Electronic Voice:
Welcome to the JMark business innovation technology experience.
Dax:
Okay. Welcome, everybody. Today, we have a interesting topic to talk about, as usual. They’re always interesting, but this topic came up. I think it was a discussion that you and I were having, Tom, maybe around what are the expectations that someone should have in their IT. And you kind of threw out this… I don’t know if it’s a term or just this idea that IT should have a guaranteed outcome. And I hadn’t really thought about it that way because, with any services, of course, there’s a contract. There’s expectations between the two parties, but there’s also generally a little bit of vagueness or something, or maybe a little bit of give and take in some cases, where you may have an agreement with SLAs. And nobody really looks at the agreement and sees if it’s actually being followed.
Dax:
But talk about this idea of a guaranteed outcome, because I think that changes the — I don’t know — the scope and maybe the accountability of what an agreement should really be like with an IT service provider.
Tom:
Absolutely. Well, I think it came up in a context of the nature of an ad hoc relationship around a service provider, a loose relationship, even internal IT, when it comes to that. Because ultimately, when you have an agreement with a mature managed service provider, you’re paying for a service to receive a guaranteed outcome. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts.
Tom:
As a part of a mature agreement, you’re going to have responses in a certain amount of time. You’re going to have a technology plan. You’re going to have clarity in what’s going on. There’s accountability in the ticket management system, where you can go back to refer to it. You’re going to have reviews on a regular basis, whether that’s quarterly, biannually, annually, whatever is appropriate. And in those conversations, it’s “How do we constantly mature IT?” and “How do we set an expectation around a project and give it a deadline and then deliver on that project or deliver on those outcomes?”
Tom:
And what we find most often, that is a challenge for an organization, is… It’s kind of the opposite of that. IT is operating in a best-effort scenario, and whether that’s an internal IT person… They’re probably a really good person. They’re probably working really hard in trying to achieve the goals and the expectations of the organization, but it’s a best effort. They could work 20 hours a day, and they don’t have the resources, the experience, the capabilities to achieve everything that needs to be done with IT.
Tom:
And so, when you flip that on its head and you say, “No, no, no. I don’t have time for that. I don’t have patience for that. It’s not good for my organization. I need to be able to set an expectation and to have that achieved.” And, at the bottom line of all of it, that’s what outsourcing is about. It’s taking the burden that would normally be held in some capacity inside the organization or a hybrid and saying, “Nope. I’m going to pay somebody to guarantee an outcome, so that I can focus on what matters the most.”
Dax:
Yeah. What you said actually reminds me of, now, what the conversation was that we were talking about. And it had to do with the internal IT person. And we’re not knocking an internal IT person, because we work with a lot of companies that have an internal IT person, and we augment in various areas. But that is what is so important about this topic, because you have expectations of an employee, but you don’t always have… And you have hopes for an employee achieving something, but you don’t necessarily always have a guaranteed outcome.
Dax:
You want them to do everything that they need to do, but in today’s world… We’ve talked about this before. IT is so complex, anyways. There’s security, and there’s policies, and there’s compliance, and there’s just optimization and productivity. And all these things can easily overwhelm an IT person, so not by their own fault, like you were saying. It’s often just because they’re overwhelmed.
Dax:
And you may have initiatives on the plan to complete, and they are being torn into these different investors, so to speak — the employees that need help with something and the different department heads that need help with different things. And then, there’s also this other project that the business owner might be waiting on.
Dax:
And that’s why a good partnership with an IT company is so vital, because when you sign that agreement, that’s where the guaranteed outcome is. It’s not about how many hours was worked. It’s not about the skill set that’s needed. It’s about getting something done. And the IT partner has to worry about the hours and the technology and everything else.
Tom:
Yeah. You hit it. And when you take a step back and you look at that just one level higher, it even becomes more challenging because, if you want a guaranteed outcome from an employee, or even from an ad hoc partner, you don’t even know what to ask for, necessarily. Well, how do I know if an internal IT guy or girl is actually doing all of the patch management? How do I know the backups are happening? I can read a report, but do I really know that we’re doing a test restore and we have a good business continuity plan? How do I know what to set as a reasonable expectation of best practices of security inside the environment?
Tom:
You’ll have one viewpoint or two people’s viewpoint of what that is. And so, when you go to a partner, it’s like, “No. I want my network to be secure. I want to make sure my backups are occurring. I want to make sure that I’ve got patches in there.” I mean, the service providers should bring all of those to the table and say, “Here’s what we provide for our agreement, for the fees that we’re charging. We’re guaranteeing that we’re going to deliver on these outcomes.”
