Published; The Hard Questions For Your Tech Team

Thanks to Jim and Ian, Canadian Business Magazines entrepreneur supplement PROFIT published another article by me on asking the pointed questions that ensure you are getting the most value out of your IT Staff or suppliers

The column is for growing business owners, ‘C’ level execs and managers, and briefly covers;

* How quickly can we fix breakdowns?

* What’s our long-term plan?

* How are we managing our tech spending?

* What will we do if a tech disaster strikes?

* How are we using technology to boost productivity?

The full column is here!

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Is Generation SaaS Here?

Treb Ryan at Sandhill.com posts the argument that this recession may be just the nudge required to push Software as a service (SaaS) over the tipping point of user adoption, possibly leaving installed software packages as a footnote in the history of the Internet.

I easily fit into most of the boxes that Mr. Ryan argues will spell the decline of the old school complex, application architecture.

….expensive, difficult to use, challenging to integrate and complex to install

Check, check, check, and check again!

I know I may sound like a broken record if you have been reading this blog for a while, but for those of us the SME space, there are still a few land mines that we have to beware of.

1) A SaaS provider of ours recently unilaterally changed the terms of our agreement. Will that have an effect on you if it occurs to you?

2) A lot of the providers in the SaaS space, and a lot of the reams of digital ink written about it are still very US-centric. What are the liabilities and jurisdictional risks we need to consider? As an example, if I, as a Canadian business, do business with Cuba – am I liable for a visit by the US Patriot Act police if my data is hosted on a SaaS vendor’s servers in California?

The SMB Takeaway

I am not saying that these are necessarily deal breakers, but a full evaluation of the risks, as well as the benefits are required to calculate if it is the best option for you.

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Do You Need Business Goals?

Do We Need Goals?

A thought provoking article at SlowLeadership titled; Do You Need Clear Goals?

In that article, the author presents a great argument that goals can actually be more detrimental than beneficial to our strategies. As one example; setting goals can lead to a tunnel vision on that goal, ignoring any other factors that may be occurring within our business environment. In the authors words;

Flexibility and goals don’t mix

I am of two minds on that concept.

First, I can agree that when goals (and more specifically, their rewards) are too short term and structured, abuses like we have been seeing on Wall Street are going to happen. Because you do get what you pay for.

On the other hand, as a manager in a SME, I don’t believe that we can just write off goals completely as we try to execute our strategies. (herding cats springs to mind )

Without goals it becomes difficult to find metrics. Since metrics are goals. Performance measurement relies on setting, and monitoring, measurable objectives.

Can we set any measurable objective with no goals?

The SMB Takeaway

I definitely agree that we must not allow tunnel vision to block out the sidelines around us, but if we are not aiming for those goal posts, what are we aiming for?

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Photo Credit KTDEE via flickr

Hiring SME IT Leaders: Results Or Skills?

As small to medium business Owners or Managers, at some point you realize that the time has come to look for some leadership to take control of your IT  team.

Like most businesses, in your early stages of growth you probably hired your IT staff based on particular skill sets that you needed. Perhaps those skills were with certain Point of Sale systems, database software or email servers, etc.

While skills and experience are critically important when supporting and fixing your existing technology and software tools, that requirement for a particular skill level begins to change as you begin looking for higher levels of IT leadership. Those exact skill sets can become less relevant than business results.

That is not to say that there can be zero technology skills!

As SME managers, we need to wear many hats. That includes your IT managers. We need (‘we’ meaning  business technology leaders) to maintain our technical skills, but we also need to grow the more business results oriented strategic planning, relationship, and project skills.

Skills, Results: Let me paint an example

As a growing business lets imagine that you have reached the point where you have decided that you need to invest in a larger resource planning (ERP) or financial application.

This can be a huge investment, so after many discussions with your peers, and maybe a consultant or two from your local Chamber of Commerce, you think that a particular product will be perfect for you. Lets also assume that those same discussions convinced you that to support this type of technology initiative, you will need to go beyond your current break/fix  tech geeks to a true business technology leader who can be responsible for delivering the value you need for this investment.

Answer this question;

When you call the placement agency, or publish the advertisement, what importance do you think skill with the product you chose should carry in your hiring decision?

The answer is not necessarily much!

Next, lets assume you are now interviewing a few candidates for that IT leadership position.

One particular candidate looks excellent. She has great recommendations, and has successfully implemented ERP or financial software a few times already!

But! she has never used, or even seen that particular ERP or financial vendor’s product that you want to implement. Do you think that matters? Do you write her off the short list?

Here is a tip!

A strong business technology candidate will pick up different software skills easily. Example; I was once flown in to fix a problem with software environments I had never seen before, it was less than two days until I understood enough to fix the issue.

It is the skills to discuss, negotiate and implement the processes behind the software are the harder ones!

Your candidate can demonstrate that he or she has obtained the results that you are looking for several times, it is only because each time she was using products that are competitive to the product you have chosen that you are considering knocking her off the short list.

So in this example, the demonstrated results this candidate can show far outweighs their lack of skill with your chosen software package.

The SMB Takeaway

Skill and experience with a particular product can be critical when you are hiring someone to babysit a particular tool or product, but demonstrated results is the critical metric when you need leadership to provide business benefits from your IT investments.

Hire Well!

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B2B IT And Your Value Proposition

A September2009 Harvard Business Review article by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne is an excellent piece on strategy. I wanted to pull out one comment in regards to the Business to Business space. The authors recommend that B2B businesses work on maintaining two value propositions;

… one for your customers and one for your customers customer

This is something that few businesses (large or small) do really well. But some can do it very, very well, and outperform because of it.

To revisit a conversation I wrote about previously, I had asked which is the easier sale; one where a customer needs to be sold on your product, or one where a customer comes in looking for your product.

I think that the answer to that one is pretty clear!

But what about when the end buyer does not purchase directly from you? Can we still get that customer researching their local market to find your product specifically?

The answer is yes. Effective marketing and brand awareness can do that. In this post I will stick to my IT experience and ask;

For Managers in B2B SME’s, are there ways that your IT can help your marketing efforts? Help in getting your customers customer looking for your product?

The method and ideas may differ depending on your industry, but how about some samples;

* Successful case studies prominently displayed on your Web Site, made easy to create by efficient content management systems?

* A Blog that allows your senior leadership to start down the road to being deemed as thought leaders in your industry or market?

* A world class web site that easily refers a prospect to your partnered retail network?

The SMB Takeaway

Again, these are just some off the cuff ideas, but in the SME manufacturing or distribution business, keep this second value proposition in mind – the one for your customers customer.

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Photo Credit KnownColor via flckr

Where Is Your Planning Horizon? (Part 2)

In part 1 of this post, I outlined how ‘C’ level executives and managers in the small to medium enterprise need to ensure that their senior IT leaders (internal or outsourced) are considering long and medium term planning horizons, not just short term planning, which is the specific, immediate actions required for particular results.

Often longer term planning can be difficult, because it will always be a moving target. (I have changed my own long term planning goals twice in the last 18 months or so) Despite being a moving target, get away from the what if.. or you will never get any planning goals off the ground.

Your IT planning has to balance the long term of where you want to be vs. the day by day steps that get you to that goal.

One Without The Other?

Does not work!

With no long term planning, short and medium term planning has no goal. No end game. No target that you are trying to aim for. And with only long term planning, you get stuck vague ideals about a perfect future – but with no immediate deliverables to begin setting you on that road. (like the old saying; if you do not know where you are going, any road will get you there)

And yes! your long term plans will probably change, be aware of it, and adjust as necessary.

In part 1 I promised to give a real world example, so here it is!

After joining my organization n the fall of 2007, I realized that our IT cost structure was way out of whack.

