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TECHNOLOGY
Avoiding those "uh-oh" moments
Managing your IT shouldn't be a do-it-yourself project
By Nancy Doucette
Once you’ve watched the DIY Network, you’re left feeling confident that you can update a bathroom, repair your deck or landscape your yard like a pro. Even if you’re only moderately handy, successfully completing a do-it-yourself project is rewarding.
IT management, on the other hand, shouldn’t be a do-it-yourself project, according to a growing number of agency owners. And if you have tried to do it yourself, chances are, it wasn’t rewarding.
“I can be my own worst enemy from an IT standpoint,” admits Peter Anderson, owner of Anderson Group International, LLC, based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. “All of us who think we know enough about IT to do it ourselves have had those ‘uh-oh’ moments when we realize we aren’t the computer pros we thought we were.”
Of course there are plenty of agency owners who aren’t do-it-yourself IT people. They’ve chosen instead to have an IT person or even an IT team. Byrne Stapleton, CIC, cautions principals in this category to beware of what he calls “The Bubble Effect.” “That means that the IT person or team is so invested in the system they’ve nurtured over time that they don’t keep up with the newer technology. They’re isolated in a bubble.”
As the third-generation principal of Stapleton Insurance Group in Toledo, Ohio, he observes: “Agency owners generally aren’t proactive when it comes to their IT. They wait until the proverbial fire breaks out, and then they address it.”
It might be a simple matter of priorities, notes Tim Woodcock, president and CEO of Courtesy Computers, Inc., based in Ft. Lauderdale. “Agency owners and principals have better things to do,” he states. “They don’t have time to do IT.” He says his company is a one-stop shop for clients where everything related to IT is centralized. Additionally, the cost for this “managed IT service” approach is a flat monthly fee, making it easier to budget for.
“At Courtesy Computers, we live and breathe IT,” Woodcock proclaims, “but we do it as a managed services provider. Managed services isn’t just IT. In the very generic sense, MSP is the practice of outsourcing day-to-day management responsibility as a strategic method for improved, effective and efficient operations and reduced overhead.
“Courtesy Computers is part of the MSP Alliance Group,” Woodcock continues. “That means our staff of 12 in our Ft. Lauderdale office grows to over 400 when we factor in the vendor partners and our associates in the MSP Alliance.”
In addition to having a “strong bench,” Courtesy also offers clients 28 years of experience. “We’ve specialized in the insurance industry since we started,” he adds.
A non-traditional approach
Peter Anderson has been a customer of Courtesy Computers for about 10 years. “I love their MSP program,” he declares. “It’s a manageable, predictable, and reasonable expense.”
Three years ago, Anderson sold his retail agency and spun off the musical instruments insurance division that had been a sideline for 19 years. In the process, his agency went from being a brick and mortar entity to a virtual operation. “No one really needs to find us other than via the Web,” he says.
That’s a good thing because Anderson reports that he’s on the road for as much as six months a year, and half of that time is aboard a cruise ship because of the type of work his wife does. But he’s doing a brisk business from wherever he is. “We were averaging about 360 applications a year before we spun off this division,” he notes. “Now I’m averaging about 120 apps a month. Our search engine optimization has positioned us as a top source for musical instrument insurance worldwide.”
He says Courtesy Computers “handled everything” with Applied Systems to get his virtual agency’s TAM Central system switched on. “I no longer have servers like a brick and mortar agency would,” Anderson explains. “My data is housed on Applied’s server at their data center. In my quest to go virtual, I’ve gone without a domain. That was somewhat scary for me at first. But my network is working fabulously wherever I can get an Internet connection.”
Anderson Group International has a staff of six, including Anderson and the agency’s Webmaster. Two of the staff are still in the former agency location in Massachusetts. They handle the customer-related contact, Anderson explains. He outsourced his back-office staff a couple of years ago so he also has two employees in India.
Through its tiered managed IT service plans, Courtesy Computers can tailor services according to an agency’s needs and budget—including network monitoring, spam filtering, security, telco and data circuit auditing, and IT consulting. “Courtesy manages our workstations, which means I don’t have to deal with the challenges that workstation management entails,” Anderson says.
Courtesy Computers offers AppRiver as one of its managed products. (See “In pursuit of easy” for more about AppRiver in the December 2009 issue of Rough Notes.) Anderson says he is delighted to have AppRiver host his Exchange server. “That was another server I was happy to get rid of,” he says with a smile. “My mail server was constantly giving me challenges.” He says there is a nominal additional charge each month for AppRiver’s Exchange hosting and unlimited storage.
Additionally, Anderson uses AppRiver’s spam and anti-virus protection. “I can’t remember the last time I had a false positive on spam,” he says.
Anderson says Courtesy Computers also helped him with his agency’s Voice over IP phone system. “Courtesy researched a VoIP solution for me. It rings wherever I tell it to ring,” he says.
Most recently, Anderson was discussing Web filters with Courtesy. For what he needed, the traditional solutions were quite expensive, he notes. The solution that Courtesy found for him, though, was considerably less.
“Anything related to how I run my operation—admittedly much differently than most agencies—has been with guidance from Courtesy Computers,” Anderson says.
