IT is the engine of your workplace. Who keeps an eye on the dashboard?

A few minutes a day

A meeting that stutters. A connection that drops for a moment. A meeting room where a video call never works first time. Each moment on its own is small. Nobody reports it, because after a few minutes it works again.

Yet it adds up. Take an office with 80 workplaces. If each employee loses 10 minutes a day waiting, reconnecting or moving to another spot, that is more than 2,900 hours a year over 220 working days. This is a worked example, not a promise: your own figures may be higher or lower. But it shows why small glitches are a topic for management.

The difficulty is that the cause rarely sits in one place. When an employee complains about the Wi-Fi, the problem may just as well be an old switch, a full patch cabinet or a connection that is too tight. If you only look at the complaint, you often fix the wrong thing.

Why a snapshot is not enough

A pre-inspection shows the digital state of a building at the time of the visit. That is valuable, for example during a viewing or before letting. Compare it to the MOT test for your workspace: a reliable snapshot.

But IT does not stand still, even when nobody changes anything. There are four reasons why a part that is in order today can be a risk tomorrow:

• Contracts expire. A supply, maintenance or service contract has an end date. When it expires, the agreed repair time for an outage may lapse, for example.
• Equipment ages. After a number of years, manufacturers stop releasing updates for switches, Wi-Fi and other equipment. Without updates, known security holes stay open.
• Usage grows. More employees, more devices and heavier applications need more capacity than the network ever had.
• Regulations change. New rules bring new requirements, such as the European rules on cybersecurity (NIS2 and the Dutch Cybersecurity Act) and the Gigabit Infrastructure Act for fibre-ready buildings.

With only a snapshot, you notice these changes when something goes wrong.

The engine and the dashboard

IT is the engine of your workplace. IT-Label Smart Control is the dashboard with the warning lights, and the regular service that goes with it.

It starts with an examination on site. A Certified Partner looks at the whole chain: from the connection in the street, through the cabling, the patch cabinet and the network, to the workplace and the meeting room. The partner uses measurements, the tickets at your helpdesk and a short, anonymous questionnaire for employees.

The result appears in one pyramid of 15 building blocks in 5 layers: connection, building infrastructure, network and security, workplace and IoT, and usage. Each block gets a colour:

• Green: in order.
• Orange: an early signal. Nothing is going wrong yet, but the block is weak. Just like an orange warning light in a car: have it checked in time.
• Red: it is already going wrong, and everything above it feels it.

We call the lowest red block the kink. It is the part that slows down the whole engine. As long as the kink is there, investing above it does little good. That is why the advice always starts there, in order of priority and without naming brands or suppliers.

Working time in hours, not promises in euros

Smart Control shows how much working time faltering IT costs. Deliberately in hours, with a range, and not as an amount in euros. An amount in euros sounds like a promise, and you know best what an hour of working time costs your organisation. The report shows exactly how the hours were calculated: the number of workplaces, the minutes per employee per day and the number of working days, and which sources the minutes are based on.

Is lost working time the same as lost revenue? Not always. The hours are still paid, so it always costs money. Whether you also lose revenue depends on your business. In a shop or restaurant, it often does so directly: if card payments and the till fail for a few hours on a busy Saturday, the sale does not go through. In an office, you usually notice it later, in delays, missed appointments and weaker results.

An IT multi-year plan and ongoing care

For buildings, a long-term maintenance plan is quite normal. For IT, it hardly ever exists. Smart Control therefore draws up an IT multi-year plan for 5 years: what needs to happen, when, roughly what it costs and how much working time it saves. The costs are an indication from the Certified Partner, checked by IT-Label. This lets you include IT in your budget, and the plan fits in with the long-term maintenance plan of your building.

After the examination comes Smart Control Care. Your regular Certified Partner checks the blocks on site at least once a year. The partner keeps track of the end dates of contracts, warranties, updates and certificates, and updates the colours, the history and the multi-year plan. When an end date approaches, the block turns orange and you receive a reminder. In the car comparison: the check is the service, the end dates are the MOT and the multi-year plan is the service schedule.

From one office to an entire portfolio

Smart Control is tailor-made. You agree with the Certified Partner what a location is: a floor, a whole building or a campus.

• Businesses and tenants have their office examined, from the connection to the workplace. Management, the facility manager and the workplace administrator each get their own start screen in the dashboard.
• Building owners and landlords look mainly at what they provide to all their tenants: the connection, the cabling, the riser and the server room. They can share the overview of the management with an estate agent, buyer or new tenant.
• Asset managers and businesses with several sites see all their locations in one dashboard: the risk and the kink per location, and the multi-year plan for all locations together, with an export for Excel and a short overview by email every month.

How Smart Control relates to the other services

Smart Control does not replace the other IT-Label services. They complement each other:

• The pre-inspection is the snapshot: what is the digital state of a space or building? It is often the basis for the Smart Control examination.
• The Security Audit looks at the security of your Wi-Fi, network and server room. Its findings appear in the dashboard with the blocks they belong to.
• The IT-Label certification leads to the official label for a building. Smart Control does not lead to a certificate, but the scores of a certificate are shown with the blocks.

Frequently asked questions

What does Smart Control cost?

Smart Control is tailor-made. For the examination, you receive a quote in advance. Care is a fixed amount per year per location. The fee depends on what you have examined and on the number of locations.

Do you monitor my employees?

No. Smart Control measures the network and the workplaces, not what people do. The questionnaire is anonymous, and the results only appear from a minimum number of responses, so that no one can be identified.

How often is my IT checked?

With Smart Control Care, your regular Certified Partner checks the blocks on site at least once a year. When an end date approaches, you and the partner are notified. If a block has not been checked for too long, the partner is notified and you see it in the dashboard.

Is lost working time the same as lost revenue?

Not always. Lost working time always costs money, because the hours are still paid. Whether you also lose revenue depends on your business. In a shop or restaurant, it often does so directly; in an office, you usually notice it later.

Can I see all my buildings in one dashboard?

Yes. With access to more locations, the dashboard shows all locations side by side, with the risk and the kink per location, and the multi-year plan for all locations together. The dashboard is available in Dutch, English, German and French.

Want to know where your kink is?

Do you want to know where the IT of your office, building or portfolio is holding you back, and what needs to happen first? Explore Smart Control and the example pyramid, or request Smart Control. A Certified Partner will contact you.

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