Tom:
And that way, someone who is a CFO, office manager, whoever is responsible for doing those things, doesn’t have to worry about understanding IT and then, oh, by the way, learn how to manage gates, which is its own thing. We want to make sure that they’re focused on driving their business forward.
Dax:
I think it adds… I mean, in the end of that, it’s clarity. And I think clarity is so important because… We talked about the guaranteed outcome and where you’re at, at the end, but a lot of stress comes from simply not knowing. There’s the stress of the unknown. And so, when you’ve got these guaranteed outcomes, and then you’ve got everything mapped out, it’s not hard for these people who aren’t necessarily technically proficient to be able to find out where the project stands, and find out and then relieve that stress of the unknown. And then they can put it out of their mind because they know that they can focus on their work because it’s written down. The path is laid out. And so, they can understand that that’s being taken care of.
Todd:
So I have a couple of thoughts after listening to Tom and to you, Dax, and just thinking about this. A lot of agreements, like I was mentioning at the beginning, you have this expectation that there’s this guaranteed outcome, but they’re just not… There isn’t a lot of accountability or even desire for accountability, a lot of times in an agreement. How can a managed services company improve that accountability and take it, essentially, away from a client, so that the client is seeing that the outcome is being done, but they don’t have to pull up an agreement every week and read the T&Cs and read through the lines and check the balances of whether you’re actually doing your job?
Tom:
Well, there’s a couple of different ways. It’s a great question. There’s a couple of different ways that it can and should be fulfilled. And the first is, on a monthly basis, there should be some sort of evidence of all of the things that are aligned, and that should marry up to the agreement. So, if we’re promising response times, if we’re promising backup management, if we’re promising security management or patch management, there should be a report that summarizes that in ways that are not geeky and that are easy to understand for a business leader.
Tom:
And then, in addition to that, in what we do in a quarterly business review, where we come in and we talk through all of the different areas of the organization, where there may be risk and why, what investments need to be made, but also showing, “Hey, this is what we promised in the agreement, and this is how we delivered it.”
Tom:
One of the most important things in any kind of a relationship is saying what you’re going to do, doing what you say, and tell them what you did. And that’s the philosophy that needs to occur in every one of these agreements. And that’s how we do it. So, in the agreement, we tell them what we’re going to do, and then we execute, and we do what we say. And then, through our reporting and through our face-to-face conversations, we tell them what we did to show the evidence that it is.
Tom:
And again, to your point, Todd, that shouldn’t be a burden that a business owner or a business leader should have to bear. That’s shifted to the provider. We’re the ones that need to bring the best practices to the table, the evidence to the table, and demonstrate how IT should be run for their organization and make sure that aligns with their expectations for outcomes.
Christina:
So, Tom, I have a question for you. From end-user perspective, what is a guaranteed outcome that I should expect? Because we’ve been talking a lot about the business owner. What about the end user?
Tom:
Yeah, that’s a great question. It really comes down to response times and then resolution times. What are we doing to make sure that we can… So, if you open a ticket, you have an issue on your computer. Let’s say that you can’t print, or you need to get something done and your computer’s acting silly or having a problem, and you open that ticket. It’s making sure that the managed service provider can actually respond within a certain period of time to resolve your issue, and that you should have consistent communication. You should have follow-ups to make sure that it actually is resolved because we all have had those things where we get the guy on the phone, and all of a sudden it works fine, and everything’s good. And then five minutes later, after you hang up, it comes back again.
Tom:
So there should be some follow-ups and capabilities for the organization and the user to stay in alignment, in terms of resolving those issues.
Todd:
I’d throw in… We were talking about this, I think, last week, where… All those things that you said, Tom, are accurate, but they’re also the… I don’t know. What did we talk about? They’re expected. Those are the expected things. You expect to have friendly customer service. [crosstalk 00:11:42] Exactly. You expect those things. But I was thinking that, from an end-user perspective, that needs to shift.
Todd:
And I don’t think a lot of end users think about this. They think more about, like you said, to answer my questions and resolve issues. But I think they really should be thinking about it a little bit more selfishly. Make me successful. ?? Make the technology work. Make it so that I don’t have to call you. Make it so that you predict my problems and that you anticipate my problems. And that’s what it’s all about. It’s making sure that people are successful.
Tom:
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s empowering people to do their jobs and to be successful in driving speed, driving efficiencies and performance all the way through. I mean, I describe it, oftentimes, when we’re talking with individuals and companies about our services, that you never really sit in your car, turn the key or push the button, depending on what you’ve got, and expect it not to start. You push the button, and you expect it to start every time. And if it doesn’t, it’s like, “Uhh.” It ruins your day. It changes everything.
