Real SMB IT: Consulting Services And Scope

Lets try this little story on for size!

You want to hire a plumber to replace your kitchen sink. So out you go and you get a couple of quotations, here they are;

Vendor number one’s quote states; Replace sink

Vendor number two’s quote states; Replace sink, Re-install existing faucet hardware, modify plumbing to fit new sink

Now which of those above quotations make you feel most comfortable that all contingencies are met?

Which one makes you comfortable that there will not be surprises on the scope of work or billing?

Maybe Number Two??

Unless you have a long history of service and trust with the vendor of quote number one, you can understand that that quotation number two covers the bases in a lot more detail.

Now, How About IT?

For smaller businesses it can be fairly common to use outside contractors and suppliers to perform installation or maintenance of your IT assets. Maybe you don’t have full time IT staff, or perhaps you just have a small IT staff that needs outside help in performing a larger task.

But like the example above, don’t forget that there can be a problem here!

It is a natural, but often invisible problem that exists because your contractor, supplier or VAR (Value Added Reseller) and yourself can be looking at the same event or work, but through different lenses.

Freebies vs. Being Nickled & Dimed

For yourself as a manager in the small business space, you are thinking;  “Well since they are here installing that server anyway, I am sure that they can take a few minutes and do this upgrade to our MS Office applications while they are here….”

But for the Management of that vendor or contractor, they need to have their staff into, and then out of your office in the time frame that they quoted you to install that server, and adding what could be an hour or more of time to upgrade those MS Office installations was not part of their plan.

This type of disconnect can lead to frustration and distrust on both sides.

Your supplier feels that you are trying to drive them out of business supporting you with freebies, while you think that they are being unreasonable and doing a nickle and dime routine because you think that the little thing should only take a couple of minutes.

Get Rid of the Disconnect With Proper Scope

To remove this disconnect when sourcing IT contract work, ensure that your vendor and yourself have an itemized list, or breakdown  of each and every task that are to be performed for any particular contract. This will be the scope of your contract engagement.

This point is also the time to discuss those little extra’s.

You think that a few minutes will upgrade your MS Office applications, and they can respond that with 17 workstations at 10 minutes per workstation (assuming nothing goes wrong!) you are looking at almost another three hours of labor.

The SMB Takeaway

When dealing with IT service providers of any kind, ensure that you have an itemized list of the work that is being contracted for. And ensure that it is broken down to as granular a level as is possible.

It takes a bit more time up front, but it is time well spent.

Because both parties can develop the trust that what was contracted for is reasonable, and mutually beneficial.

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Photo Credit using neighbo.com via flickr

SaaS – When Policies Change, Are You In Or Out?

A Change In Policy

We use a hosted, online Software as a Service tool. It is not a huge or complex one, but use it for a key internal function.

As the possibility of the vendor going out of business, shutting down, or being aquired always exists, we negotiated at the outset that we wanted periodic copies of our data.

In this case, the vendor was simply supplying a raw backup of the database. In the event they did shut down, our development team could at least extract the data for import into any other tool that we wished to use.

A few weeks ago I stopped getting that data backup.

An email with their tech support was responded to with this;

Hi Elliot,

I am with XXXXX support. I tried to contact you few minutes back to discuss this issue and reached your voicemail. I left a voicemessage for you. Currently there are some changes in our company policies because of which database backups are not provided

The SMB Takeaway

Using software applications ‘out in the cloud’ has some benefits. But there are risks.

In this case our data backup strategy for our corporate data had the rug pulled out from underneath it.

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Photo Credit JM3 via flickr

I Am Furious, Just Frigging Furious

I had a chat with one of our corporate field staff yesterday.

He had me absolutely furious. Literally.

And No – It wasn’t our staffer that had me furious

He has been having difficulty in dealing with a customer, because e-mail kept failing. It turns out that e-mail from our domain was being blocked – in fact e-mail from this customers biggest supplier was also being blocked.

3 months of unresponsive IT requests to get it resolved.

When the owner of this customer business finally forced the IT contractor to respond, the contractors words were;

I control the systems

bull shit

Let me tell you arse wipe – you don’t.

You control f*** all

You may maintain it – that is it. Period!

It is a business asset. And a business tool.

As such it is controlled by the business

PS: An I hope you read this because I told our field staffer to have that owner call me you arse wipe. 

The SMB Takeaway

You IT assets are yours. Not your IT staff or your suppliers – Yours and yours alone.

If you have a staffer or supplier like the above, kick their effing arse out the door.

PPS: My apologies for the language.

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Photo credit by anguila40 / Alejandro Groenewold via flickr

SMB IT: Hiring Your First IT Service Provider Part 1

You are a small and growing business that is looking to hire your first technology services provider.

As a non technology business owner or manager, that can be a great sign of growth, or it can be a nightmare.

What questions do you ask? 

what are the pitfalls to avoid?

Where can you get help choosing?

Many questions! – But first, take a step back

Before you go any further, some important questions will be key to your decision.

Goals And Drivers

First, what are your goals? 

And second, what are your business drivers?

