How to get more from your IT Support in School

Nigel Milligan, IT manager to schools and businesses, discusses how to get more from your IT support

The general feeling is that IT technical support in schools isn’t effective and is more of a fire-fighting scenario rather than a proactive solution. It’s an awful experience to see the eye-rolling and hear comments against support technicians who are only doing the best they can under the circumstances.

The real issue lies with the support providers who do not focus on the school’s needs; they seem to care more about up-selling products which create more fires that need to be extinguished. I could name and shame a few educational IT support companies which are still, to this day, only interested in schools that spend more money with them, rather than providing more personalised service to support people before product.

There are so many schools that don’t have the confidence to break away from this way of working; there needs to be more transparent advice given to all schools to help them select a fairer support system because technology will only be effective if the people using it are all on board and feel that the solutions in place will work and are available whenever they need them.

School budgets are tighter now than they have ever been and there are so many options out there to help you get more from your budget. For example, over the last 18 months, I have converted a lot of old devices – such as Windows laptops and Apple iMacs – to run Google Chrome so that Google Workspace for Education is available to more users without having to buy new hardware; that’s a free, cloud-based, solution making use of existing technology! There’s no need to have an expensive onsite server any longer with all of the headaches and ongoing costs that brings.

My seminar at EdExec Live, Manchester will be a great opportunity for schools to share their IT support experiences and discuss the ways in which problems can be resolved. I have worked with amazing technical staff who, in many cases, have been let down by the IT support company or team they work for; they feel that they do not have a voice and are just told to ‘Get on with the job’ – the sales/customer service manager will take care of future ideas’ – well that’s not my way!

I’m looking forward to meeting you all on 5th May 2022 so we can share lots of ideas that you can take back to school to help make a difference.

Nigel Milligan

Twitter:@mrnmilligan

To find out about how you can get more from your IT support come and join Nigel at his seminar at EdExec Live in Manchester on 6^th October 2022.  Book your tickets here!

To register your interest for free or discounted tickets email [email protected] quoting the subject line ‘I want to learn more at EdExec Live!’