At some point during their growth, usually around the 50-100 employee stage, most startups face a "quadruple whammy" of IT infrastructure challenges. If the startup doesn't recognize that this is happening (or, better yet, anticipate and prevent it from happening), IT can quickly become a major drag on the startup's continued growth.
Early on, a startup's IT needs are generally handled internally on an ad hoc basis by a de facto IT team of various personnel, acting in addition to their primary responsibilities as engineers, managers, and so forth. This works fine for a while, often for several years. At some point, though, as the startup continues to grow, several factors all come together:
- The IT workload is increasing, as the number of employees, offices, and customers all increase simultaneously.
- Expectations for the company's IT infrastructure are also increasing, faster even than the numerical growth of the company might suggest. As the company grows, everyone (new hires, long-time employees, management, customers, investors, regulators, etc.) expects more of the company's IT infrastructure, and becomes less tolerant of deficiencies that were accepted earlier on.
- The de facto IT team are all getting busier with their "real" jobs, leaving less time to "help out" with IT, at exactly the time when IT problems are becoming more complex because of the company's growth and rising expectations.
- New hires are less able to fulfill their own IT needs, both because of changes in the nature of hiring over time (i.e., early hires in a startup tend to be more self-sufficient, while later hires have a higher expectation of what is already in place), and because of the ever-growing complexity of the company's IT infrastructure.
As a result of these factors, bad things start happening:
- Routine IT infrastructure requests (moves, adds, changes, and troubleshooting) are an increasing burden on the de facto IT infrastructure team, all of whom have other primary responsibilities, to the point where the IT work is beginning to interfere with those other responsibilities.
- Despite the best efforts of the de facto IT infrastructure team, the IT infrastructure isn’t living up to expectations throughout the company, and is beginning to become an obstacle.
- Many IT infrastructure decisions are being made in an expedient and ad hoc fashion, without adequate contemplation of future needs, growth path, maintainability, and so forth, due to lack of a coherent IT infrastructure architecture and road map.
Essentially, at this point, the startup needs to put in place the framework of IT architectures, systems, processes, and people that will enable its IT infrastructure to facilitate the company's growth, rather than impede that growth.
Netomata's staff have helped many startups through this transition; if this situation sounds all too familiar to you, contact us, and we can help you too!