IT Services and Payment Schemes in Singapore

It is of course highly debatable. Information technology (IT) has taken over bulk of the workload in many industries and businesses and has substantially improved effectiveness and efficiency of many manufacturing and business operations aside from the everyday routines that they have made more convenient. But on the other hand, IT has also made a lot of manual labor skill irrelevant thus forcing a number of workers to shift to other trade and even take new jobs that do not suit their traditional trainings.

But as it is, there has been very good balance.

Now there are rising demands for new expertise and competencies not to mention newer and newer job positions. After all, even machines need human controllers. Today, the field of IT never seem to run out of new jobs: programmer, network engineer, database engineer and technical support. Optimizing the changing labor and employment landscape IT support service companies now perform vital tasks in matching a potential employee to a task at hand.

IT Services

Generally, IT service providers offer technological solutions to many day-to-day business or commercial operations. And IT support therefore provide   a number of help for companies and businesses. But in general, they address problems with on equipment or services rather than the provision of trainings or staff development. Usually, they serve as third party or outsourced supplier of telecommunications equipment including network infrastructure facilities, batch job utilities even state-of-the-art security set-up. They can smaller office items like printers, computer and other informatics goods.

Then too, IT service providers in Singapore offer IT software services. They design database management software, data management and data security applications including network set-up access. In most cases, these software services are custom-designed based on the company or industry’s technological needs.  Most IT support service in Singapore also offers technical support for the products especially those that they sold. This is considered after-market services but basically include maintenance. In Singapore, IT maintenance may be performed over by e-mail, live support software on a website, or a tool where users can log a call or incident. Accessing such support is sometimes facilitated by internal IT offices so that employees first refer their problems to an internal unit in the company which in turn refers the problem to the IT providers. Recently however, larger organizations frequently have allowed staff to directly contact IT service providers for computer-related problems in order to increase efficiency.

IT service providers also do  “crowd sourcing technical support”  which involves the IT service providers to setting up and monitoring discussion boards for products users and interacting with them on behalf of the company. This allows companies to monitor customer satisfaction and feedback at minimal operational cost.

IT Service Categories and Payment Schemes

The development of IT support services in Singapore and the increasing number of companies and industries availing of these services have created an industry of its own, Or at least, names of their own.

For instance, a common tern for IT services in Singapore is the “Call in” service where a company purchases equipment needed and then pays a technician on the pre-negotiated rate when a problem occurs all in one package. “Block hours” has also become popular and this involves clients purchasing a number of hours upfront at an agreed price by both parties. Under a block hour system, a reduced hourly rate, or standard non-reduced rate may be charged to a client before providing service.  

In contrast, “managed service” arrangements on the other hand means a company will receive a list of well-defined services on an ongoing basis, with a well-defined response and resolution times for a fixed or a flat lee. Whatever the case is the world today depends on IT professionals to bring solution to our current difficulties.