4 min read

Bleeding Money: Ways Your City’s Reactive IT Support Drains Your Budget

Hiring reactive, “as needed” IT support begins with hope and temptation.

The hope: “I’m a small municipality. We don’t need much technology support. Our servers and computers should work fine most of the time.”

The temptation: “If those servers and computers work fine most of the time, then I’ll barely need to use our on-call IT support—and we’ll save lots of money.”

Unfortunately, that hope and temptation usually doesn’t turn out well.

Why? IT requires constant monitoring, maintenance, and patching in order to maximize your investment. Technology will experience issues, break, or malfunction. Users will need help. A cyberattack or natural disaster may occur.

While reactive IT support may seem cost-effective in the short term, its unpredictable costs make it a poor financial strategy for municipalities.

Here are five ways your reactive IT support costs can creep up and wreak havoc on your municipal budget.

1. Municipal staff downtime.

Recurring IT issues interfere with the productivity of salaried work. Your police department, administrative staff, emergency services, payroll, public works, and other critical employees and functions all depend on IT systems. Downtime from relying on a reactive IT support vendor that merely fights fires as they crop up will lead to delayed resident services, potential public safety risks, and frustration—both from employees and residents.

2. Potential municipal revenue impact.

A municipality’s revenue collection can become impacted by reactive IT support in two ways:

Directly: Citizen service outages lead to inefficient revenue collection and possibly missing out on collecting revenue. When your online payment services for utilities, taxes, and fines don’t work, then citizens are less likely to pay you on time—leading to debt collection costs, time on the phone to process payments manually, and sometimes simply not receiving the revenue.
Indirectly: If you want to appear to the public as a vital, functioning municipality, then your website and municipal operations must appear professional and demonstrate that you are able to do business. Constant downtime with servers and computers doesn’t just affect you internally. It affects public perception. Each time you are unable to process a payment, follow up on a request, or fail to provide information because “our computers are down,” says something to both current and potential citizens and businesses. Obviously, we’re not saying that constant server failures will lead to businesses and citizens leaving your city or town in droves, but this data point can form part of an overall perception used to assess your municipality—positively or negatively.

3. Unexpected crises eat up tons of on-call hours.

A reactive approach leads to constant unpredictable IT costs for repairs, hardware replacements, and emergency support. Because you are not proactively maintaining your IT environment, you never know when an issue will arise. Constant crises cause disruptions to your budget and financial stability, which could mean potentially reallocating funds from other critical services or emergency reserves.

The specific costs for each incident will also be quite high compared to proactive management, eating up a lot of billable hours at a high billable rate. Reactive IT support vendors usually charge a premium billing rate for urgent, after-hours, or emergency repairs. They will charge for onsite time and likely need many hours to fix each issue. In that moment, what choice do you have? Paying these higher hourly rates in lieu of a proactive managed approach wastes taxpayer dollars.

4. Unexpected or unnecessary charges.

When you’re in an hourly, ad hoc relationship with your reactive IT support vendor, every interaction may lead to yet more costs. Municipalities have told us stories about getting charged for calling their reactive IT support vendors on the phone, emailing their vendors, or paying for travel time even when the IT vendor is local.

Indirectly, your hardware wears out faster without regular maintenance, leading to premature hardware replacements and unplanned capital expenditures.

5. Too many onsite visits.

The collective stories we’ve heard from many municipalities over the years reveal that many reactive IT support vendors turn any little issue into an onsite visit. For example, a slow server, a need to install security software, or a malfunctioning printer are all tasks that can likely be handled remotely but that reactive IT support vendors sometimes use as an excuse to plan an onsite visit. These onsite visits take longer than remote support and also include travel time—again costing you a lot of money.

By following a proactive IT support model, municipalities will save money through: