Account Managers vs Technicians,
What’s the Difference?

feature from: Dominion Post, Waikato Times, Christchurch Press June 2008

It is likely that you will have your IT partners meet with you monthly to discuss, amongst other things, your Service Level Agreement, issues resolved and things that have appeared on the radar that need to be addressed. You will most likely be given a monthly overview to ensure you are on-track with budgets and vision.

It is important that you, as the business owner or IT manager, keep in mind during these meetings that you should really only be spending money on IT to either increase business productivity, reduce cycle/decision time by staff and/or increase responsiveness to your client base. Preferably all three. Spending outside this will most likely only cost you money and give no real benefit.

These meetings should be held monthly and with an Account Manager and not a technician. Basically, the difference between the two being a ‘business advisor’ vs a ‘fixer’. This is not to downplay the intelligence nor capability of a technician however consider the following analogy

Your business lifeline is a journey.
Your business IT infrastructure is the car in which you travel on this journey.
An Account Manager is the guide who travels with you on the journey. He has made the journey before, knows where you can and can’t take shortcuts and knows all the key places along the journey to stop. He knows the safest and most comfortable places to stay and knows all the best mechanics should the car need to be repaired whilst traveling. He is a trusted advisor. He knows where you are going and why you are going there
An IT technician is a mechanic

Experience has shown me technicians like fixing things. They like playing with things. They like to ‘open the hood’ and take the engine out to replace the sparkplug. They do not understand your business drivers or goals or strategically how to fit this in with business growth, because they are not trained to do this! They are trained to fix physical things and play with infrastructure. They talk in acronyms and concepts you do not, nor need to, understand. This is why many business owners don’t really understand what IT is or why it is of value to their business. Technicians should never ever be your business advisors.

Smaller IT firms will try to be everything to everyone. This doesn’t work. For these groups, the technician will be your first point of contact, probably the same one who fixes things on your site. In fact, you may not have even heard of the Account Management concept.

Your Industry standard IT provider will assign you a full time Account Manager. Their job is as follows:

- To be available to you whenever you need them 
- To provide you with the best advice concerning your IT requirements including what similar companies are doing and most likely what some of your competition are doing
- To help you plan your roadmap and budget to ensure you reach your goals, on time and in budget 
- To be the ‘one point of contact’ between you and their company and to manage whatever resource you need to help you along the journey 
- To do what they say they will, when they say they will 
- To understand your business, financially as well as strategically 
- To talk in layman’s terms about what they are doing to help you achieve your goals and to de-mystify IT by talking in simple, clear and concise terms. Basically it should be information without the acronyms

So, who is currently advising you and are you spending wisely?

Patrick Kershaw is a Business Partner for Horizon Pacific, a nationwide technology support provider specialising in assisting SME’s with all their technology requirements. For further information, go to www.horizonpacific.com

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