You would likely discover that an inordinate proportion of their time is spent on recurring tasks that do not bring your business forward, on a deluge of similar support tickets. You'd feel like a homeowner routinely replacing the same pipes in his crawl-space with no money left for real improvements in the rest of his house.
The good news is that with a mixed software infrastructure built on Cloud Productivity Suites and Open Source tools delivered through the concierge model, there is less complexity, less futile upgrades, less purchases, and less tickets, so there is less of all this in the itemized report we submit to our clients. There, you will see an estate being built and well maintained.
Everything your IT staff does for you should be compiled in reports, installation instructions, charts, and training material (network, cabling/Wi-Fi systems, server content, cloud resources, devices, apps, etc.). When it is, you become more familiar with your infrastructure and your IT staff never has to troubleshoot the same issue twice. Your house has a plan.
None of this is improvised. What belongs in that plan is settled by the recognized security frameworks, and they agree on where it starts. The CIS Critical Security Controls open their list of eighteen with two devoted to inventory, one for your devices and one for your software, on the stated principle that an organization cannot defend what it does not know it has.1 NIST's Cybersecurity Framework says the same: Asset Management is the first thing it asks you to identify.2 A full, current inventory of the estate is not paperwork for its own sake; it is the foundation every serious standard is built on.
But an estate is not a photograph. Devices are added and retired, certificates and domains expire, versions move, and permissions drift, so a record accurate last quarter has quietly stopped being true. Best practice keeps the inventory alive: it tracks what changed, when, and what depends on it, drawn straight from the systems that run the estate, so a new device or an expiring certificate reaches the record, and your reports, as it happens rather than at the next audit.3 That ends the manual re-entry documentation used to demand, and because those reports are built from that same live record, they are open to you in full at any time: every asset, every change, every renewal coming due.
That is what we do. Our Stewards build that living record for each client, hold the estate to these frameworks, and keep it honest, so you get the holistic view a ticket queue never offers: what you own, how it connects, and where it is heading. A provider paid by the ticket has little reason to make tickets disappear; a fiduciary one is measured by their absence.
Our clients' IT house is in order, and they have something to show for it. Any potential buyer would know what he is getting.
Concierge CIO Partners is a unified Guild of senior technologists providing dedicated, long-term fiduciary IT leadership to midmarket service firms. It offers a strategic alternative to fragile internal IT silos and to Managed Service Providers who advise you on what to buy and are paid on what you buy. With transparent unit pricing and an automated service catalog, the Guild eliminates administrative bloat and ensures every IT dollar spent and decision made directly drives your financial performance.
1 The CIS Critical Security Controls (v8.1) comprise eighteen controls; Control 1 is Inventory and Control of Enterprise Assets and Control 2 is Inventory and Control of Software Assets, the two that open the list, on the stated principle that "enterprises cannot defend what they do not know they have": CIS Controls list, CIS Control 1. 2 The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 places Asset Management (ID.AM) under its first function, Identify: "Inventories of hardware managed by the organization are maintained" (ID.AM-01) and "Inventories of software, services, and systems managed by the organization are maintained" (ID.AM-02): NIST. 3 CIS Control 1 does not treat the inventory as a one-time list: safeguard 1.1 requires it be maintained and kept up to date, and safeguards 1.3 to 1.5 call for keeping it current automatically through an active discovery tool, DHCP logging ("Use DHCP Logging to Update Enterprise Asset Inventory"), and a passive asset discovery tool: CIS Control 1.