Working With an IT Team 2,500 Miles Away

Let us be plain about the position before anything else: we work for your IT department, not against it. Most of the arrangements we are in were set up by the internal IT team, they direct the work, and they stay in charge of it. Nothing on this page is an argument for replacing anyone.

This is one of the most common situations we walk into, and it is almost never a story about bad IT people.

The company is headquartered on the mainland, or it was acquired by someone who is. IT is a real department with real engineers, and they are good at their jobs. The Hawaii office is a branch. And every week, something small goes wrong here that takes a day and a half to fix, and nobody can quite explain why.

The explanation is usually geography, and it shows up in three specific ways.

1. The clock

Hawaii is two to three hours behind the west coast and five to six behind the east. That sounds manageable until you follow one ticket through it.

Nobody is being lazy in this picture. An eastern desk gets your morning and misses your afternoon; a headquarters in Asia gets your afternoon and misses your morning. The Asia row is drawn for Tokyo, nineteen hours ahead; Hong Kong and Singapore sit an hour later again. And the caveat that bites: nineteen hours ahead means your Friday afternoon is their Saturday, so the one overlap you have is missing at the end of the week.

Someone in Honolulu can't log in at 8:00am. If the help desk is in Charlotte, it is already 2:00pm there, the ticket lands in an afternoon queue behind everything that arrived while Hawaii was asleep. A first reply at 10:00am here is 4:00pm there, and the person who could actually fix it goes home in an hour. The realistic outcome is tomorrow.

We can put numbers on that, because it is our own service desk. Over the last 120 days our clients filed 770 tickets, and this is when they arrived, counted on Hawaii time.

770 tickets our clients filed over 120 days, counted on Hawaii time. Spam, merged duplicates and tickets we opened ourselves are all excluded, so this is what people actually asked us for.

Two things fall out of it. This is an ordinary Monday-to-Friday business, with 93% of the work arriving on a weekday and Mondays worse than any other day. And of the 513 tickets that landed inside a Hawaii working day, 270 arrived after 11am, which is the moment a nine-to-five desk on the east coast finishes. More than half the working day's requests arrive after the mainland has gone home.

None of that is a criticism of the people on that desk. They are keeping their own hours perfectly well. It is simply that the hours do not overlap with the ones your staff work.

Nothing went wrong in that story. Nobody was lazy. But that person lost most of a working day, and if you multiply it by the number of small problems a busy office generates, you get the thing people actually complain about: everything takes forever, and I don't know why.

The mirror image hurts too. When something breaks at 4:00pm Hawaii time, the mainland team has gone home. Your afternoon is their night.

If the parent company is in Asia rather than on the continent, the same problem arrives from the other end. Tokyo is nineteen hours ahead, so a nine-to-five desk there covers 2pm to 10pm on your clock: your afternoon is answered and your whole morning is not. It is the eastern desk's problem reflected, and it catches a lot of businesses here, because an Asian parent company is common in Hawaii and the arrangement looks fine on an org chart.

2. Nobody can touch anything

Remote support fixes software. It does not fix a dead switch, a drowned access point, a server that will not come up past POST, a camera system that needs a monitor plugged into it, or a new hire who needs a laptop in her hands on Monday morning.

What happens instead is that the office improvises. The bookkeeper becomes the person who reboots the rack because she is nearest to it. Somebody's nephew comes in on a Saturday. A vendor sends a subcontractor nobody vetted, who is escorted by whoever happened to be free. None of this is in a contract, none of it is documented, and all of it is now part of how your business runs.

The shipping problem behind the shipping problem

Mainland IT teams plan on mainland lead times. Next-day parts, a spare in a drawer, a local supplier. Out here a replacement switch is a week, a specific server part can be longer, and "we'll just overnight it" is a sentence that costs real money and still is not overnight.

A plan that assumes hardware is a day away is not a plan here. It is a plan that works everywhere except where your office is.

3. Nobody knows the building

Where the demarc is. Which circuit the rack is on. Which panel the landlord controls and who to call at 6:00pm when it trips. Which floor loses wifi when the elevator is serviced. What happens to your network when the building does its annual power shutdown.

That knowledge is not written down anywhere, and it cannot be acquired from a datacenter three thousand miles away. It is acquired by standing in the room.

The fix is not a new IT department. It is hands.

Here is where most local IT companies would tell you to switch. We would rather tell you what we actually see work, because it is almost never that. In most of these arrangements the internal team stays exactly where it is and we report to them.

If your mainland team is competent, and they usually are, the problem is not who owns IT. It is that IT has no hands here. That is a solvable problem, and firing a team that knows your business well is an expensive way to solve it.

Co-managed means your mainland team keeps the systems, the standards, the identity platform and the roadmap. We are the local half: hands on site, hardware received and staged here, vendor and building relationships held locally, and the 4:00pm problem answered at 4:00pm because we are in the same time zone as the person having it.

A page is enough. No page at all is how a server sits down for a day while two competent teams are polite to each other about whose it was.

The boundary matters more than the labels. Co-managed arrangements fail when nobody wrote down who owns what, and two competent teams each assume the other has it. So write it down: who is called first, who touches identity and security, who buys hardware, who escalates and to whom, and what the local side is allowed to do without asking. A page is enough. No page at all is how a server sits down for a day while two IT teams are polite to each other.

Questions worth asking, whoever you use

• What is our actual median first response, measured in Hawaii hours? Not the SLA, the measured number, for tickets filed from this office, during our business day.
• Who is physically closest to our office, and what is the realistic time to get someone here?
• Where does replacement hardware come from, and how long does it take to arrive here? Ask for a real example from the last year.
• What happens to a ticket filed at 4:30pm Hawaii time?
• Who does the office call when they have stopped calling you? Everyone has an answer to this. It is worth knowing what yours is.

If the answers are good, you have a good arrangement and you should keep it. If the answers are vague, you now know exactly which gap to fill.

Questions? Email info@enlightentechhi.com or call 808-451-3630. If your IT is on the mainland and mostly working, say so. That is a different conversation from a rescue, and we are happy to have it.