It's well known that most IT support consists of switching it off and back on again and, if that still doesn't sort things out, Googling (or Binging) the error message.

As someone who delivers professional IT support for living, I would suggest that the real expertise is in knowing whether to switch it off in the first place and which of the 2,740,000 results that the search engine delivered can really help you solve the problem.

In a way, it is like the old tale of an engineer called in by a factory boss to fix a piece of machinery.  It had broken down, brought the entire factory to a halt and, in spite of days of effort, no one in the organisation could get it started again.  After examining the machine and much thoughtful consideration, the engineer hit it with a hammer and it sprang back to life.  When asked what the charge for his services would be, he replied £1000.  The factory boss exclaimed in no uncertain terms that he thought £1000 was excessive for just hitting something with a hammer.  To which the engineer explained that the charge for hitting the machine with the hammer was only £10, providing the expertise to know where to hit it was £990.

And the point of this is?

If you are involved in supporting the IT which helps run your business, we'd like to share some of our expertise with you and help you choose which of those 2,740,000 Google results can actually solve your problem and provide real value IT support. 

There are some incredibly useful tools and techniques available to help support IT in your business and many of them are free or very reasonably priced.  So look out for "Value IT Support" in our future posts – you'll find they include some real IT support expertise that you won't be charged for!