It is a fact of life that the IT department is a necessary yet costly part of today’s small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Many SMBs have reduced the size of the IT department to the point where costs cannot seemingly be cut any further. The result of these cuts is that service has been severely degraded, customer satisfaction is down, and the real value of IT to the business is being questioned. And still SMB IT leaders are being asked to do much more with much less. How does an IT department cope with these ever increasing demands and diminishing budgets?
Smart SMB CIOs are leveraging the Expertise-as-a-Service® (EaaS™) model to transform their organizations. Legal and finance departments have leveraged outside counsel and accounting firms for decades, with the IT department being one of the last of the major departments within the business to move to this low-fixed-cost model. Taking a page from the legal and finance departments’ “playbooks,” EaaS is used as an extension of the IT department. EaaS brings cost savings by enabling IT to reduce and reallocate in-house resources more effectively, while retaining on-demand access to scalable high quality expertise, information, and performance measurement. EaaS gives IT the ability to quickly adjust to changing business goals and drivers, encourage innovation, and increase productivity while reducing fixed costs.