A few months ago, I told you about a makeover contest that CDW, a technology retailer, was running along with its partners Intel, Lenovo and Linksys. The gist was that CDW would choose five small companies for a technology overhaul and then report the results. Let’s just say the wow factor on one lucky winner was just as great as on those extreme makeover shows on television.

E.L. Johnson Investigations is a 20-person detective agency based in Chicago. The firm serves court documents for attorneys and performs skip tracing to locate people. As many as 2,000 people can be served in a week.

However, Executive Vice President Stacey Johnson says technology limitations were holding the company back and draining precious resources - both monetary and personnel. “Every week, I had someone coming in to tweak things - I was spending $1,100 a month on IT support just to keep things working,” she says.

Those “things” included a hodgepodge of desktops and servers running a mix of Windows 98, 2000 and XP. “There was no consistent operating system across the office, and we had a lot of problems with crashes, virus infections and supporting different brand computers. The IT money we were spending was just putting out immediate fires. We weren’t moving forward.”

In addition, the customer database - the crown jewels of the company - was a mix of hard and soft files. Each Monday employees, who were otherwise in the field, would have to come to the office to manually input case packets. Courier costs were also high from having to send physical files back and forth among agents and clients. Database crashes were frequent and frustrating.

Johnson said she had considered doing a makeover herself, but “it’s so overwhelming. You don’t know what you need. You don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on stuff that might not be right for your business.”

She poured this frustration into her essay for the CDW contest, and it struck a chord with the company. In March, she received a call saying that E.L. Johnson had won the contest.

A short time later, four representatives from Intel and one from Lenovo came on-site to create a detailed list of what technology would be needed to cure Johnson’s woes.

“They looked at what we do on a daily basis and the equipment we were using. They also took pictures of the site,” she says.