Any company that uses computing devices and other peripheral devices within their business network will have a need for an IT Department. Smaller companies may have a one or two man department and larger companies may have hundreds of IT professionals on stand-by to take calls and to troubleshoot.

If you own your own small business and have finally decided to invest in an IT department to keep your systems up and running, you may be interested in finding ways to get more value out of your IT technicians.

After all, in a small and close-knit environment, you aren’t going to have a server emergency or system breakdown every day. Here are some tips to get the most value out of the department you have invested in to keep systems up and running and confidential information private.

Have Your Knowledgeable Technicians Train Your Employees

Your employees must be very hands-on with computing equipment and devices during day-to-day operations. If they do not know how to save files, access files, change the printing layouts or navigate between software programs, your office is running very inefficiently. One way to improve efficiency in the office so that more is done throughout the day is to set up IT-guided training sessions during downtime.

Have Your IT Department Monitor and Analyze Threats

The last thing you want to do is hire a third-party managed security services provider to perform different tasks that your in-house IT department could be performing. One of the duties of professionals in IT is to keep your network secure and your data private. One small hacker attack could be a major catastrophe.

If you equip the IT department with the security operations tools that they need to monitor threats, hunt for incidents and analyze events, then you can avoid the emergencies that cost a fortune to rebound from.

Give Your IT Department the Opportunity to Drive Strategic Business Change

IT technicians do not just service and maintain your networks, they can also help drive change that will improve work processes to execute procedures in a more effective manner. By asking for your IT managers to sit in strategic meetings and to come up with innovative solutions, you can save money in some areas while improving performance measures.

Recommending the Right Systems and Programs for Your Organization

You could spend quite a bit of money hiring a consultant to recommend specific computer systems and business enterprise programs. With a highly-educated IT workforce who knows the latest concepts and techniques in computer science, whether that is thanks to an online master’s degree in computer science or other formal training and education, you can trust your technicians to make the right recommendations for your organization. As long as your technicians have mastered specific computer science skills, you can trust that they can point the organization in the right direction.

Organizations should not just turn to their IT department in an emergency. While technicians should be on-call for emergency situations, they can be utilized in more than one way. Put them to work training, monitoring, and even consulting and your technicians and they will feel like bigger members of the team.