IT management for SMB: looking for the ideal solution

In small IT departments, as elsewhere, structuring IT management is essential to guarantee a certain quality of service and efficiency. How to find a solution that fits the size, budget and needs of the team? 

Make the IT management of SMBs more professional

As an IT manager in a small or medium-sized company, you have certainly already taken initiatives to improve your IT management and production. You may have developed in-house solutions (e.g. an Excel file to structure the inventory of your assets). You may have preferred to turn to online tools (e.g. a graphical and no code tool to design your processes…). 

These tools, developed to compensate for the lack of professional software, can be interesting to meet a specific need at low cost. But they quickly reach their limits.

As an example: 

• Maintenance : your IT equipment’s evolution and the need to provide new services will require a constant adaptation of your tools. Question of maintenance of your tools and your specific developments will probably arise.    
• Limited control: using several applications will not help you keep control of your environment. It is difficult to homogenize practices and structure processes with dispersed solutions, except at the cost of a sustained interfacing effort.

Hence it’s worthful investing in professional ITSM software, which will have the capacity to structure the IT production, by centralizing data and harmonizing processes.

Automate and measure IT management in SMB

You should look for affordable solutions, but do not compromise on quality and functionality. First of all, the tool that meets your expectations will cover all the fields that structure the activity of your IT department: asset inventory, service catalogs, contract management, helpdesk…

But beyond this functional scope, as complete as it may be, the solution’s ability to industrialize your IT processes will be decisive.

An efficient ITSM solution should offer automation (assigning a ticket to a technician), monitoring (time analysis, drift), information (countdown alert on the respect of a commitment) or search capabilities (find all supplier contracts related to a system)…

As a result, you can put your IT department on a continuous improvement track and prepare it for growth, technological change and evolution of business expectations of your department.

Why not an Open Source solution in SaaS mode?

The choice of tool, the mode of acquisition and deployment is also key to success. It has to be aligned with your resources, both human and financial.

Open source software makes it possible to small and medium companies to meet some needs, without investment or delay.  In fact, they are the main users of open source (94%), according to a survey by the CNLL (Union of Free Software and Open Source Companies). It is therefore not surprising that the use of open source is common in IT departments with less than five people.

On the other hand SaaS mode brings real benefits in terms of cost and flexibility. It requires less up front investment in technical infrastructure and purchase of licenses. SaaS hosting allows you to say goodbye to the management of internal servers, to the upgrades you have to do yourself and to the commercial lock-in of software maintenance contracts.

The profile of the solution that ticks all the boxes for IT management in SMB is becoming clearer: a SaaS tool for its lightness (acquisition budget, ease of deployment, data hosted in the Cloud…) and open source for its robustness (transparency of the code, contributions from the community for development, reversibility of data…). Open source in SaaS combines the best of both worlds. At least if the tool contains all the features needed by SMEs to industrialize IT processes.