A Dime a Dozen Small Business, Tech and Talk

I know that this post will be anathema to every IT consultant in the small business / medium business space. However, it is true - in the SMB space, we are not all the same.

I had a great discussion with the president of a small business. We started discussing technology recommendations that his tech provider was recommending. After discussing his business and requirements, I said don’t bother, you will just be wasting money - invest it somewhere else in the business.

This business actually has approximately the same revenue as my own organization, and we have a huge technology requirement and investment. The difference?

Even though our organizations would statistically classify as the same size by revenue and other metrics, my organization is a technology based company. We provide on-line, Internet based tools. Just about everything we do has an electronic element of some kind. We generate revenue through the creation and management of technology solutions.

In this small business Presidents case, it is the opposite. His business is the distribution of manufactured product. He generates revenue moving boxes out the door.

So in his case, a basic technology investment for their financial package and e-mail. But nothing fancy required. As I explained, technology can definitely help speed up a process, but until you have identified a particular process that technology can help speed up - buying various technology tools or packages are not going to help you.

Perhaps you begin to find that you are getting a backlog in some piece of the business, just through lack of time to “paperwork” - perhaps for inventory, ordering, shipping etc. At that point you can begin to look at how a technology solution can reduce that backlog by reducing the amount of manual time to get the process completed.

I think that his tech supplier took me off of their greeting card list.

On a previous post here, I mentioned that for the most part I do not even maintain a “real” data centre in my organization. We provide an Application Service Provider model for some of our customer base. The 24×7 requirements of the applications, the need for security, the need for “lights out” management, and all the associated pieces required are too expensive for us to maintain internally. So all these critical servers are outsourced. They are hosted, maintained and managed in a large data centre that is not even in the same city as our office location.

Like all things, you have to be aware of the trade offs. And we are working through one of those right now.

Some of these servers are due to be retired. When you have your own servers, in your own data centre, it can be a little less stressful. You purchase and install your new server or servers. You then can stage your migration from old server to new server in what ever time frame and order that you wish.

In this outsourced hosting model, we have to get that migration completed as quickly as possible. The “old” and “new” servers cannot co-exist together for any length of time. That is not due to any technology reason, but plain and simple, while the two servers are running, we are paying for both of them. And only the one will be generating revenue.

So rather than a leisurely migration of database data, applications and data, it becomes a forklift upgrade that must be planned, and implemented as quickly as possible.

The Internet can be a wonderful thing. Every now and again you stumble onto something that is so perfect, that you have to share.

Perfect prose, perfect subject matter, and perfect humour.

OK, it is a little unsettling as well read it here.

OK, CIOInsight had this article on the IT skills shortage. The IT skills shortage, IT worker retention, recruitment etc etc is all over the technology press. Call it the hot button of the decade.

Of course the article drew the predictable rants - and, well, I couldn’t resist - I had to add my own comment as well. (with just some typo and grammar fixes) For non technology managers that may see this, the tech domain is getting a little too notorious for body shopping. Forget training someone on this years technology changes, just dump them and get a new one.

Its funny,

You know, I never see an advertisement looking for automotive technicians with skills on next years model.

I mean really, the guys fixing last years cars may as well be COBOL developers right??

When the IT programming language or process of the year comes along, everybody will be advertising and looking for 10 years advanced experience with a 6 month old technology.

Come on!!! - can the auto industry be so out of date? forget training those service techs! - just fire them all, and hire new ones! Surely there are already techs learning how to fix all next years cars right now!

Oh yes, wait - there are - the Automotive industry is preparing for the training their techs need for the 2009 model year as we write these words.

Maybe we are the ones truly out of date

As with any thing, it is never “that” simple. But it is a problem never the less.

UPDATE: timing is everything right? I had barely published this when I read an article in the March 01 print edition of CIO regarding server virtualization.

“… it can be hard to learn as you go with virtualization…a consultant can help you avoid blunders…”

Uh huh - training can too …..

my 2 cents

I was reading an industry specific “trade rag” recently. To protect the “guilty” I won’t specify which one. I am sure that one of these exists for just about every vertical market and industry.

