WetalkedtoJohnabouttheemergenceofmanagedITservices.
He believes they offer a compelling solution to the technological challenges faced by today’s recruitment business.
Why is the managed service concept such a good fit for this industry?
“Having moved nearly two hundred sites over from traditional in-house IT infrastructures to a fully managed, thin-client alternative, I’ve been able to compare the respective merits of both.
For me, the reason why managed or outsourced IT provision is so well suited to the recruitment sector is that it delivers big in three key areas: scalability, availability and agility.
Take the example of a thriving business that expands quickly to 750 staff and develops its own IT resources in line with this growth.
Then along comes a downturn and the company shrinks by 50% – yet it still has the hardware, software, licenses, comms and IT team of a company twice its current size.
That’s a lot of waste and essentially untenable in a sector where cost and price pressures are intense and the onus has to be on ‘lean working’.
With managed service, on the other hand, IT becomes a utility and therefore scalable – you use what you need and pay only for what you use.
The nature of the recruitment operation also demands the highest levels of system availability. Consultants need access to client and candidate data around the clock – if a client needs a temp at very short notice, or you have to interview a candidate after hours, you need to be able to get into the system immediately, you can’t afford for it to be down.
With managed services, the necessary availability and redundancy are implicit within the service – as long as you have an internet connection, you have ‘anytime, anywhere access', while the provider’s data centre is built with back-up and failover in mind.
Staff can simply get on with their work and concentrate on what they’re good at, with IT playing an enabling rather than a disabling role”