Applying the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ to Managed Services – Part 1 of 2

The ‘wisdom of the crowd’, popularized by James Surowiecki’s book of the same name, rests on an idea originally credited to Aristotle.  The idea is that if you take a diverse set of opinions and aggregate them, the average tends to be much closer to the truth than any single or individual response.  This can easily be applied to the utilization of a managed IT services team for your project.

Nine of the top 10 search results on Google for “benefits of managed IT services” are lists from various publications in recent years. This provides a total data set of 66 responses.  Although each is phrased differently, we can group them by creating categories based on commonalities to normalize and standardize the data. Of the search results, 13 different categories were obvious.

Once each response is categorized, we assign each standardized data point a value based on its rankings and add the values to find the total value of each category. There is some subjectivity involved in determining which category each data point best fits into based on their descriptions, but overall, the results were fairly clear.  Of the 13 categories, the top five from our data set using the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ analysis on the benefits of a managed IT services team include:

1. Expertise and Staffing
As the highest-rated category, the focus is primarily on having a highly skilled and knowledgeable team of IT professionals.  This team should increase efficiency within the business, thus reducing costs.

2. New/Changing Technology
Resting significantly higher than the following categories, this proves that an organization’s ability to keep up with the rapid pace of changing technology can greatly impact operations and efficiency.