Why KPIs are Important when Outsourcing your IT

Published on 16 May 2022

Outsourcing your IT is becoming more popular as businesses are seeing the benefits of using an external IT provider for all their IT needs. It is important to understand the best ways to track how successful your investment in your IT Provider has been. A great way to do this is with KPIs.

What is a KPI?

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. They are a set of measurements that show you how well your business is doing when compared to the long-term goals of your business. This could be something like increasing overall revenue by increasing customer upselling. KPIs are vital in ensure the success and longevity of your business.

KPIs can:

• Give you a realistic idea of how your business is performing. This allows you to make adjustments in real time to ensure growth.
• Shows you which teams are hitting their targets, and which are not. Giving you a better overall perspective of how your business is performing.
• They can keep your teams on track by providing specific targets they need to meet.
• You can discover and analyse patterns to improve performance.

A good Key Performance Indicator should be trackable, have a clear objective and end- goal, and help you make informed decisions. There are many KPIs that a business can use to measure their success, it is important to keep your KPIs aligned with your business’s objectives.

What is Outsourcing IT?

Outsourcing IT is moving your current IT infrastructure management to an external company, often called a Managed Service Provider. This is an excellent way for growing businesses to remain competitive and scalable at a more affordable cost. With the speed at which technology changes and grows, having experts on hand can be a benefit for businesses who do not have a dedicated IT department. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can build secure and scalable IT infrastructure for your business; ensuring its longevity and functionality.

There are many benefits to outsourcing your IT to a Managed Service Provider:

Experts

• Most MSPs will have staff who are experts in specific fields of IT. For example, Cyber Security: this could allow you to get enterprise grade expertise without any added cost. By having access to experts in IT you can future-proof your business’s IT so that as you grow, your IT can grow seamlessly with you.

Keeping Focus

• Often with small to medium businesses the management of IT falls to either the owner or the most ‘tech-savvy’ members of staff. Often this will remove them from their work to fix IT issues, which in turn will slow down productivity. Whilst this may not be an issue now, if your business continues to grow you could be adding unnecessary stress on you or your staff as well as slowing down productivity overall. Outsourcing your IT will alleviate the extra work and save both you and your staff time.

Cost

• Using an MSP will provide you with predictable operational expenditure. Avoid unexpected costs and downtime by paying a fixed monthly fee. It can allow you to budget and focus your spending on more important areas of your business.

When outsourcing your IT to an MSP it can be easy to forget about your IT and let them run quietly in the background. Not having to think about your IT can be a huge relief, however it is important that your IT provider is meeting your expectations. An excellent way to do this is by using KPIs to measure their performance and outcomes against your own expectations. More importantly you will be able to understand if you are getting the most out of your MSP.

There are many ways you can use KPIs to measure this; we have put together a helpful eBook to guide you through the 7 KPIs we think can help improve your ROI (Return on Investment) on your IT provider. Download our eBook here.