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Facilities Management

IT equipment and software is continually being updated. Maintaining an effective IT department will therefore require a continuing investment in development and training as new software is designed and introduced and hardware is updated.

Consider a company seeking to provide help desk support. The support staff will need to be re-trained when new software and hardware is introduced. Such support needs to be available whenever the users run into problems, but a small company may not be able to afford to provide continual support and indeed the demand for such support may not justify them providing a continually manned help desk. In this situation the company might decide to contract out the provision of a help desk.

Contracting out all or part of IT provision or support is called Facilities Management. This may involve contracting a Facilities Management firm to provide any or all of hardware, software and staff to deliver the necessary IT provision within the company. The benefits of facilities management are:

  • The third party supplier can provide a cost-effective service because, being a specialist provider they can make economies of scale. One example would be in the provision of telephone help-desk support where one central help desk could support a number of clients.
  • The Facilities Manger will have a greater expertise than an in-house solution would provide.
  • Costs will be negotiated in advance as part of the contract so that the uncertainty that often accompanies IT provision is eliminated
  • Staffing flexibility - if IT staff are employed by the Facilities Management firm then staff numbers can be more easily increased and decreased according to need without the associated problems of recruitment or redundancy.
  • Upgrading will be easier if software and/or hardware is provided by the Facilities Management company.

There are however some drawbacks to using a Facilities Management solution. The principal problem is that an essential function within the purchasing company is dependent on the operations of a third party. When contracts need to be renewed the purchasing company may find that it is locked into a solution where they are so heavily dependent on their Facilities Management provider that they have no option but to agree less favourable terms.

   

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