His remark, as he looked across his desk at my iPhone, was that, for a few hundred bucks, any person can carry in his pocket the equivalent of thousands of the supercomputers of the seventies–giant dinosaurs that, even given entire city blocks in which to compute, would still not be as powerful as a modern cell phone due to their limited processor bandwidth and address resolution.

Round about 1984, my dad came home with a Timex Sinclair ZX81 personal computer, and we later adapted it using a home-built, metal-fabricated keyboard kit, to look something like a Commodore VIC-20.  That Sinclair was my first experience with personal computing.  Dad would write down short BASIC programs on a notepad, and I would type them in while he was at work at the U.S. Army tank plant in Detroit.  Of course, Dad knew what the programs would do–and I had no idea until I typed them in and ran them.

Occasionally, Dad would need to give me an assist with a syntax mistake. Hey, it’s tough for a six-year-old to know what a semicolon IS, let alone find it on the keyboard.  And the QWERTY concept was weird, too. I wondered why the keyboard wasn’t in alphabetical order.  But I digress.

People opine that my field is boring. This makes me chuckle.  Things have advanced so far, so fast, in my field of information techology, I can hardly wait to see what the next 25 years bring.

With another difficult year behind our region, northeast Ohio is facing a crossroads of challenging business conditions.  Our industrial identity is up in the air, our regional infrastructure is behind much of the country, and our I.T. costs are higher than they ought to be. Yet, there’s never been a better time to trim technology budgets.

The incentive to outsource role-based personnel and I.T. management positions is very high right now.  Here are four reasons why:

1. I.T. employees, some of whom may be “coasting along” during a downturn, often get less work done than consultants, whose ability to earn is based on their work deliverables instead of upon their employment relationship, which is difficult and expensive to sever.  Retaining consulting staff can gain you more value.

2. I.T. employees, especially network administrators and systems support personnel, rarely offer the rich knowledge and expertise of a consulting organization.  When you work with a consultant, you are drawing on the expertise of many.  Moreover, before you ask your I.T. employee to complete a project for your company, consider that a consultant has probably already completed that same project many times before, while this may be your I.T. employee’s first attempt at it.   A consultant can work with your I.T. employees to manage the project through to satisfaction–completing the project, reducing waste, and improving your I.T. employees.

3. Consulting with a third-party reduces your tax liability. As an expense item, I.T. consulting does not incur the same tax burden as an I.T. employee (payroll tax). There’s no sales or use tax associated with I.T. consulting, either.

4. The number of I.T. staff required to support your technology users has shrunk drastically in the last several years, do to improvements in software stability and a more knowledgeable user base.  If you have a single I.T. employee or a small group, which is doing both end-user helpdesk support AND networking support, it is very likely that a consulting organization can reduce your expense and increase the level of service experienced by your users.