Case Study: Cost of In-house IT Support

Your IT Department Structure

Cost often drives the outsourcing of key IT applications and services, but your analysis shouldn’t stop there when looking for managed services. Factoring in employee salaries, employee workloads, and the core expertise of your IT department also needs to come into play when making the decision to outsource or keep the IT applications/systems under the management of your in-house staff.

Case Study: IT in a Law Firm

For brevity sake, this case study will focus on the ongoing support needs and costs associated with a small to medium business that is selling a service.
 
In this example we’ll focus on the legal services industry. The law firm of Hamilton, Madison and Jay employs 22 lawyers, 15 executive assistants, 10 paralegals and 20 associates.They have a single office located in San Francisco California and have one network administrator as well as a junior level technician that assists the network admin with daily operations. The network administrator is retiring in one month. The management committee needs to identify the route the firm will take in the future.   
 
Over the last 10 years the IT needs of the firm have changed dramatically as technology has evolved and the firm’s caseload has grown. 

Hamilton, Madison and Jay LLC:

Current setup
 
•  75 Desktops and Laptops
•  Digital Phone System
•  8 servers providing interoffice support functions as well as hosting the time and billing system, client databases, company website and email, backups and blackberries.

 Let's start with a breakdown of the costs that the firm is currently incurring. The salary for the Network Administrator is based on the average figures from salary.com. These figures where current as of May 5, 2007, (click here for the current salary.com figures).

The salary for the PC Technician is based on the average figures from salary.com. Figures where current as of May 5, 2007, (click here for the curren salary.com figures).

With these figures, the average cost of the in-house IT support personnel is $201,643.

The management committee is evaluating the idea of outsourcing their daily IT operations to a local IT consulting firm. As such, they listed the benefits and drawbacks to their existing support structure. (Next blog post)---->