Is Your IT Helping or Hurting Your Business? Five Questions to Find Out
Feb 11
2 min read
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Most business owners don’t need another tool.
They need a way to diagnose what’s actually going on.
Here are five questions we use internally when evaluating an SMB’s IT environment. You don’t need technical knowledge to answer them—but your answers will tell you a lot.
1. If Something Breaks, Do You Know Who Owns the Outcome?
This is different from “who do we call.”
Ownership means:
someone is accountable
someone understands the system
someone decides what happens next
If responsibility is vague, problems tend to:
linger
get patched instead of fixed
resurface at the worst possible time
Lack of ownership is one of the biggest hidden risks in SMB IT.
2. Could You Explain Your Core Systems to a New Hire?
Not in technical terms—in plain English.
If you can’t clearly say:
what tools matter most
where critical data lives
how work actually flows
…then your business is relying on tribal knowledge, not systems. That works—until it doesn’t.
3. Are You Paying to Maintain Workarounds?
This is a big one.
Many SMBs aren’t paying for “bad systems.”
They’re paying for:
extra support hours
repeated troubleshooting
employee frustration
inefficiency baked into daily work
When IT is helping, it removes friction.
When it’s hurting, it quietly taxes everything.
4. Does Change Feel Dangerous?
If your team says things like:
“Don’t touch that.”“We’re afraid to update it.”“It might break something else.”
That’s not stability.
That’s fragility.
Healthy systems can evolve without fear. Fragile ones create avoidance.
5. Do You Have a Point of View—or Just a Setup?
This is the most important question.
A setup is what you have.
A point of view is why it’s that way.
If no one can explain:
why this tool was chosen
why this process exists
what the long-term direction is
Then decisions are being deferred—not made.
What to Do With These Answers
You don’t need to overhaul everything.
But you do need:
a prioritized view of risk
clarity on ownership
a roadmap that reflects how your business actually operates
This is where good IT leadership earns its keep—not by reacting faster, but by reducing the number of emergencies altogether.
