I recently was reading the Puget Sound Business Journal and came across an article titled Customers must remember options when choosing a computer provider. Since Moose Logic is an IT services provider, I wanted to see what suggestions were being offered.

Now to clarify, I did find the article to have good advice (if you’re too busy to read the whole thing, the “quick tips” box they provide will give you the main bullet points), so what I’m about to say is in no way intended to be critical of PSBJ. Moreover, I feel that a series on how to choose a computer, networking, and/or IT services provider would be helpful to many businesses out there. But the article did get me thinking about how easy it is in this information-at-my-fingertips age for someone to suddenly surface and represent him/herself as a “guru” of some area of knowledge. And sometimes the less the average business person knows about the subject, the easier it is for said guru to masquerade as an expert whether s/he really is or not.

Henry Ford famously commented that he didn’t need to know all the answers, he just needed to know who to ask. As business people, we frequently need to hire or contract with someone who can answer our questions. The problem is that some things are so complex that we don’t even know what we need to ask! So we try to educate ourselves on the topic as best we can, if only to help make a decision on what – and who – to ask. Enter the self-proclaimed internet guru, offering their free advice hoping that you will click on their Web page ads.

So what’s my point? Well, I have a couple:

First, anybody can build a Web site for a modest investment and begin to dispense advice (even us ). But if there’s no way to verify the background of this guru, you have no way to know if the advice they are dispensing is worthwhile or effective. I could put up a site tonight and start handing out golf tips, but that would not change the fact that I suck at golf. In fact my tips would probably hurt your game more than help. Second – and this is particularly true in IT – there’s not necessarily only one right way to do anything. Just because something has worked for one person in one market in one geographical location does not mean that it will work for your business, your location, and the current market conditions.

OK, is there great free advice to be found out there in Internet-land? Yes, of course there is! (After all, you’re reading some here.) Just be careful whose advice you follow. Sure, my Web site on golfing tips may eventually fail after enough people try my suggestions and realize that I don’t know what I’m talking about…but in the meantime I may ruin a lot of people’s golf games. Small businesses cannot afford to make a wrong decision on an IT provider. Even though they have the same basic needs as a large business – a reliable IT infrastructure that supports whatever the business does to make money and protects its vital data – the business landscape is unforgiving and intolerant of even the slightest error by a small business owner. IT mistakes that might barely cause a budgetary blip for a large business can literally kill a small one. So do you really want to base the future of your business on an unproven guru of the internet age?

Bottom line: Take advice from those that post a resume, and ask for recommendations when looking to hire any new service provider.

Don’t just take my word for it – I’m just an Internet guru. (And if you don’t believe it, just ask me.)