4 Reasons Why Successful Companies Have IT Departments

1. Maintenance

Whether you want to be or not, if you operate a computer your are a system administrator. Users regularly install, uninstall and do other maintenance operations without really understand what's going on.  When was the last time your computer was defragmented or your startup routine audited. How much is on the hard drive and is it necessary?  These are the tings that the IT department deals with, which develops protocols for maintaining office wide performance and reliability levels.

2. Security

The Internet is a hostile area where malicious programmers develop methods to steal from anyone, vandalize computers or sell something. This rapidly changing area requires constant monitoring which is more than most people have to commit. Spam and Pop-Ups don't destroy your computer, however, they are still very annoying and time consuming.  Hackers/Crackers are a different story all together they can do anything once a system is compromised and no self interest to prevent them from doing their worse. It's the IT professionals job to install software to protect your, hardware to combat menaces and to advise you on best actions to take.

3. Data

Data is the most important part of any businesses.  However, there are many who do not keep proper precautions to make sure that if disaster does happen then there is recourse.  93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (Source: National Archives & Records Administration in Washington.)

4. Training

After computer failure the leading cause of productivity loss is under utilization of tools.  Often users misunderstand how to do basic software functions.  They may ask for help from a co-worker or just poke around until they can coble something together.  IT support provides on demand training and classes to teach users how to use complex but very powerful programs.  A good IT professional can even walk you through software functions over the phone, without even looking at your screen.