When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
My issue isn't with your suggestion, but with it's seeming refusal to acknowledge that the scale is probably too great. ...(MSPs are notorious for that phenomenon some of us would know as the "Tyranny of the Urgent"), and scale doesn't necessarily make it better for everyone.. just those who need that specific thing at a level of specialization that benefits from greater scale.
MSPs are notorious for this, sure, so are SMBs. You are trying to point out that this isn't always true with SMBs, I can tell you for a fact it isn't always true with MSPs. Any aspect that MSPs get of that is from the SMBs anyway.
Scale does make it better. It just does. It's not the only factor, but it is the only big factor that changes, and only changes for the better.
I think what you are missing is that MSP vs. SMB there are only upsides, no downsides. Not really. You point out only that MSPs are not perfect, of course not, but you don't point out how SMB work has any means of improving on it. MSPs have a better structure giving more chance for better work. SMBs simply lack those options. All negatives in the MSP space come from the SMBs, but they add some positives that SMBs can't do alone.
Scale matters. A lot, there is no way around this. Unless the SMBs can keep you from being on call and can keep your pay closer to enterprise, that basically proves the point. There is a reason that people don't normally move from MSPs to SMBs, it's not a step up. Once you are in a good MSP, there is really very little better to be found.
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@scottalanmiller Well, the US military is a weird case anyway, so I don't count them either. Besides, they're more like the biggest, strangest non-profit IT outfit in the world I'de say; and they have pretty irregular needs in a variety of ways as well.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
If it really was cheaper for all SMBs to contract MSPs for their IT, they would be doing it. If only good MSPs were worthwhile, there wouldn't be so many more bad ones than good.
Obviously this is not true. The hallmark of the SMB is bad business decision making. SMBs dont' do what is smart, especially around IT. We even talked about that specifically at MangoCon. The average SMB goes out of business within a couple years.
That SMBs avoid smart moves like MSPs actually suggests that the MSP model is better, rather than worse. SMBs routinely make emotional, illogical moves that don't make them money. This is both why so few have MSPs, why so many that hire MSPs dont' hire good ones and is the top struggle that MSPs have in dealing with SMBs.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller Well, the US military is a weird case anyway, so I don't count them either. Besides, they're more like the biggest, strangest non-profit IT outfit in the world I'de say; and they have pretty irregular needs in a variety of ways as well.
Right, they are a weird mix of government and non-profit. NHS is similar.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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?
