A professional services company with 80 people, four offices and four different IT suppliers: one for the ERP, another for network infrastructure, another for workstations and another for billing software. Each supplier was responsible for their part. Nobody was responsible for the whole. When an issue touched two different systems, an incident could last days while suppliers pointed at each other.
How it was before
- 4 different suppliers with no coordination
- Incidents lost between overlapping responsibilities
- No updated inventory of systems and devices
- Leadership with no visibility of real IT status
- Average incident resolution time: 4-6 hours
- A single point of contact for all IT operations
- Clear escalation with measured and auditable SLAs
- Centralised inventory updated weekly
- Monthly IT status dashboard for leadership
- Average incident resolution time: 45 minutes
What was hardest to change
The technical part was the simplest. The hardest part was the supplier transition: there were active contracts, system knowledge dispersed across several teams and natural resistance from existing suppliers to hand over information and access. The complete onboarding process took 8 weeks, not 2 as initially expected. The second difficulty was the internal habit change: the team was used to calling the technician they knew directly, not opening a ticket.
What did not change
The business software was not touched. The ERP, CRM and productivity tools remained the same. What changed was who manages them, how their status is monitored and how issues are responded to when something fails. This is important to say because many companies perceive IT centralisation as requiring system changes. It does not require changing systems: it requires changing how they are managed.
reduction in average incident resolution time in the first 6 months of centralised management
What we learn from this case
- Supplier fragmentation has a hidden cost in management time that rarely appears in the IT budget
- Centralisation does not require changing existing systems: it requires changing who manages them and how
- The biggest transition risk is knowledge loss during handover: onboarding must be planned with enough time
- The first 30 days are the hardest: the team does not yet trust the new process and resolution times may worsen before improving
- The value for leadership is not just incident reduction: it is having real IT visibility without four separate phone calls
Fragmented IT management is one of the most common and least addressed problems at 50-150 person companies. The cost of fragmentation appears in no budget line, but it is there: in management hours, in incidents that last longer than necessary and in investment decisions made without complete information.
If your company works with multiple IT suppliers with no coordination, we can diagnose the real cost of that fragmentation before proposing any changes.
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