In this particular publication was a piece on supporting this particular industry with a certain technology platform and tool set. The piece started well, but then it became readily apparent….

…It was not a “piece” at all, but what I will call an “advertorial” - it was written by the supplier of the tool that could magically fix all problems mentioned in the article.

If you are a non technology manager and read some sort of industry publication, you may see a “tech” article similar to the following;

a) The article will start out with some general technology related concepts. So far - So good, no problem yet.

b) The next part will go into what you “should” do about it. I get suspicious when it says “should” and look for the next point

c) The by-line signature will then have, (surprise) the contact name of the company that provides the product that just happens to do what the article said “should” be done.

Being a technology manager, that bugs me. You want to advertise? feel free. You want to deliver a specific “white paper” that demonstrates your take on how your product can solve a specific problem - knock your self out. But technology vendors providing that sort of biased “writing” can be downright mis-leading.

First, No tool is a silver bullet. People, process then technology. Without the people and processes in place, technology won’t help you, see my post on automating broken processes.

Second, there is more then one road. When they say “should” in these advertorials, I can say that a different way is how it “should” be done. I could even plagiarize 90% of the article, change the “should” do parts to something that a competitive product does, and I would be just as correct.

If you are a non technology manager reading a technology piece in an industry trade publication - watch out for these.

This is not painting all vendor writing with the same brush. If the relationship is clearly stated up front, they can still be of value. Lets break these vendor written articles down into some bullet points;

Bad Vendor Piece

- Article Introduction & concept
- you “should do” this
- By-line signature by a company that provides the “should do”

Good Vendor Piece

- Article Introduction & concept
- Possible responses and methods of dealing with the concept
- How vendor can approach and help the possible responses and methods

Regardless of your industry, I challenge you to compare these advertorial writings with one of the other other non technology articles in the publication dealing with your industry. Using my bullet points, your industry expert articles will look something like this;

- Article Introduction & concept
- Possible responses and methods of dealing with the concept
- Demonstrations of how the responses and methods have helped others within your industry
- And possibly even comparisons of competing technologies that helped other organizations

PS
You should leave the bird cage open
SIGNED: the Cat

A March 2008 Ottawa Business Journal article located here, puts it simply;

..Forrester Research report from January says the value of online retail in the U.S. alone reached $175 billion in 2007 and is expected to grow to $335 billion by 2012, partly because retailers are moving away from the bricks-and-mortar format to the higher-margin web-based storefronts

Secondly, in Canada, a Canadian Business article points out that of roughly 2.3 Million businesses in Canada, an infinitesimal 0.3% have 500 or more employees. The remainder is all in the small business / medium business space.

As I have written on this site , and others have written elsewhere, the internet is the ultimate leveler. But it won’t do it by itself.

As the above Ottawa Business Journal article states, if your customers have to click through more than 5 levels, you will most likely lose them. So as SMB owners or managers, it is incumbent on ourselves to ensure that the web storefront is optimized to get some of that traffic and dollars. Our web sites must be optimized, they must be quick, clean, and accurate.

Even if you are not set up for true “e-Commerce”, and rely on a local market, you must ensure that your site is found, you must ensure that it presents you as effectively as possible, and that your service, your product, and your value can be seen effectively and quickly. And ensure that finding your location or contact information is dead easy.

This little note is for the SMB Technology Guru’s.

A recent post by Merrill Dubrow President and CEO of MARC Research brought this to mind.

As written about on this site, In the IT space, your mantra must be to Keep Learning. Never stop. And that does not just mean the newest server or programming language of the day. Keeping up with the latest pure “technology” issues will lead you to be a great IT “electrician” but to be in the next wave of IT workers, we will have to be part data steward, part relationship manager, and add to that part business process expert.

As Merrill Dubrow states,

Read all the time! In fact never stop reading. Concentrate on things happening in your industry, companies and names in the news. Focus on best practices that can help you with your job!

In my opinion, you must learn your industry and your industries pressures. You must know as much of your industry dynamics as any one else in your organization. My employer is a managed training services provider with an extensive customer base in the automotive OEM industry.

You guessed it, the last year or so has been a crash course on learning theory, the automotive industry, and related issues.

