Cooperating With your IT Department

10 years ago, IT departments in small businesses hated the idea of Quartet helping them with projects. About 90% of them considered us to be their enemy (or potential replacements), and they were reluctant to work with us.

Today, those same departments are now asking us to help them implement new projects.

Why the change in attitude?

These IT departments realized that they were unable to keep up with the demand of emerging technologies. (Understandably, their resources are limited compared to enterprise IT departments.)

By working with Quartet, they gain our technical expertise. They are also able to procure the required equipment at a lower cost through our vendor partnerships.

Situation

One of our customers – an accounting firm – had a resistant in-house IT department consisting of 5 technicians.

The project was an installation of Microsoft System Centre Essentials (SCE) onto their network. Each technician was experienced in their respective field, but none had the skills needed to deploy the software.

Solution

We were brought on to handle the deployment project. We helped install SCE onto the network and trained our customer’s IT staff in proper use of the software. After-service standby was provided once the project was completed to safeguard against possible problems.

The result: Zero downtime, and a more coherent asset management plan. With SCE, the IT personnel were able to see what services needed to be worked on. They could locate network bottlenecks, and monitor application performance.

The once-resistant IT department now embraces us as their technology partners. Thanks to our success with the SCE deployment, Quartet has been retained for further projects since then.