Enjoyed the article and the comments. It was also easy to relate to Heather’s problem.

Working with small business owners as a technologist, I often walk into environments where the technologist is over his/her head. Often because the expert is an expert in technology with little business understanding.

In recomending maintaining the present IT staff I would worry that Heather might run into the same problems she’s having now with her IT. I would recomend finding an IT proffessional who has a formal background in business and in technology to help plan the strategy. Besides a strategist I would recomend a specialist in the particular applications the company uses.

Maintaining staff that has an expertise in infrastructure support would seem counter productive if all services where either hosted on line or maintained by servers in the cloud.

I agree with you that there is a definite niche for business/technology consulting for the small business niche. Thanks so much for the article it made me think.

Thanks

You've got one thing correct..Heather doesn't communicate with her IT staff. I spoke with them recently and they rarely get any time with her.

She does fully understrand her business but not her IT. I'm happy to say that one of the outcomes of my working with her and forcing her to get closer to her IT staff, she's realized that IT is much more important to her business than she expected.

Things are looking good for Heather's team.

Thanks again for stopping by. Great stuff.
My recent post Links for May 30 2010

The cloud is great for many platforms but there are times where there are reasons to keep things in-house.

Thanks for stopping by! I've now got another Cloud based tool to take a look at (Rypple of course).
My recent post Small Business IT Outsourcing – don’t go too far

Great post! Lots of food for thought.

As a cloud vendor ourselves (http://rypple.com is a SaaS platform), we get involved in a lot of conversations about outsourcing core IT competencies. I think your point about transitioning the role of your IT staff to technology initiatives should not be understated.

Although you can definitely move your email to Google Apps, shift your invoicing and billing to Freshbooks, and move your team performance and management to Rypple, you won't become entirely free of the need to administer those various services (think onboarding, offboarding, upgrading capabilities, etc.). You'll also want to make sure that you keep a technically competent staff around to assess new tools as they emerge, deciding when and how they make sense to work into your IT mix.

Check out Choose the Cloud, a great new resource from box.net, GetSatisfaction, SocialText, and others (Rypple will soon be listed too!) covering why you might choose to outsource IT to the cloud.

Keep up the great work!