Managed ICT: Finding calm in the storm

It is a time of uncertainty for Ireland’s business community. While vaccination levels remain relatively high, Covid-19 is still a problem and there hasn’t been as great a return to the office as many predicted.

Most companies are still operating a hybrid work policy, with some staff in the office and some working from home at least some of the time. From an IT point of view, this has the potential to create headaches, with the result that many companies are opting to outsource some or all of their IT functions.

“The pandemic in general resulted in a very significant spike in our managed service business, in particular around 18 months ago when people first started to shift towards working from home. Our clients are typically corporate and enterprise companies so we built and provisioned thousands and thousands of laptops very quickly so people could get their home set up up and running,” Paul Schmitz, group sales director of Auxilion, said.

“The main thing was to make sure that these units had collaboration tools like Office 365 and Microsoft Teams and so on, so that people could connect with each other. That was the original drive.”

Since then, Auxilion has continued to support these devices with between 230 and 240 of its staff involved in its managed services business.

“In the past, a big chunk of those people were on site, supporting users working in physical offices. But now all the users are at home and that has become a much larger effort. All our support has to be done remotely and on the phone,” Schmitz said.

“On some occasions, we have actually had to visit people’s homes, but that’s unusual. Usually you can diagnose and work with someone’s machine remotely without any problem. If it’s a hardware issue, then most companies maintain what we call ‘hot spares’, so that if there’s a problem we just swap it out.”

A more versatile workforce

Adapting to the logistics of offering managed ICT services and specifically help-desk and support services during the pandemic has been a tough challenge, but Schmitz thinks that it has just created a more versatile workforce.

“One thing that has happened is that because everyone is using their laptops not just as work machines, but also as collaborative communications devices to stay in touch with their colleagues, they typically get quite stressed if they break down,” he said.

“If you’re in a big office and there’s a problem with your machine, you call the help-desk and then get up and walk around, maybe chat to people or go to a meeting while it’s being fixed. But when you’re at home and you depend on that machine, you can’t really do anything until it’s fixed. So the urgency levels involved go up.”

By its nature, the managed services space is just that – a service industry – which means that to thrive in that business, companies have to be adaptable and conform to the needs of the other companies they do business with. So from that point of view, adapting to the changing market conditions of the last 18 months hasn’t been that big a deal.

According to John Casey, head of managed services and IT solutions for Arkphire, there have actually been a few different inflection points in that time.

“For us, the biggest change was that the teams of people we had delivering the service were remote from each other as well as their clients, and not sitting beside each other. It was challenging in that it was different but really, being adaptable is what we do and it worked well,” he said.

“Once people were set up to work from home, a second inflection point came during the peak of Covid and cyber security became a big issue. We had to adapt again to remodel our managed service offering to include additional security services and to help our clients be cognisant of phishing attacks and the like.”

The return to work represents a third inflection point with many companies confused as to how much to return to the office and how much to continue with home working.

“When everyone is working remotely, then they’re working remotely and you have a set of services around that. But now we have a hybrid situation with some people at home and some in the office and we have to be able to service all of them,” Casey said.

“For people back in the office, things haven’t gone back exactly the way they were before. There’s more adaptation to be done. For example, a lot of routine upgrades and refreshes to networks didn’t happen over the last 18 months so that either has to be done now or changes need to be made to the plans going forward.”

Supporting this from an IT point of view is a logistical and financial headache, and one of the key offerings of the managed services space has always been that, for a monthly fee, busy companies can make their ICT worries go away.

They can make the details of how things work someone else’s problem, leaving them free to concentrate on what best to do. For some, that’s always been a compelling proposition, but it’s particularly attractive at the moment when companies have a lot on their plate dealing with the market conditions created by the pandemic.

“For a long time, ‘outsourcing’ was a dirty word in the IT industry, but the reality of things is that there is a serious issue out there in terms of availability of adequate resources, people who want to do support work. The reality is that technical companies are having difficulties attracting staff and non-technical companies have no hope of attracting staff at all,” Casey said.

“People coming out of college today want a career path straight away. They don’t want to be pigeonholed in a firm of solicitors or accountants, doing a run of the mill IT job. If they take a job like that, they’ll get left behind very quickly.”

