Ask any business executive how important IT has been to their business over the past 5 years and chances are they will agree that not only is it crucial, but it's becoming more important than ever.
But if you talk to accounting and get an idea of the company's IT budget, you will see a completely different story. It seems that businesses are cutting back on IT expenditures, and overall money spent on IT innovation has been steadily dropping. From the years 2005-2009, IT innovation has dropped from 20% to the 14% of the typical IT budget expenditure according to a study done by A.T. Kearney It Innovation and Effectiveness.
What is astounding to me is that there is the attitude that while the technology portion of their business is important, the IT department isn't. It's now only there to merely keep things running. This past year we have seen cuts of over 25% across the board and more businesses that are just asking for contract IT to come in to repair, not even perform preventative maintenance - much less innovate or upgrade IT infrastructure. And if anything with the way the economy has been going I've been seeing IT cut-backs so that even maintaining company IT infrastructure is a challenge.
These same companies are leaving IT out of the loop. They are taking a do-it-yourself attitude and trying to take IT innovation in their own hands. This ranges from buying their staff a complete new set of android based smart-phones, to new computers, all the way to complete new servers without consulting IT. Naturally when compatibility issues come up, and things don't work (as wass as the advertising campaign where the business owner is standing next to a simple server box with a smug look on his face) - they blame IT for their downtime.
Business executives, please let us do our job. Dell computers does not know your business like we do. Best Buy is not selling you computers that will work in your corporate environment. Consult with us. Listen to what we have to tell you. Don't cut back on your IT budgets because in the long run, your business will suffer.
I've been a Logmein user for several years now. What initially got me into it was the FREE remote access that was easy to install, setup and use. It was first used as a backup to the standard RDP remote access, but now its the first place I go. I put on the hundreds of computers I support on it over the years and it has not let me down.
They made a great product even better by introducing the Logmein iPhone app 
, which gave me even more flexibility. Now its not even essential for me to walk around with a small notebook to handle support requests.
I use logmein every day.
Anyway, check out the PCMag review here.