiency, ultimately reducing the flexibility similarly.
Yes, but how do you associate this with MSPs? You are saying that things like scale, training, peer review, mentorship, career growth are rigidities that are so dramatic that SMBs are stifled by them?
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller Perhaps the average SMB goes under where you are, but it's about 50% nationwide for almost all major industries, except ironically in the Information Industry. There's an inordinate amount of them in some parts of the United States that survive much longer than in others. Part of the reason is that enterprises run them roughshod with sheer size and monetary absorption power, meaning they must be creative, or fill niches that are not filled elsewhere.
The Northeast is pretty saturated because it's old and well established, the South and Midwest are not.
No, it's WAY above that. SMB failure rates are insane. It's like 80%. I'm in Texas, BTW.
-
@scottalanmiller Plumbers don't have to teach the value, the value is obvious because the results are obvious. If pipes don't take sewage out of the house, well.. it's not hard to see the problem and why plumbers are valuable. Same for Electricians when the AC is out due to power issues and the heat index is 110 degrees outside. Lawyers, Doctors, and Accountants are in the same boat. Their trades by nature explain themselves to a large degree.
Which of those fields operates in a single location for long periods of time for the same customer?
None of those examples is comparable to IT, because they're all fields that are only utilized by their clientele when they are needed. IT is pretty much always necessary, so it's hardly comparable to compare contractors to permanent service providers. -
Failure rate is 20% in the first year which is hard to believe because how does a business fail in the first year? That's so fast, they couldn't possibly have had any idea what they were doing. My roommate has a totally insane business with zero business plan, zero income and no hope of any income ever yet has already lasted THAT long.
By five years, failure is passed the 50% mark. By fifteen years, it's closing in on 80%.
https://www.fool.com/careers/2017/05/03/what-percentage-of-businesses-fail-in-their-first.aspx
-
@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller Plumbers don't have to teach the value, the value is obvious because the results are obvious.
IT results are pretty obvious to real business people. That's why no IT people have to justify their expertise in the enterprise space.
That the results are not obvious suggests either the results aren't there or the business people are not doing their jobs.
