Is IT an "extravagent indulgence"

I stumbled on the Age's Enterprise blog over the weekend. What a depressing read this post was.

Quite simply, the idea that getting IT support is an "extravagent indulgence" is silly. It's like saying your rent or car maintenance is an optional extra. It's not, it's a real business cost.

One of the biggest mistakes small business makes is to keep their IT in house. It ends up soaking hours of the owners valuable time. In the worst case it costs ten of thousands in lost time.

The worst case we've ever seen is a network where all the computers had to be rebooted every time someone wanted to print. A typical print job would involve the user warning everyone they were about to print, the other five staff would save their work and troop out for a smoke.

Once the print job had finished, the user would reboot his computer and wander out to have a smoke with the others.

Every print job was costing the business a man hour of work. Over a year we estimated it was costing the business over $30,000.

Small business owners have to understand that IT is essential to most businesses. The cost involved are a natural cost of doing business. Not factoring for these costs is like not factoring for insurance.