Should I Build or Buy an IT Department?

by Blake Cormier
Content Manager, E-N Computers

Should I build it or buy it? We face that question often – whether it’s furniture, clothes, a house, a building – there are many times when a DIY solution is more economical in the long run. Or an off-the-shelf or pre-built solution may be the right answer.

The same is true of IT service. Your business has the option to “build it” – hiring, training and managing an internal IT team. Or you can “buy it” – using an outsourced IT company or managed services provider (MSP) to manage your IT systems.

Both approaches have pros and cons. Depending on your business and its needs, one method is likely more appropriate than the other. Or, your business may benefit from a hybrid approach, where some roles are cared for by internal staff and others are outsourced.

At E-N Computers, we have helped businesses of all sizes benefit from all of these approaches to IT management. For some of our clients, we function as an all-in-one IT department, handling everything from help desk calls to infrastructure management. Other clients have an internal team handling the day-to-day, turning to us for guidance on IT strategy as well as second-level support. And still others insource their information management and business analysis, while we keep the systems and infrastructure running.

In this article, we’ll look at what it takes to build a top-quality IT department. Then we’ll look at how you can “buy” some or all of those functions by partnering with a managed IT service provider. Finally, we’ll help you to determine which approach is right for your business.

Many businesses get started building their IT department by hiring a general IT specialist, systems engineer, or network engineer. But they quickly find that hiring IT staff is not the same as building and running an IT department – even if the team is just one or two people to start.

In addition to hiring, we’ll look at the procedures, tooling, and training that are necessary to build an efficient and well-run IT team.

In a large IT department, there are more than a dozen unique roles that need to be staffed. Smaller IT teams usually combine these roles into just one or two positions, but this has its drawbacks. For example, it can be difficult for one person to be responsible for both day-to-day operations and project implementation. Oftentimes, the daily “fires” that crop up crowd out long-term strategic work that is necessary to keep up with advances in technology and changes in business needs.

Additionally, there are other administrative functions that can be neglected if not assigned to a dedicated role. Things like software licensing, hardware inventory, budgeting and forecasting, and resource monitoring are often viewed as “nice to haves”, but in reality are vital to strategic IT management.

So, while it’s tempting to search for a “jack-of-all-trades” IT engineer, we’ve found that IT teams are most effective when they are able to specialize at least somewhat. For example, a three-person IT team could be made up of a user support specialist, an infrastructure manager or systems engineer, and an IT director to manage them and make strategic IT decisions.

Having the people to do the work is only part of building an IT department. For the work to get accomplished in an orderly manner, an IT team needs to build out repeatable and scalable processes and procedures, and then ensure that both the team and the rest of the company follow them.

Some areas that IT procedures should address include:

• How should users request service from the IT department? (Phone, email, ticketing system, etc.)
• How is issue priority determined? How are emergencies handled?
• Do you have a service level agreement (SLA) with management and users – a goal to resolve most tickets within a certain timeframe? How is it measured and tracked?
• What is your change management process? How are changes communicated to the rest of the company?
• How are individual problems tracked so that broader issues and trends can be identified and handled?
• Where do you securely keep current system documentation, passwords, and other critical information?

Many teams allow their procedures to grow organically. While that’s fine for smaller teams, when more than one or two people are involved, having strong, documented processes in place will create better IT outcomes for the entire company.

There are books and online resources that can help you to build your processes, for example The Practice of System and Network Administration, the many online resources on ITIL, or Google’s Site Reliability Engineering guide. Many organizations also choose to engage a consultant to help them build and document their processes. But ultimately, it’s up to IT and company leadership to develop and adopt procedures across the organization.

As with any job, IT specialists can work much more efficiently when they’re provided with the proper tools. In the IT world, there are two types of tools: 1) tools that help the IT team do their job but have little direct visibility to end users, and 2) tools that end users know and may interface with such as antivirus, file storage, and backup systems.

Both types of tooling can be designed to work together. These include ticketing systems, hardware and software inventory databases, software deployment tools, remote monitoring and management (RMM) systems, and more. These tools can also be integrated with each other and with other systems. They can also be automated or scripted to varying degrees.

For example, an integrated ticketing and inventory system can automatically populate a trouble ticket with information from the user’s system. A well-configured RMM can automatically open and close tickets based on alerts generated from servers and network infrastructure. And automation can be used to make sure tickets don’t get stuck or missed by sending alerts about certain conditions.

Selecting, implementing, and maintaining IT management tools can itself be a full-time job. This leads many IT teams to neglect their tooling, in effect making their job harder than it needs to be. Proper tooling can also be expensive, especially for a small number of endpoints. But when set up properly, tooling can be scaled up relatively easily.

Another large but often overlooked cost of building an IT department has to do with management and strategy. Without a clear picture of how IT needs to grow and evolve to meet the needs of the business, your team will find itself jumping from problem to problem applying band-aid fixes. Projects and critical upgrades can easily fall to the wayside unless someone is responsible for setting priorities – and the bandwidth to complete those projects is made available. Also, it can be hard to get a handle on the true costs of IT support in your business when they’re distributed across multiple cost centers and not unified on a single report.

For this reason, larger IT teams are usually headed by a Chief Technology Officer (CTO), who is responsible for setting IT strategy for the organization. Reporting to the CTO, an IT Director oversees the day-to-day operations of the IT team (smaller organizations may combine these roles). And many organizations are adopting techniques from the construction industry and hiring dedicated IT project managers to oversee the implementation of new processes and systems.

Smaller companies may lack the resources to hire dedicated IT management staff. But having good management to set a strategy and provide a liaison between IT and the rest of the business is a critical part of successful IT outcomes.

Building an organized, efficient IT team isn’t a trivial matter – but it’s not impossible, either. With the right management strategy, staffing, tooling, and procedures, an in-house IT department can provide outsized value to your company, especially as technology becomes increasingly important to businesses in every vertical.

But the honest truth is that most small-to-midsize companies – those under 250 employees or so – will find it difficult to find and dedicate the resources that it takes to build a fully insourced IT department. For most businesses of that size, compromises will need to be made that will prevent the IT team from providing the level of service that’s required in today’s business environment. To fill in these gaps, your business will want to consider outsourcing some or all IT functions to a third-party vendor.