building from humble beginnings
In the beginning, we performed a substantial amount of work with the Provincial Government in Saskatchewan, and the Federal Government of Canada. Our competency in information technology resulted in us playing a major role in one of the largest information technology projects in Saskatchewan history, consolidating 16 executive government departments into one centralized IT support model. An 8 year, multi-million dollar project that touched every aspect of Government.
We gained a substantial amount of experience dealing with a multitude of different problems. There isn't much we haven't seen or experienced. Our work with the Government contributed to them earning a Gold Medal for excellence in IT service delivery. Ultimately, many of those lessons learned have become Lexcom best practices and are still relevant today.
pioneering the managed IT services model
Back in 2001, highspeed Internet was really starting to open up new options for providing support to our clients. We began to offer cloud hosted solutions and remote IT support services to our customers. We made substantial investments in these capabilities including the implementation of a service ticketing system and professional support and automation tools.
At this time, we began to remotely monitor our clients infrastructure, proactively patch their servers and help prevent viruses from infecting their networks. We went through a period of tremendous growth becoming one of Saskatchewan's top information technology firms.
too much trust is not a good thing
Going through tremendous growth was great. We were hiring new people, our revenue was growing and life was great. Unfortunately, a few disgruntled employees were able to disrupt this growth and derail everything. The impact on our business was substantial. It took years to repair the damage to our reputation, it cost us millions of dollars in revenue and nearly put us out of business. While this was a major issue, it also made us see a major opportunity to solve a problem that most business owners don't even realize they have.
reinventing Managed IT Services
For any business owner who has gone through a major crisis, it sucks! You have a significant amount of capital tied up into your venture, you are on the hook legally for your business, you are responsible to pay your employees, your reputation is on the line and you are indebted to your creditors. When bad things happen you and your shareholders are the only people left holding the bag!
We saw an opportunity to solve a problem that many business owners face. Placing too much power into the hands of Information Technology professionals with little control. We sat down and designed managed services from the ground up building a much better business model we call Best Managed Technology Systems.
The Best Managed technology methodology
After multiple years working within the Midstream Oil & Gas industry, we saw how they would proactively plan maintenance for years in the future. The industry relies heavily on ISO 9000 Quality Management principles to ensure pipelines are build correctly.
We applied Quality Management principles, with standards for Asset Management, Information Security, Risk Management, Business Continuity as a way to define what we do. Each of these items roll into an operational work program that is the basis for our IT Service Management practice. Each item in the operational work program is proactively scheduled, tracked through completion with the ability to both audit the work, and hold employees accountable. When mistakes are made, processes are in place for continual improvement which allow for us to always get better over time.
Creates a customized Operational Work Program focused around the implementation of business controls and
service delivery rather than number of devices under management.
Works within the financial realities of the business or organization that allocates resources based on a cost
vs risk model that is in alignment with what a business actually needs.
Provides a consistent budget that allocates resources based on a cost vs risk model that is in alignment with
what a business actually needs.
The managed services being provided were focused around delivering reliable IT infrastructure, not advancing
the mission of the organization or contributing to line of business activities.
They needed to best utilize the available funding for IT, while also mitigating as much risk as they could knowing
they they would not be able to mitigate every risk.
Delivers a wide range of experience and skillsets to businesses to fill in gaps in expertise.
