Managed Services Delivers More, Better, Faster – and Cheaper
The Background
DECA Inc. is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit student organization with more than 215,000 members in all 50 United States, the District of Columbia, Canada, China, Germany, Guam, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Spain. DECA trains and prepares emerging leaders and business personnel by cultivating relationships with high school and college students, administrators, and other key members. The United States Congress, the United States Department of Education and state, district and international departments of education authorize DECA’s programs.
The Challenge
With 35 employees on-site, DECA’s 4-person data management department handles all IT, membership and conference registrations for the organization. Michael Mount, Director of Data Management, is the only on-site staff member who can address IT issues, so the organization’s support resources are limited.
Mount was looking for ways to operate more efficiently, better serve his internal constituents, and save money: “Nortec’s been helping us with IT support for over 16 years now, and we’d gotten to a point where an engineer was coming in nearly every week,” said Mount. “We needed to find a way to be more efficient and cut down on costs.”
The Solution
DECA asked its strategic IT partner, Nortec, to suggest an alternative approach to daily IT support. Nortec proposed is Managed Services Offering, which would allow users to submit support tickets online and Nortec engineers would respond within 24 hours. This approach gives continuity to IT support for DECA’s employees, and allows its IT department to focus on other tasks.
Managed Services also gives DECA consistency to budgeting for IT support as well as tracking for the types of issues DECA’s users experience. “I can see where people are having issues, whatever they may be, and it saves a lot of time and money working on someone’s computer,” said Mount. “Users just go online, submit a ticket, and Nortec will remote in to fix it – usually within the hour.”
Benefits
“Nortec managed services are saving us about $1,000 per month on IT support,” said Mount. “It’s been beneficial financially, but it also saves me from the time-consuming tasks that take me away from other things.”
Now in its second year of managed services, DECA is able to confidently complete larger-scale projects, as well as day-to-day support. “We finished a complete Office 365 migration over the summer,” said Mount, “and we’re planning on moving our files to the cloud as well.” With the day-to-day IT support in place, DECA is able to plan, budget, and implement the IT projects it needs to continue to serve its members well into the future.