I don’t think I’ve heard the term used since the last economics class I took in college. It’s oft-relegated as neigh irrelevant - one of those ethereal, difficult to measure items, that’s left out of the equation for so many business decisions, especially in IT. Not that you can really blame the operational managers in IT – they’re typically so busy fighting fires and pushing projects forward that they’re happy if they can get any kind of metrics together into a report to get upper management off their backs. Trying to put a dollar value on intangibles isn’t even on the radar.

Everyone is talking about Managed Services. The number of IT organizations working with MSP’s has been rising steadily – fully half of all IT organizations in a survey conducted by Business Solutions magazine are engaged with an MSP. By all accounts, IT spending is only ever expected to increase, and an increasing portion of those budgets are being spent on, or earmarked for engaging with an MSP to handle ‘the plumbing’ of their IT infrastructure. All that said, there’s no shortage of reasons not to use an MSP – let’s review some of the most common ones.