Coleman Technologies Blog

Among IT professionals, an acronym is sometimes used when discussing certain issues and challenges: “PEBKAC,” or Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. In other words, user error. 

While it’s a fun little inside joke that can help frustrated technicians blow off steam, we cannot deny that PEBKAC implies some disrespect for the end user. Frankly, that’s not the perspective anyone offering support should take.

Instead, our approach to IT support is more reminiscent of a very different perspective.

Good IT Support Requires Empathy

For context, we have to go back to 1996 and acquaint ourselves with a researcher and publisher named Philip Agre. A doctoral graduate of MIT and researcher of artificial intelligence, Agre also wrote prolifically about a variety of topics and maintained an online newsletter called The Network Observer. UCLA has preserved his work and it is available to be read freely in their archives.

In 1996, Agre posted a brief article titled “How to help someone use a computer.” In it, he documented an impressive list of platitudes he felt support professionals (or really, anyone) should remember when helping someone else use a computer and a list of best practices to follow while providing that assistance.

It’s fascinating to read almost 30 years later because it really shows that the more things change, the more they stay the same. For instance, the following nuggets are just a few pieces of advice Agre gives the reader:

“Nobody is born knowing this stuff.”

“You've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.”

“A computer is a means to an end. The person you're helping probably cares mostly about the end. This is reasonable.”

“They might be afraid that you're going to blame them for the problem.”

Later, in the “rules” he gives for a support professional to follow, Agre clearly endorses a gentle, empathetic approach.

While We Break Some of Agre’s Rules, We Follow the Important Ones

As a managed service provider, a key part of our job is operating in the background to help prevent users from experiencing issues. Otherwise, we’re there for them to call on when they actively need assistance. Our goal is to resolve the issue and get them back on track.

This directly contradicts one of Agre’s virtues: “Your primary goal is not to solve their problem. Your primary goal is to help them become one notch more capable of solving their problem on their own. So it's okay if they take notes.”

However, beyond this and a few other exceptions, we totally align with what Agre endorses. After all, it summarizes any good IT technician's approach: listen, educate, and resolve. Not only is it a more effective means of solving a problem, it does so by building a community, and as Agre put it:

“Knowledge lives in communities, not individuals. A computer user who's part of a community of computer users will have an easier time than one who isn't.”

We like to think that all our clients around British Columbia have a positive experience working with us. If this sounds like something you want to assist your business in achieving its goals, please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask. Call us at (604) 513-9428 to start a conversation about your needs and concerns.

Nobody likes getting large support bills from technology companies—especially when they are unexpected. This is the case for both the business owners footing the bill and the employees who might be held responsible for racking up the bill in the first place. This puts SMBs in a bit of an impossible situation; either spend money to keep employees productive, or save money and suffer from productivity issues.

But the issue is more nuanced than that, and there are valuable solutions out there to solve your IT support challenges.

The IT Support Headache

Let’s walk through a scenario that I’m sure you’re all too familiar with.

An employee runs into a technology problem while they’re going about their workday. They are hesitant to seek out help for the issue for two primary reasons: they either don’t know how to get support, or they are too afraid to ask for help out of fear they might incur a large support bill for the company. This prevents them from getting the support they need to effectively do their jobs.

The end result: significant loss of productivity as employees struggle for no good reason.

Remove Barriers to Solving Technology Problems

All of the above issues can be addressed by one simple idea: make solving IT problems easier for your team.

You need to ensure that employees not only know how to ask for help, but that they also feel supported and encouraged in their decision to seek out help. This involves having a single point of contact for all of your tech support needs, as well as actively reassuring your team that they are not going to be held responsible for issues related to billing. In other words, tell your team that you expect them to use the support, then show them how to do it.

Thankfully, there’s an easy solution, and it’s one that we can offer: help desk support.

A Help Desk is the Solution

Imagine experiencing a technology problem, then having the means to immediately solve it.

That’s what a help desk offers small businesses: an entity for any and all technology-related issues your employees might face. They can submit a support ticket at any time, which will then go through a delegation process according to the situation’s urgency. The issue is then resolved with the efficiency it deserves.

