IT Failure costs S.M.E’s £6000 a year

By Tim Richardson Posted: 12/02/2004.  

Small businesses are losing up to £6,000 a year in lost productivity because their IT systems aren't up to scratch.

So says research by PC World Business, the catalogue arm of Dixons Group, which found that regular IT failures among small businesses can lead to a loss of productivity, undermine morale among hacked-off workers and damage relationships with punters.

What's more, when IT gear does go wrong it's often left to senior staff to deal with the problems.

Said the research: "When IT fails, managers are forced to turn their attention away from their primary business goals, and this is especially true in smaller businesses where employing dedicated IT staff is not a viable option."

The research also found that most IT problems are routine and easy to fix, with seven in ten problems able to be sorted within 15 minutes, says PCBW.

But small businesses suffer longer than they should, because they are numpties (our word, not PCWB's) when it comes to IT. According to PCWB, the issue is "so significant that many employees see IT outages as a barrier to doing their job properly, and often leave their job because of it. With the cost of labour turnover to businesses averaging £4,000 per person, this represents a huge financial risk to businesses unable to manage their IT systems effectively."


PCWB bases its £6K-a-year lost revenues estimate on a Chartered Institute of Personnel Development labour survey from 2002, which calculates that the cost of IT failures to business – mainly caused by decreased productivity - at between 0.1 and 1 per cent of overall revenue. ®

Article Source: Tim Richardson

The Register.

'Timeshare' keeps IT costs in check Nov 17 2003

By Graeme King, The Journal

Innovative it specialists from Sunderland are offering `timeshare' staff to help small businesses with tight budgets to manage their computer systems.

The team at GBM Solutions say they are tapping into an enormous market of companies who are not using their computer networks properly, which is costing them time and money through lost work and inefficient systems.

The three partners opened their business in May this year with funding from regional development agency One NorthEast and have hopes of growing into a business with a turnover of several hundred thousand pounds.

They offer companies a free diagnosis as to what is wrong with their computer systems, and how they can configure them more effectively.

Chief executive Omer Kutluoglu said: "SMEs often have problems with their IT infrastructure, but they can't afford an IT manager, and it's not economically viable to hire a consultant.

"What we do is offer a timeshare of an IT manager, who can look after a company's system one morning a week, then work on other companies' systems through the rest of the week. 

Mr Kutluoglu said when GBM offered its free diagnostic advice, his team was astonished at the poor standards they saw in so many companies.

He said: "Around one third of systems had viruses, which were of critical danger to their systems. And every single one had misconfiguration problems - essentially how information is spread through the system, which has a massive impact on performance."

Mr Kutluoglu said the problem some companies have is they have far too much information saved on one particular machine, while another lies almost empty, affecting the efficiency of their operation.

The GBM team also found many companies were guilty of not keeping `back-ups' of essential information, which could leave their businesses exposed should the main system fail.

He said: "People were not backing up information that was critical to the company's performance. Around four out of five companies had inadequate back up of core data."

Now GBM is trying to move on to the next stage of its growth, and recruit extra engineers.

GBM managing director Brian McGrath said: "We think this level of service to SMEs is long overdue.

The risk facing SME's out there is immense, and yet there has been very little affordable support available."

Omer Kutluoglu

Chief Executive