Instead, according to Casey, graduates want to work at the cutting edge of the industry, with the best resources and in a job where every day is different.

“Working in managed services means being exposed to the bleeding edge of cybersecurity, digital workspaces and remote working and they know that’s better for their career. The days of an IT manager going into a role and staying there for 25 years are gone,” he said.

For many managed services companies, one area that is growing fast is that of the managed help desk and the pandemic has played a big part in that, according to Karen O’Connor, general manager for ICT services and solutions with Datapac.

“The pandemic and remote working have driven a lot of growth, and there’s also no doubt in my mind that the IT skills shortage that’s out there has also played a role. That shortage hasn’t gone away, if anything it’s probably worse than ever. It's still expensive and costly to get people trained up in ICT, given the complexity of all the environments out there, along with things like increased regulation,” she said.

“It's very difficult for any one organisation to maintain the depth and breadth of knowledge that is needed if that’s not the entirety of their focus. And technology doesn’t stand still – keeping up to date is an ongoing process that takes a lot of time and energy.”

Keeping the user experience positive

O’Connor said that there was a “huge spike” in the help-desk tickets submitted to it at the start of the pandemic, and the same is true now that people are returning to the office.

“We’re nearly at the inverse of where we were back in March 2020. Back then, it was network and security issues that caused most of the queries, basically getting people set up to work remotely. Now it’s more likely to be a problem with someone integrating their home working set-up back into an office environment,” O’Connor said.

“Overall, our goal is to keep the user experience positive as an organisation. Keeping people happy is important to our clients because they have their own talent retention issues and it’s important that working for them is a smooth and hassle-free experience for their employees.”

O’Connor thinks the short-to-medium term prospect for managed ICT companies is relatively bright, as many businesses that dipped their toes in the outsourcing waters during the pandemic are likely to expand rather than contract those functions in future.

“Companies facilitating remote working are either dealing with a situation where they have a boundary in their network or they aren’t. Working with that hybrid approach to work adds an extra layer of complexity to your ICT function. I think that means it’s going to be a more sustainable model to outsource in the future,” she said.

A further complication for companies looking at transitioning from remote working to a return-to-the-office situation is that big changes like that can prompt movement of staff. Nick Connors is managing director of Tekenable and he recently came across an example of this.

“A good customer of ours rang us two weeks ago with a problem. They had a key dependency, a full-time employee looking after a system for them using a specific set of skills, but when that person was asked to come back into the office, they promptly handed in their notice,” Connors said.

“We’re seeing a lot of that at the moment. The larger and more traditional enterprises that have legacy systems aren’t really set up for ongoing remote working and it’s causing a problem. They need staff back in the office, but their staff aren’t necessarily that keen. Meanwhile, the IT market is quite buoyant and people are making life choices around this issue.”

The question for many hard-to-replace employees is whether to stick with a job where they are asked to go in two, three or even five days a week, or leave and work for a different company that will allow them to work from home.

“It’s hard to really criticise people making those choices because we all have to do our best for ourselves and our families,” Connors said. “Our own model is that we will continue to facilitate people in working the way they want to, but it’s a big factor at the moment when you hire staff. Salary is obviously still important, but we’re always asked ‘is there an option to work from home?’ ”

“We’ve picked up some staff with hard-to-source skills because they were disgruntled at being asked to be in their old office more than they want to be. Sometimes they were offered a blended working model, but usually not as blended as they wanted.”

According to Connors, this is just the new reality of the employment landscape. Companies without the ability to offer the degree of flexibility hard-to-find staff want will lose out.

“This is a key factor now in retaining and hiring staff so that if you don’t have the systems in place that allow blended working, then you’re potentially going to lose those hires. What we’re saying is that if you have an old legacy piece of technology that requires you to have people in the office to mind, then you’re in a lose-lose situation,” he said.

“You’re going to lose some of the people minding that technology and you’re going to lose out on the benefits of using newer and more agile technology. It’s time to look at the legacy systems you have and that physically need people in the building and seriously consider migrating that to the cloud or shifting the dependency to an outsourced managed services company like us.”