As mentioned in part 1 on this site, The ITIL framework is an effective method of reducing the costs of IT service delivery, and improving the quality of IT services.

As can be seen here ITIL is not just for large businesses. Adopting the ITIL framework reduces IT service costs, and increases IT effectiveness for organizations of all sizes. As stated in part 1 of this note, and seconded here the ITIL framework allows you to lift pieces that are specific to your unique environment.

In this post I am going to dive a little deeper into the ITIL Configuration Management process. Larger organizations may find that a blended look at configuration management, incident management and change management together provide the best benefit. If you are at the larger end of the medium business space (i.e. approaching 100 Million revenue) you may be best served by this as well.

However, I have found that the configuration management process by itself can pay dividends to businesses at the smaller end of the scale. (ie 50 Million and less). The payback comes from reducing the hidden costs of IT services. These hidden costs can include;

- Re-inventing the wheel - hours are spent configuring or building an IT asset, you should not have to waste those hours doing it all over again.

- Efficient and Effective problem solving. your IT resources - either in house or contract. You are paying them to fix something in your environment, not to learn what the environment is first.

- Continuity planing, outages cost money. The difference in the time to recovery can mean the difference between minutes and hours (or days)

- Improve expenditure planning (ie software licensing, and capital expenses)

At the simplest, configuration management is ensuring that accurate documentation exists on all server, and device configurations. Consider it a check list or road map for documenting that asset. This documentation should be of a sufficient level of detail that a person with expected knowlege of that technology can rebuild or recreate that IT assets configuration from the ground up with no other data needed.

Second, configuration management demands that you look at, and document, the end to end configuration of all IT assets and services. For example, you may have an E-mail server that has a fully documented configuration, but the IT “service” of E-mail is not one single server. The “E-Mail service” encompasses every point from someones desktop, through any switches, routers, firewalls or other devices to the email server. (As an analogy, think of an electrical wiring diagram, or the assembly instructions for some piece of assemble it yourself furniture)

Consider this all to common scenario; An IT technician has previously modified, but had not documented, the IT infrastructure to allow your web mail, and Blackberry Enterprise Server to work correctly with your E-Mail server. A few months later another technician, not realizing why the changes are there, reverses them, causing interruptions of service. In this case the configuration management process should have documented the relationships of every device and server that produces the “e-mail service”. Whether it is via web mail, or your Blackberry device.

Another example that I ran into a number of years ago, a larger organization had an engineering and testing network dedicated to load and performance testing of network infrastructure hardware. In other words, this network was deliberately designed to push the limits of network devices. An IT technician made a change in the firewall rules that was preventing this testing environment from impacting the regular production network, this change allowed the test data to start flooding the production network with this engineering test data. It took a couple of days for me with the assistance of a skilled network “sniffer” analyst to decipher the problem. Proper documentation of the correct rules and their reasons would not allowed this incident to occur. (or allowed it to quickly reversed)

The Configuration Management “database” is a key component of the ITIL framework for documenting these dependencies. In the larger organizations, there are many vendors willing to sell you these Configuration Management Databases, or “CMDB’s”. In the smaller end of the SMB space this documentation can be contained in any format or tool that you may have. The key is to keep it current and enforce its use.

This Configuration management database should include all relationships associated with the asset or Configuration Item (CI) including any software, procedures service levels and usage. This CMDB documentation will be used for improving the management of all other ITIL processes, and as such must be regularly audited for accuracy. It is not a static piece of information, but a dynamic document that must be immediately updated with any changes to the IT environment. These updates could include new software or tools installed, new security permissions or groups, down to the installation of new IT assets.

UPDATE: Part 3 is now here.

I frequent a forum that is geared towards technology professionals, recently we wandered into an interesting series of posts. The initial concept started as a comment on the IT field dealing with “Good Enough”

What became clear - and I found it fascinating, is that the initial concept started wandering all over the map - and the reason for the wandering was the different “definitions” or perceptions of what “Good Enough” actually means, Our individual perspectives count for a lot.