So easily enough my long term plan was to reduce our IT cost by at least 50%

The short term and medium term plans to get to that goal included multiple tasks, some of these were relatively easy to implement, and others that were more difficult. Examples include;

* Improving purchase approvals,processes and supplier agreements

* Improving IT costing

* Consolidating four database servers down to one

* Consolidating five application servers down to three

* Improving budget and trend analysis

You get the idea!

Some of these tasks took a lot of planning and time (eg, you can’t just pick up and move a database from one server to another – trust me on that – applications will break, software code needs to modified, etc etc)

In the interest of full disclosure, I cannot take credit for all cost reductions we achieved as our B2B customer base started feeling the pain of our current economic meltdown long before the press started talking about the recession word. When they closed their wallets, many growth and spending plans had to be shelved.

The Long Term Planning Change

OK, so my first long term plan was cutting IT costs. By middle to late 2008, the market that we call SaaS, (Software as a service)and  PaaS (platform as a service) had begun to mature.

For me? maintaining database servers and application servers are not our core competency.So my long term planning has evolved into identifying if we can successfully leverage those technologies.

The SMB Takeaway

Yes, the future is unknown, and unknowable. But that is not excuse to avoid planning for where you believe you need to be. You may modify, you may tweak, you may adjust.

In fact you may rip out and replace the whole plan.

Do it anyway!

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Photo credit coincoyote via flickr

Real SMB IT: The 2 Basic Building Blocks of Improving IT Service Reliability

As a C level executive, General Manager, or Owner of a small to medium business, too often we leave any talk (possibly even thought!) about our investments in technology assets and staff until the time something breaks.

And that is unfortunate!

Cambridge MA based Forrester Research identifies that 80% of businesses identify that their Information Technology (IT) is between “somewhat” and “critical” to business.

Yet still we often live with the mind set of; out of sight,out of mind. (at least until it breaks!)

Question: Have You experienced some of these symptoms?

Consistent and regular failure of your IT infrastructure? Maybe the Internet dies regularly, E-Mail seems to fail more often than it is working, people cannot log in to their workstations or cannot access the servers they need?

Or perhaps this one; You are paying IT staff or suppliers;

And yet…..

You are usually wondering what they do all day?

These are often symptoms of that out of sight,out of mind tendency that we all can have.

Fortunately it is relatively easy to begin changing this mind set without becoming a PhD in Computer Science!

You can change it simply by starting a regular conversation with your Information Technology Management team or supplier on the these two basics of IT service delivery blocking and tackling.

1) Is It Written Down?

If critical information exists only in the brain of one person, that person is a disaster waiting to happen. All IT assets and services must be documented.

That does not mean that you need 500 page manuals on each of your servers! Think of the assembly instructions for some piece of assemble it yourself furniture. As brief as can be while still maintaining all the critical information and relationships among the pieces.

Consider these documents a road map or cheat sheet of how each piece of your IT infrastructure supports and depends on other pieces. This documentation should remain fairly technical, the goal is not to have your grand mother be able to rebuild it (unless she was a computer expert of course!) but it should be explicit and clear enough that any individual with skills in that technology environment can use that documentation as a baseline to either rebuild,or keep moving forward.

As an example; if you are a manufacturing concern, I am quite confident that every time an operator for a particular machining tool leaves, that you are not going back to the machine vendor to re-train a new operator. You have the operating procedures and instructions both for training , and for operator substitution.

Why would you not do the same with your IT infrastructure?

2) Give Me The facts Please!

Our second tool in this basic blocking and tackling is maintaining records and reporting on all issues and requests that have affected your IT service delivery.

At it simplest, in your discussions with your IT Leadership; how many things broke last week? and most importantly, do we know why it broke? And how long did it take us to fix it?

You also want to know how many calls for help and service that your IT staff are dealing with. This should include everything from helping fix that corrupted Marketing presentation, to why that particular person is having trouble printing in landscape mode.

Using my same machine tool example, if that tool is failing regularly, you need to know why. And if regular operator issues are occurring, again, that can begin to point out trends or the requirement for improved training.

