A boundary that occasionally costs us work — and why we keep it anyway.
Our PositionTrying to run infrastructure support and individual workstation support at the same time inevitably makes one of them worse, so we draw a clear line between the two.
A network, a firewall or a server room needs a different kind of attention than a single laptop that won't boot or a program that won't open. Anyone offering both ends up splitting their time between two genuinely different kinds of work. NDVDL chose to stay with infrastructure, where a fault doesn't affect one desk but the whole operation. Supporting individual workstations well needs different structures, different response patterns, and often a different daily rhythm than infrastructure support does. This split isn't about capacity — it's a deliberate choice about what we actually want to be good at.
A fault in the network or the firewall usually affects the whole operation at once — it calls for a calm look at the whole system before anything gets changed.
A single workstation acting up calls for something else: a fast response to one, usually well-defined problem, often right at the device. Trying to stand ready for both equally means being slower at one or shallower at the other.
A team that also handles individual workstations on the side inevitably gets more requests about single people than requests about the whole system, and those requests tend to sound more urgent because they stop one person from working right now.
Over time, attention drifts toward whatever is loudest, not toward whatever carries the most risk. Infrastructure that isn't currently bothering anyone gets less of the care it actually needs.
Saying what you're not responsible for also says something about what you actually want to be responsible for. That clarity can be checked and judged — a provider who claims to be equally good at everything is harder to assess.
A business can plan this boundary into its own organisation, instead of later wondering why a request about a single screen sits waiting while infrastructure work takes priority.
Ideally, a business wants to call one number regardless of whether the printer is down or the network is out — every extra interface is coordination work for someone who wants to run their business, not manage IT vendors. By limiting ourselves to infrastructure, we push exactly that coordination work back onto the client: they have to decide themselves whether a problem is 'ours' or the workstation provider's, and that isn't always obvious. For smaller businesses without an internal IT contact to manage that split, this is a real disadvantage of our position. We can't argue this point away — we accept it because we believe infrastructure that's poorly maintained ends up costing more than a shared responsibility does.
What this means in practice
Does that sound like your situation?
Then let us talk about what it concretely means for your business.
We'll tell you plainly whether your issue falls into our area — and if not, where it belongs.