A help desk puts the power back into your employees’ hands and empowers them to seek assistance when it’s needed rather than be fearful of the repercussions for doing so.

Call Us Today to Learn More

The right help desk solution can improve your business’ productivity, and we’ve got just the service for you.

Coleman Technologies supports British Columbia businesses in countless ways, including help desk support for any and all IT-related issues. Your employees will never fear asking our team for help. All they have to do is submit a ticket or call us for help. We can even remote into your desktops to address issues that require a hands-on and immediate response.

Learn more by calling us today at (604) 513-9428.

In business, experience is always useful. Nowhere is that more apparent than when managing your organization’s IT infrastructure. The problem is that acquiring the expertise to do just that can be quite confusing for most business owners. Today, we’ll talk about how technology management experience can produce better business from one end to the other. 

Value of Modern IT

For any-sized business, the use of technology can present huge steps forward in terms of productivity and efficiency. For the business that actively tries to find the right technology to aid its operations, it can be maddening and frustrating. This is because there is seemingly an endless amount of options available, all of which promise to help build a better business. The thing is, not all technology that works for one business, works for another. 

The technology consultants at Coleman Technologies work daily with British Columbia businesses to help them get the technology to drive their business initiatives forward. This isn’t just about getting computers set up, it’s about getting the tools into a business that can work to make productivity easier, automate menial tasks, and build an efficient workforce that doesn’t have to struggle to collaborate. 

The value of modern IT can be immeasurable if it is implemented and supported correctly. That’s why having experienced technicians that understand both the fundamentals of supporting business technology and how it works to improve a business’ operational effectiveness is important. 

Experience With Business Technology

As far as delivering the right technology, technicians with experience not only understand how a business can utilize certain solutions to solve operational problems, but they also understand the potential value it has to a business as a whole. The procurement of new technology can be difficult for people that don’t know exactly what is needed to accomplish organizational goals.

Since most businesses have to be diligent about choosing prudent technology investments, having experienced perspectives is a great benefit that can go beyond dollars and cents; it can create environments where workers can be the most productive and allow business leaders to build processes that can bring a level of consistency that isn’t found in businesses that don’t have expert perspective driving their IT investments. 

In business today there are a lot of considerations to be made about IT. Does your business use remote workers? Does it have systems that need more security or more transparency? Most important of all, can it build the dynamic IT infrastructure you need to forge ahead confidently? With Coleman Technologies consultants working to help build your business’ technology, you can gain the peace of mind needed to know that you are getting the IT you need affordably. This makes for a more reliable technology environment. 

Experience with Support

Getting the right technology is only half the battle. If it isn’t supported, managed, and maintained correctly, you might as well flush money down the toilet. The key to a reliable IT infrastructure is expert support. This means experienced IT technicians that know what they are looking for/at and that are able to reliably keep your technology up and running efficiently and securely.

Today, there are more threats than ever, and that is before you consider that technology breaks. To ensure that your business doesn’t grind to a halt with technology problems, having experienced IT experts actively working on keeping your IT running effectively is more important than ever. Of course, you can hire IT staff to accomplish this, but if your business can’t afford the thousands of dollars a month that a professional IT technician would command, considering a managed service provider like Coleman Technologies is your best option. Not only can you have experienced IT technicians at the ready if something happens, they work proactively to ensure that you don’t have to deal with productivity-sapping downtime. 

Business IT can get complicated, but at Coleman Technologies we pride ourselves on being a solution to our clients’ IT problems, not another problem. Give us a call at (604) 513-9428 today to talk to one of our consultants about how we can help you get the most out of your business. 

Breaking Down Managed Service Providers (Also Known As MSPs)
First, our title throws a lot of people. What are managed services, and why do you need a provider at all?

In a lot of ways, we’re just like the internal IT team that you may or may not have. We look over and manage your technology solutions as a part of the service we provide.

Again, just a part.

Yes, part of our role is that of a remote monitoring service, but we can provide much more than that. We can advise you on your technology solutions, assist you in procuring and maintaining them, help you implement technologies like cloud computing, help keep your data secure and your solutions compliant to industry requirements, and a lot more than just that.

