How to hire IT, Channing does it better than me

OK, so I have said that I was eventually going to get more positive and offer some ideas on how to hire good IT staff. Well either someone read my mind (or my blog) or it is just coincidence, but there is a great two part blog post from Channing on the TechSoup Net Squared blog.

Part 1 -Don’t Just Hire a Geek: How to find good IT help for your organization

Part 2 -Don't Hire a Geek 2: How to find good IT help for your nonprofit

here is a great quote:

Here’s the reality: when you spend money on information technology, you’ll need to spend more for support. If you’re a two-person operation, running out of a bedroom and a garage then, yes, you don’t need to hire anybody. You can rely on the kindness of strangers. Any bigger than that, and you’re going to need a budget. The killer truth is that there’s also a minimum threshold that you have to spend, whether you have a 5 person office, or a 50 person office.

The two thoughts that I had about his post though were:

1. Do we do enough to make our existing staff more self sufficient? Do we provide enough training to all staff to enable them to use the technology we have?
2. If we can find the right person to meet our technology needs, cant we get them the technical training they need?

Anyway, I dont think I need to blog anymore, Channing is better than me.