Ottawa, ON (PRWEB) April 28, 2014 -- Billions of dollars in lost productivity and anemic IT spending threaten Canadian and US businesses, primarily because IT firms and their customers keep focusing on utility computing, lower costs and uptime as their key drivers.
IT firms, VARs and MSPs continue to compete for lower cost computing, remote managed services and service level agreements on narrowly based targets such as uptime and help desk turnaround. The reality is that level of service should be a given; the most important aspect of business computing is whether the firm is using information technology to its competitive advantage.
The average SMB budget of information technology investment compared to payroll is extremely low - and it’s a global competitive threat, not just a domestic one.
“You can’t have a knowledge worker at pay ranges of $50,000 to $150,000 having as little as 3% to 5% of payroll allocated to information technology investments. That’s right, I said investments – IT is not an expense,” says Keith Taylor, VP of Business Development at FuseExpertise. “The industry and business clients have it all wrong. If you want to survive and thrive your top priority should be to double your IT budget and start spending for productivity, internet marketing, mobility, technology skills.”
Industry-wide IT spending has been relatively flat for many years in the western economies. The level of productivity, automation and integration available today, combined with the cloud, internet and mobile means a high performing company can be just a few people – outsourcing to virtual expertise and really hammering bigger companies that just don’t get it.
“The writing is on the wall. IT firms need to start communicating to their clients in a different way,” pressed Taylor. “You can’t just provide a la carte products and services anymore. You need a better conversation with your clients and give them the competitive advantage of IT.”
As Taylor points out, the industry irony is that while folks debate the cost of software subscriptions few, if any, of the employees have even minimal skills on using the software for business productivity. And hardly any of them ever capture or share their ‘in context’ software expertise with their colleagues.
“FuseExpertise and IT Health for SMBs is a great way to start that IT business conversation with your clients,” says Taylor. “Moreover, you can push out IT Productivity tips to your client’s employees, allow them to capture and share their operational expertise and even be the catalyst for capturing your client’s employee intelligence – ideas, prospects, competitors, etc.”
FuseExpertise is a division of FuseTalk Inc. a leading provider of discussion forums, blogging tools, wikis and collaboration solutions. FuseExpertise leverages many of the capabilities of FuseTalk and provides powerful, patent and patent pending traits that make FuseExpertise 'business essential’ Collaborative Business Improvement Software (TM). Coupled with subject matter expert content and Profit Practices (TM), FuseExpertise can greatly leverage employees, managers, consultants, authors and publishers - anyone and any organization that has or needs expertise.
Lesley Huppert, FuseTalk Inc., +1 (613) 249-9205 Ext: 131, [email protected]
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