The SMB Takeaway

If you only talk to your IT staff or suppliers when things have broken, you will not be successful in monitoring or improving your IT service delivery and IT infrastructure reliability.

Without having to learn techno-speak, just beginning to ask these questions on a regular basis will begin to demonstrate what is happening within your IT organization.

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Photo Credit Leo Reynolds via flickr

Can You Reverse Decisions?

I have written more than once on this blog that in the SME space, you need to be comfortable that your IT team is thinking in both short term operational planning, but also in longer term strategic planning.

Be warned though!

Technology changes. Business drivers can change. The world around us will always be changing.

So longer term planning will always be a rolling, fluid, and (hopefully) flexible look at the future.

The SMB Takeaway

What seemed like a great decision last year, may not be the best decision this year.

Your IT longer term planning will not be written in stone.

As an example?

Two years ago perhaps you were thinking of purchasing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.

Perhaps now you are thinking using Salesforce.com for that same tool.

The goal may be the same, but the road to get there will be changing.

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IT Failing 1 in 4 Small Businesses

SMB IT Fail!

Nathan Eddy at eWeek wrote; IT Failing 1 in 4 Small Businesses, Says Effectiveness Index Survey

Initial results from a new online survey designed to measure IT effectiveness at small businesses shows almost one in four respondents score a “D” or “F” grade

The article, plus the referenced survey takes a look at the effectiveness of IT within the small to medium business space. Needless to say, in many cases, the results were not good.

We need to do better.

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Photo Credit fireflythegreat via flickr

Where Is Your Planning Horizon? (Part 1)

What Is Your Planning Horizon?

I was going to do this in one post, simply because I envy Olivier Blanchards wordsmithing, but he puts told you so! to my post of; Talent vs Experince!

I surrender, so this will now be the first of two of them, part one the general idea, with part two being one specific example.

I have to be the first to say it, (OK I’m not the first!) it is probably an issue that you as the executive or general management of a small to medium business have complained about for years.

But have you found that too often IT staff in the SME space have somewhere between zero and short term only thinking in their planning horizon?

Simply put; if that short term only planning horizon cannot be improved, you cannot improve service and lower costs within your IT spending.

(And if you have been having doubts about your IT Leadership, just ask the question of what goals they have going on their planning horizon!)

Within the SMB space, IT staff or suppliers tend to simply plan that for that server upgrade, that new firewall, or that new software you want, and generally the planning is short term and simply trying and keep the status quo moving along.

In reality, there is no inherent problem with this short type planning horizon, – in fact someone has to be looking at it. But in your senior IT staff or IT leadership, you also have to be thinking in other time horizons.

So here is a quick look at some of the time horizons your I believe that your IT leadership should be looking at;

Short Term

As I stated above, you do need this short term planning horizon: It is the specific, immediate actions for particular results. These results can include anything from particular upgrades, resource hire (or exits!), and the myriad of IT Operations and Infrastructure planning required by your organization. Consider these the “Known-Knowns” events that will be happening in the short term to keep the status quo moving along.

Medium Term

Some expert will call me wrong in my wording here, but I consider the medium term planning horizon to be analogous to a chess game; starting the moves that allow me to get to my  long term horizon. Let me call this the “Known-Unknowns”.

I say this because you won’t (and can’t) know everything that is going to happen, We can’t be sure because there will be because something won’t work, something else may be too expensive, or the technology just changes.

So you have to be flexible and be ready to modify. We know there may be twists, turns, or dead ends, but we can visualize and plan for a framework that gets us to our vision made in the long term horizon.

Long Term

Be warned, the long term horizon will always be a moving target in IT! (see this oldie titled; learn to dance) But I consider this to be the end state of an improved service, a reduced cost, or a new proficiency.

My “knowns” does break down here because I don’t want to call it an unknown – unknown. That implies less vision than I believe is necessary, because you did know enough about the end result you were looking for. Even if you could not put it in a project plan.

Again, in Part 2, I will demonstrate this in a little more detail

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Photo Credit Not Quite a Photographr via flickr