Big picture
“When Courtesy is building out an agency’s IT infrastructure, we look at the business model first. The technology must follow the business model,” Tim Woodcock explains. “So even though we’re IT, we look at the bigger picture. What is the agency’s plan? Are they looking to acquire? To be acquired? Organic growth?
“Each of those goals has an implication on the agency’s IT…now and in the future. We want to plan based on the business plan for the agency,” he says.
To accomplish this, Woodcock conducts a review with new customers to get a baseline view of the agency’s technology landscape. That includes looking at vendor plans and contracts to determine whether current solutions are meeting the agency’s IT needs. “Generally, the first question I ask when an agency contacts us is: ‘When was the last time you had a network review?’ Nine times out of 10, the answer is ‘Never,’” he notes.
Woodcock says these reviews are comprehensive, sometimes taking weeks to complete. Pricing for a review is based on the number of workstations and servers. Principals are asked to complete a self-assessment to determine where they think they are with respect to the business.
Courtesy combines that information with what it finds out from interviews with staff, their assessment of the staff’s overall productivity, and Courtesy’s evaluation of system security. Courtesy then generates an analysis and recommendation report for the agency.
“The report includes quotes for not just the labor but also the materials needed for the solutions that will resolve whatever the issues are,” Woodcock says. “We’re not offering a particular product or solution. As an independent consultant that’s not what we do. We tell the agency what they should have been doing yesterday, what they need to do in the next couple of months, and what they should be doing on an ongoing basis.
“Different agencies have different needs,” he observes. “Following a review, the agency might want us to work with their existing IT staff to implement and oversee solutions; they may want us to work with a local vendor that the agency is near and dear to, recognizing that the vendor has some limitations; or the agency may want us to become their IT staff and asks us to implement the solutions. We’ll take on whatever level of responsibility that the agency wants us to.”
If the agency has an IT person or IT department, Courtesy can provide an evaluation of those resources as well. “We don’t want that person’s job,” Woodcock emphasizes. “We need that person in the agency. But sometimes we discover that the IT person needs some continuing education in the IT field. We know where to direct them so they get the level of education they need. The more knowledge the agency IT staff has, the less dependent the agency is on us.
“There are instances where we’ve worked ourselves out of a job,” he continues. “But in those situations, agencies continue to buy services from us such as off-site data backup, AppRiver, disaster recovery services, or some of our security products where we’re monitoring productivity and internal threats—where we’re remotely watching what employees are doing on their workstations.
“We may not be doing the day-to-day management of their systems but we’re assisting those agencies in other ways using technology.”
Proactive, not reactive
Byrne Stapleton takes pride in the fact that his long-established agency keeps ahead of the curve in terms of technology. “Our commercial lines department has been paperless for over a decade,” he says.
Not surprisingly, when he was looking for an IT consulting firm to help with network management, remote troubleshooting, and off-site backup, Stapleton wanted an organization that was proactive, not reactive, where his agency’s technology was concerned. Another essential requirement was knowledge of the agency’s management system.
“I could hire hardware people or network people,” Stapleton points out. “But they wouldn’t have insurance knowledge or be familiar with the players in this industry. Courtesy was recommended by one of my carrier representatives. They understand the insurance industry from all angles; they understand the tools and the vendors.”
Stapleton says the agency has a controller who handles on-site IT issues. “There’s very little for us to do, thanks to Courtesy,” he admits.
He says he follows Courtesy’s advice and refreshes his hardware every three to five years for his 42-person staff. He appreciates that Courtesy can tap into his system and troubleshoot, should it be necessary. “They can do just about anything with regard to the server,” Stapleton says.
“They can shut it down and reboot it from Florida,” he continues. “Their remote access capability allows them to do everything except to unplug something. We can’t do anything without our management system, so even an hour offline gets expensive.”
Once Stapleton shared this reality with the folks at Courtesy Computers, they went to work researching solutions. He reports that they recently informed him of an arrangement where the agency can be on a temporary server with full data compliance within an hour of the agency’s server going down. “We can operate remotely until a new piece of hardware can be located, delivered and installed,” he says.
“We try to be redundant wherever possible with our equipment and data,” Stapleton explains.
So Stapleton also depends on Courtesy for off-site backup. “With all the scanning and digital downloads we get, our tape backups were taking hours,” he says. In keeping with his goal of redundancy wherever possible, Stapleton utilizes a tape backup system on site as well as the off-site backup handled by Courtesy. “It achieves all the safety measures that we need with respect to disaster recovery,” he points out.
What’s especially reassuring about Courtesy’s solution, though, is the weekly “test restore” that they provide, Stapleton continues. So should it be necessary to use a backup to restore data because of a server crash or even something less catastrophic, all parties can rest assured that the data is usable.
“That’s the proactive service I’m talking about,” Stapleton notes. “Courtesy makes sure we’re not just putting out fires. Together, we’re taking steps to stop the fires from occurring in the first place.”
For more information:
Courtesy Computers, Inc.
4101 Ravenswood Rd.
Ste. 303
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33312
Phone: (954) 321-8605, Ext. 707
Web site: www.courtesycomputers.com |
