Why Cutting the Help Desk Costs You in the Long Run

Hey, a memo to all you CIOs and IT managers out there: If you think cutting your help-desk staff is going to save your company big bucks (and make you a budgetary hero), think again.

As someone whose bacon has been saved multiple times by tech-savvy co-workers, I've long argued that the help-desk folks are the unsung heroes of most business operations. I've seen the chaos that ensues when the folks who set up and troubleshoot our computers are downsized or otherwise impacted. It isn't a pretty sight to watch a mid-level manager trying to configure a firewall or a VPN all by himself.

Happily, someone has actually quantified the cost of the stupidity of getting rid of the people who make your computer go "ding." Steven Levy, a former senior director at Microsoft, just wrote a piece about the true financial costs of cutting IT technicians.

In Levy's article, he estimates the savings of a cut technician as $28K per year -- but the resulting cost to the company as $150K per year. Oops. That's not going to look good on the balance sheet.

How did he arrive at this conclusion? Well, cutting out the set-up artists forces employees (many of whom are paid a lot more than the techs) to configure their own computers. They can't do it as quickly as the tech pros, so they lose time (and productivity, and money for the company). They're also likely to make mistakes that will require the services of IT to remedy, which incurs another cost.

In the end, maybe you've saved a portion of the salary cost of your help-desk staffer -- thus reducing the IT budget -- but you've actually cost the company as a whole much, much more. Read Levy's excellent post for more details about the costs of cutting your help desk.

The moral of the story? Think big picture. Before you slash personnel from your department, remember that you work for a larger company, and think about how your actions might ripple across the organization.

(image by quinn.anya via Flickr, CC 2.0)