We Won’t Replace In-House Staff (Or Vice Versa)
When they learn the extent of what we do, many business owners (and eventually, their staff) may start to wonder if they can outsource all of their IT responsibilities to us, essentially eliminating the need for an internal IT resource. While we appreciate the confidence, we wouldn’t recommend that, unless you don’t currently have an IT resource.

The truth is, we work as well in tandem with an organization’s IT staff as we do as a standalone management solution.

Most internal teams or resources face the same problem: an overwhelming workload. Between day-to-day problem mitigation, managing your current technology, and planning for your business’ future strategy, there isn’t enough time for them to do everything that they have to… and that’s where we come in. Our job is to pick up the slack, wherever it may be, so that all responsibilities are attended to.

However, if you don’t currently have an in-house resource and have been entirely relying on the services of break/fix by-the-incident providers, we can replace those, adding much more value than you could expect otherwise.

We Can Handle Most Anything You Throw At Us
Finally, you might be hesitant to reach out to us because you’re anticipating that your particular industry has needs that we just couldn’t keep up with. Compliances and minutely specialized solutions may be a key factor to your success, and you don’t want to risk it all on the expertise of an outside source.

We have one thing to say to that:

Try us.

It is our job to assist businesses with their solutions. This means that, as these solutions evolve and develop, we have to continually educate ourselves. How does this problem need to be handled? Is there a better option that we should learn more about?

As a result, we’re pretty up-to-date on most things IT.

To discuss your particular needs further, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428, or read some of our other blogs to learn more about how we can help you.

First, we’ll define what “infrastructure monitoring” refers to:

Understanding IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Infrastructure monitoring covers a few different considerations, all critically important to the continued productivity of your business. These considerations include things like the physical condition of your infrastructure’s hardware, how your operating systems are being utilized, how much of your network’s bandwidth is being consumed and how many errors are occurring, or the performance and availability of your applications.

Naturally, hardware failures are a considerably sizable issue, even among the issues that infrastructure monitoring can help detect. This is especially the case when you consider that your remote workers will be especially reliant on your hardware to deliver the solutions they need. This means that you need to be particularly concerned about the possibility of issues happening within your server room and impacting your physical infrastructure itself.

In order to avoid the disastrous results this could have upon your data, productivity, budget, and business continuity, it is important that you have the proper infrastructure monitoring in place. Considering all that is going on now with a largely absent workforce, you especially need to abide by a few best practices considering your infrastructure monitoring solutions.

How to Make the Most of Infrastructure Monitoring

Here, we’ve assembled a few of the most important considerations you need to take into account--especially if your team is operating remotely.

Identify your most critical pieces of infrastructure for remote work capabilities.

While the entirety of your infrastructure is important, there are bound to be some components that a remote team is going to rely on more frequently. Regardless, since your business likely relies on each piece of equipment in your setup to some degree, you will want to make sure that the conditions are ideal for them all to operate. Consider adding backups of your climate control systems to take over if your primary ones should fail, and devices that allow for unresponsive components to be rebooted remotely to ensure that your in-house tools are available to your remote team.

Make sure your alert settings are up-to-date.

It’s one thing to have alerts set up for detected issues… it’s quite another to have alerts set up to inform the right people about these detected issues. If James needs to know about something, it doesn’t make much sense to alert Sarah. As the balance of your team shifts and responsibilities move around to new people, you need to make sure that your alerts are shifted accordingly. 

Confirm your system is in working order.

If a technician ever must go into the office to attend to something, have them check around your infrastructure for issues with your monitoring system. After all, it won’t do you any good if it isn’t functional itself and something were to happen. Have them check connections and ensure that the sensors are clean.

While we all try to keep ourselves safe, we must remember to do something to keep our business technology operational. Monitoring its environment is a great way to accomplish this.

To learn more about implementing the tools that protect your business during a wide array of circumstances, reach out to the team at Coleman Technologies today by calling (604) 513-9428, and subscribe to our blog for more IT information and updates.