Thew New Age of IT Services

The following was posted on one of my mailing lists today. This is a very sensitive subject and IT professionals hate to hear that their skill set is becoming obsolete and that their business model needs to change in order for their business to survive. The following was written by Amy Luby:

I would challenge everyone by saying that you cannot provide value if all you do is infrastructure. How can you focus on providing truely valuable services if all you are doing is keeping the infrastructure running smoothly? Managed Services is a way to move into selling a commodity service at a premium, while allowing you and your customer to then focus on the truely valuable services. For example, if you have your customer’s infrastructure running smoothly, you can now talk to them on how they’re going to use their Share Point site to become more efficient. You can talk to them about how CRM is going to make them more productive and save them money. Now your customer can budget for that Great Plains solution that they have needed for the last year. This is the “face time” you refer to. Move up the solutions stack in Microsoft speak. Not only is this time billable, but billable at a premium price, and so are the proj! ects that come out of that face time. That “guy” who does infrastructure at night can’t touch you. He becomes a non-issue and so do most of your competitors for that matter. That big Gold Certified Partner does not have the business model to be successful in SMB. But, this is a whole other topic.