What is “Good Enough” really? When can we say that something is “Good Enough”? And I am not meaning just in a technology perspective, but for this post lets consider it within the business process and any supporting technology.

My personal take on the definition of Good Enough is; “adequate for the current circumstances”. Don’t think that by “Good Enough” that I am implying a “set it and forget it” mentality on any business process or tool. That just leads to wasted dollars and time. A decision that was either declined or acted upon was valid only during the current circumstances of that decision. The current circumstances now will be different. What was good enough then, may no longer be good enough now, and will most likely not be good enough next year.

It is pretty much a fact - that no matter how much research and requirements gathering you do up front - the future is really unknown, and unknowable. As posted previously here trying to hit perfection is usually a lost cause. We have seen this in the business and technolgy press for years. They were documenting multi million dollar implementations of ERP systems, CRM systems and the like. Many of which did not achieve the expected returns.

To me, there is a point of diminishing return. You spend 80 % of your time and money trying to get that last 20% to get to “perfect” when the initial 20% investment would have you 80% there. To me that is “Good Enough”

So rather than take a full year to try and define and implement some massive structural change (that would most likely fail because in one year the world has changed) “Good Enough” says to start on one smaller part of the whole and got that process working “good enough”. Then slowly start working on process piece number 2 to get it “good enough”.

Who knows, by the time you are ready for piece number 3 - the Current Circumstances may have changed, maybe the lessons learned from pieces 1 and 2 may have demonstrated that piece number 4 should be next in line.

Good Enough for me

I had the opportunity to attend a seminar on Trade and Export Control laws sponsored by The Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI). Talks were given by both Canadian and US Trade Law experts.(Brief Bio’s and links below)

Disclainer: what follows are general notes from the talks, not a full transcript - and second, The talks were “general Information” and not intended as Legal Advice.

Many of the details were “expected”, however for some businesses, especially Canadian businesses, there were a couple of items that surprised me in these presentations.

Of the “expected” details, if you are in the weapons, nuclear, encryption and biological fields, I am quite confident that you have your own army of trade law experts on tap. If you are trading with “restricted” countries as defined by NATO, Canada or the US, I also assume that you are already confident in your trade law advice.

One of the surprises to me, deals with the Canadian manufacturing sector. Note that manufacturing can include software. If your finished product contains more than a minimal amount of US content, You may actually have to comply with both Canadian and US trade law. Even if you are only exporting within Canada or locations such as the United Kingdom. By US trade law - this is “re-exporting”.

The second one is a tenet of US trade law called “Deemed Export or Deemed Re-export” - now this was my second surprise. Canada has some different relationships with other nations of the world than our Southern neighbour has (think Cuba). The US trade laws define “Deemed Exports” as “uncontrolled data access for foreign national employees / visitors.” For example, an Indian Engineer working in a Toronto engineering lab. Assuming a product that would be covered by US Trade and Export laws you would have to consider that due to that Indian Engineer - US Trade Law deems that you are automatically exporting to India. Even if your product is a Canada only item.

Unfortunately, there is not yet a clear picture on the one question that I was looking for an an answer. Namely, In this technology generation of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Application Service Providers (ASP) what are the export and legal status of the data sitting in those ASP or Saas servers? I had the opportunity to sit with Mr. Levy and ask the question, of what jurisdiction the the data belongs to, the “owners” jurisdiction, or the ASP / SaaS providers? His off the cuff response was “Maybe all of them” Mr. Levy stated that the laws have not yet caught up with technology, and that until case law catches up that you may get three different answers if you ask three different people.

So it seems there will be some time before a clearer picture of this emerges.

The Speakers at this event;

Christopher Kent
Partner, Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP Chris Kent is a partner in the law firm of Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP and is the National head of the firm’s International Trade Group. He has been involved in a large number of the highest profile international trade disputes of the past decade, including softwood lumber, steel, appliances, sugar, laminate flooring and tobacco.

Jack Levy
Founder, Trade Law International Jack A. Levy established the law firm of Trade Law International, Chartered (TLI) in January 2008, and currently serves as a Strategic Advisor to DLA Piper. Prior to founding TLI, Mr. Levy was a partner in DLA Piper’s international trade practice.