I’ve had conversations recently with two out-of-work IT managers who were abruptly let go from long-term positions in mid-size organizations. One of them had been working for the same employer for 25 years. They both cited a business downfall followed by cost cutting as the reason for their departure. When I asked how the company continued to support their IT infrastructure after they left, both of them gave the same answer: they were replaced by Managed Service Providers (MSPs). IT managers are increasingly finding themselves in competition with MSPs for their jobs.

Full disclosure: My company, CNS, is an MSP but did not replace the job of either of these two individuals. Additionally, when I describe the benefits of working with an MSP, I’m referring to mature MSPs who have achieved operational efficiency; not the many break-fix computer shops who call themselves MSPs but demonstrate little or no MSP business characteristics.

One of the difficulties with the IT Manager job is the lack of a clear definition of the role. Many small to medium sized organizations use the titles IT Manager, IT Director, and CIO to describe the same position. While all those titles generally indicate a supervisory or executive role, many IT managers and director have no direct reports and may only manage the computer systems. For the purpose of this post, I will use the term IT Manager to refer to the person responsible for maintaining IT infrastructure for their organization.

As an IT manager, if you’re simply maintaining the IT systems and “keeping the lights on”, you should be worried. MSPs are delivering IT infrastructure services more efficiently than ever and IT managers who only focus on infrastructure cannot compete.

The following tasks can be performed far more efficiently by MSPs than by IT managers. If you’re spending time doing any of the following tasks, your job as an IT Manager is at risk.

Providing desktop support

As an IT manager you’re responsible for keeping the IT systems online. This usually means servers, switches, routers, network cabling, wireless, cloud applications, etc. If you’re able to manage these high-level tasks and also providing help-desk services, your employer is overpaying for desktop support.

Think of it this way. If your salary is $80k as the IT manager, you’re employer is paying about $48/hr (fully burdened cost of labor) for your time. An MSP can pay half your salary for mid-range desktop support, which means the MSP can deliver equivalent service at a lower cost and still make a tidy profit. But wait, you may say. I’m an experienced IT professional. My desktop support is better than a junior resource. This is false justification. The junior desktop support resource spending 100% of her time on desktop support is delivering the service more efficiently than the senior resource doing it 20% of the time for the simple reason that she is spending more time and energy focused on working in that role.

Evaluating IT infrastructure technology vendors

I’ve talked with IT managers over the years that spend a significant amount of time evaluating infrastructure technology and vendors. From servers to switches to firewalls to anti-virus, IT managers are spending hours doing research, talking to resellers, testing configurations, and writing up reports.

For each of the technologies you’re evaluating, calculate your efficiency as follows. Take the numbers of minutes spent evaluating each technology component and divide by the number of units you have deployed. So if you spend 480 minutes (8 hours) evaluating anti-virus software and you have 100 seats, you’re efficiency is 4.8 minutes/seat. Now consider a small MSP with 1000 seats under management. If they spent the same amount of time evaluating the anti-virus software, they achieved a 10x efficiency gain. Multiply these gains across all technologies in the stack and you have a significant savings. Evaluating technology is a wasteful use of time for the IT manager because MSPs can do it far more efficiently.

Troubleshooting sluggish systems

I’ve had conversations with two prospects recently that wanted assistance troubleshooting network slowness. Both were IT managers who knew their systems were slow but couldn’t find the root cause. They lacked the knowledge and the toolset to troubleshoot appropriately and were looking for outside help.

I won’t claim that all IT problems are easy to solve but in many cases IT managers can’t find the root cause of system slowness because they have no visibility into their networks. They lack the tools necessary to troubleshoot effectively.

Smart MSPs achieve competitive advantage through efficiency and as a result have invested tens of thousands of dollars in software tools to maximize it. This means MSPs have tools at their disposal that most IT managers can’t afford. Good tools lead to faster problem resolution and better system availability, which leads to better system performance and uptime. IT managers, with their limited resources, can’t compete.

“Tweaking” system settings

As business productivity software continues to get smarter, computer hardware gets more powerful, and storage gets bigger and cheaper, the need to tweak settings to get every last ounce of performance out of a system is greatly diminished. For those who have been in the field at least a decade, consider the effort required maintaining Exchange 2003 versus Exchange 2013 or Office 365 and you’ll have an idea of what I mean. Good MSPs leverage low-maintenance systems to drive efficiency.

Maintaining system inventories in Excel

If you’re still tracking hardware and software inventories in a spreadsheet you’re doing it wrong. Software inventory management tools take most of the work out of inventory management. MSPs have taken advantage of this for years and the once extremely time-consuming task of pulling an accurate system inventory can be complete in minutes rather than hours.

How to add real value in your organization

Now that you understand what tasks are no longer adding value, let me share some activities that will ensure you’re making yourself invaluable to your employer.

The primary driver of IT systems in business is productivity improvement. This objective is rarely mentioned in technology meetings and we seem to be missing the forest for the trees. IT systems exist to enable workers to accomplish more work in less time. Other goals are ancillary.

With that in mind, recognize that the best way to add value to an organization is to improve worker productivity. Despite all the advances in technology, there are huge opportunities for productivity improvement through integration, automation, and business process optimization.

Improving system integration and automation

Question: “Why does that customer record have to be entered twice? “

Answer: “Because XYZ software doesn’t integrate with Quickbooks.”

As an IT manager, if this is a familiar scenario, you should be finding a way to integrate XYZ with Quickbooks. As a thought exercise, assume a redundant data entry task is being performed by 3 people 10 times per day and the task adds 6 minutes per entry. By eliminating this redundant task you would save 3 hours per day or 750 hours per year. At a pay rate of $25/hour the yearly savings potential is $18,750.

By figuring out how to better integrate business systems, you can save your employer tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per years. Show that to your supervisor on your next performance review!

Optimizing business process

Many information-based organizations have workflows that go like this: they take data in, do some work on that data, and send it back out in a different format. There are often a number of different people who need to touch the data as it moves through the organization. The path the data follows through the organization is the business process. Businesses make mistakes or fail to execute when the process is poorly defined or implemented. An example of a poorly defined process is one where and email is brought into an organization and then bounced around an organization with multiple people manipulating attachments and cc’ing the group at every step along the way. Email is fine as a notification system but it fails miserably when used as a business process management tool.

As an IT manager, you have an opportunity to significantly improve poor business processes using workflow management software and ERP systems. I won’t go into all the details of business process optimization strategy in this post but there are manifold opportunities for improvement in most organizations. Optimizing workflows isn’t easy but it will reduce duplicate effort, minimize mistakes, improve productivity, and lead to happier customers. This is a huge opportunity for IT managers to add value.

Wrapping it up

IT managers who focus on infrastructure services such as help desk, network and server management, and technology vendor management are at risk of losing their jobs in the coming decade. MSPs are already replacing people in these roles and this trend will accelerate as executives and business owners become educated about the advantages of working with a mature MSP.

In order to remain relevant and valuable to their organizations, IT managers must rethink their role and strive to deliver value through productivity enhancements including system integration, automation, and business process optimization.