Tom:
And turning on your computer, opening up an application, printing should be exactly the same. You should never have an expectation that it’s not going to work. And that’s done through the proactive management and making sure that the environment is set up to best practices, that all of those things occur, that it’s staying current on its updates.
Tom:
It’s simple things but very complex, at the same time. It’s simple but not easy. And so, it takes a lot of backend energy to facilitate that when you push the button, it just works.
Dax:
It goes a little bit beyond that, too. Not just the computer and everything that’s at the same work station as the end user, but all the rest of the infrastructure, the network and everything. Sort of the same way that you expect your car to start, you expect that the road is going to be in good shape. And the traffic, the speed, the time it takes you to get to work is going to be the same every day. And there’s sort of those same expectations with your larger network and the rest of your IT, that that is also going to be supporting you being successful in getting your work done.
Tom:
Couldn’t agree more. It’s that same strategy, that same implementation of best practices. In fact, we bring… We don’t even just bring that. We bring a technology stack that we have proven works well together. So, it’s the server with a network infrastructure, with the workstations, with the backup strategy, with the implementation of patch management, application management, cloud services. We bring a suite to the table so that we can guarantee that outcome.
Tom:
And it’s organizations that kind of do the hodgepodge. It’s like going into the grocery store and randomly pulling things off the shelf and putting them in a mixing bowl and hoping that it tastes good. And it rarely comes out in a positive way. But if you have a recipe to follow that creates an outcome, then you’re going to have a chocolate cake, and it’s going to be like, “Oh, that’s a damn good cake.” And that’s what we want to create in technology. We bring the cake.
Dax:
Tom is always really good with the metaphors, isn’t he?
Todd:
It’s a Missouri thing. I wanted to touch on the guaranteed outcomes from the standpoint of… We’ve talked about the guaranteed outcome is oftentimes the minimum right to play in a managed services agreement. So if that is the guaranteed outcome, that means that you really cannot compare apples to apples when you’re comparing managed service providers. You need to take into account, what is the outcome that is not stated in the agreement? What is the experience that my end users are going to have? What are you doing behind the scenes that is going to improve the network?
Todd:
And, I mean, I’ve seen many managed services agreements. And they all have SLAs. They all have TNCs. And they’re all pretty much, more or less, the same. There’s liability and all that kind of stuff. But when it comes to expecting this guaranteed outcome and a little more, it’s really important that business leaders ask those questions of, what are you doing for automation? What are you doing to improve the employee experience? What are you doing to improve my customer experience? Because a lot of those things, a lot of those value adds, aren’t written on any agreement.
Tom:
Yeah. You’re exactly right. And I think one of the best ways to do that is, is to engage with the managed service provider and check several references. I mean, that’s really where you’re going to find out if, if there is a situation, both at a individual user experience level, like you asked about, Christina.
Tom:
I mean, interview some of the end users, not just the business owners, and find out. Do they like engaging with IT? Do they feel comfortable? Do they feel like they’re being talked down to? Or is it like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a buddy. I can pick up the phone, and I can call Nick, and he’s going to help me out”? Or is it, “Oh, I’ve got to call this ass, because I’m going to get talked to, and it’s going to take forever”?
Tom:
Let’s find out from that experience, because it’s not in an agreement. It’s the culture of the organization. It’s the mentality of the organization. Is the managed service provider there to serve and empower, or are they there to check a box and get paid? And there’s a lot of that out there in the world. And it’s unfortunate, but it’s real. And so, I think it’s kind of an intangible piece of the equation that it just takes a whole time to do the homework and identify.
Todd:
Well, I think that’s a good place to end this conversation. Just to recap, whether it’s a IT person in a company, whether it’s an IT vendor, a partner, it’s really important to understand the guaranteed outcomes and also the outcomes that aren’t even in the agreement, aren’t guaranteed. What’s going to be the value add to those? And, if you want to learn more about the value adds that JMark can add to your organization and how we help organizations be successful with technology, just reach out to us at jmark.com, fill out a form or give us a call, and we will be happy to engage. Okay.
Tom:
Thanks. See you.
Electronic Voice:
Thank you for attending this podcast. We hope it has been informative and helps convey that, at JMark, we are people first and technology second. To learn more and discover additional content relevant to your business, please visit us online at jmark.com or at LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. You may also call us at 844-44-JMARK. Thank you for your time, and we look forward to seeing you again.10