Before thinking of looking for that provider, know the answers to these questions.

Why These Questions Matter

Think of the differences between having your income tax preparation performed by one of those fill in the boxes tax prep companies that spring up at tax time, vs being performed by a tax accountant that knows you, your industry, and applicable tax codes. And that can utilize that knowledge to  recommend tax reduction and defferal strategies.

It is not to say that one is worse than the other, but your choice will depend on your goals and business drivers.

Looking for an IT service provider needs the same answers.

Like the tax example, those answers will drive the type of relationship, and the type of service provider that you are looking for.

Perhaps all you want is a phone number to call when something breaks.

On the flip side, perhaps your goal is to look for advice and recommendations on how to leverage or improve your technology assets.

Your drivers are also key, because you need to identify if you are planning to utilize technology as purely a support role (ie to run E-Mail and your accounting software) or more strategic, perhaps to improve, or even drive revenue.

Like the tax example above, it is not to say that one is better than the other.

But knowing the goals and drivers allows you to ensure that you are aligning your research with them. 

Part two of this will continue on looking for that provider after you have these questions answered!

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Online Backup

Back in June I brought up the question of online backup viability in the SMB / SME space.

I documented a few caveats that I thought were important.

David Strom at Baseline Magazine adds a few extras to consider when moving your backups into the cloud.

….be sure to ask these key data storage questions: How much data will be stored? How fast do you need the data up and running? What makes up the data repositories? What kinds of data compression techniques will be used?

Clouds

Photo Credit

Update: David Strom has a full Online backup technologies chart available.

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ITyrannousauras Rex

As I quoted here, Nicholas Carr stated that he would be surprised if ;

“..if …20 years from now there are still IT departments in corporations”

And Vaughan Merlyn pointed me to this “Tech Pros: The Next Dinosaurs?” article by Ben Worthen

IT Evolution is Coming Here

In house IT staff as plugging a PC or server into a wall jack will be gone.

That is not to say that this low level IT work will disappear completely, but it will be a service provider. Somewhere in the phone book between Electrician and Plumber.

IT staff in our businesses will have to be Business IT – part negotiator, relationship manager, and with deep understanding of the interdependencies among data, processes, and the individuals using them.

Susan Scrupski writes that nGenera is already there. 100% Software as a Service. (Saas)

Wanting to or not, we have caught the wave – Now we need to either ride it, or, well, like old T-Rex, be for the archaeologists to look for.

Are you evolving?

Photo Credit: only_point_five

Tyrannosaurus Rex Skeleton

SaaS, Outages, and the SMB

There have been dozens of articles in print and online in recent weeks, including this one by Nicholas Hoover at Information Week regarding high profile SaaS outages with big name SaaS vendors.

In fact Mr. Hoovers article is titled;

Outages Force Cloud Computing Users To Rethink Tactics

In the SMB / SME Space? Well lets keep it real Yo!

Yes outages are a concern, yes outages are a risk.

But before someone throws the concept out of the window because they heard about an outage somewhere. Ask;

Well – Can We Do Better?

In the SMB / SME space – I bet not.

I know that I can’t.

I am located in a region with frequent power outages, and the building does not have an emergency generator.

The backup batteries on the servers and other devices hold everything for a while, but not long enough.

So as part of your evaluation and due diligence – be aware of the risks – but ask yourself if realistically you can do better.

Managed Hosting For SMB’s

Karen Schwartz has an article on eWeek Midmarket called Managed hosting may reduce costs for SMBs.

The article references a white paper by a hosting provider. I found that it leaves out some more basic information for SMB managers who may be evaluating hosting. I have used several types of hosting over the years, and there are key differences.

This will be about traditional hosting, not the current market in virtual hosting. The traditional hosting models usually fit into these categories;

Colocated Server

In a server colocation hosting agreement, the hosting provider physically sells (or leases) the server platform to you. The physical server is then installed in their data center. The hosting provider maintains the power, security, fast and redundant Internet circuit speeds and will usually service hardware failures.

But all software and server software maintenence (ie security patches) are your responsibility.

The benefit is that you maintain complete control of your platform, with the benefits of the high availability and redundancy that the provider has built into their data center.

Co-Managed Server

In this form of hosting, the hosting provider leases you the server, and again, the physical server is then installed in their data center. In a co-managed scenario you have negotiated roles regarding server maintenance. For example, the hosting provider may do the maintenance of the Operating System, or the database engine.

You remain responsible for your tools or applications that are installed on the server. If you have custom applications, or complex applications that you can modify – this will be what the hosting provider will want. Simply becasue they cannot be responsible if your internal developers blow up the application from poor coding practices.

Managed Server

A fully managed server environment has the provider fully maintain the server environment. You just use the server. While this requires the least work on your part, it also has the least flexibility. Simply because to ensure that you don’t kill the server and cost them money fixing it, only limited supported applications (ie a web application) are supported. If you wish to add anything (ie support for an environment such as PHP),it is to the negotiating table with your provider to see if it is a suported environment.

Which is the Right Choice?

The choices all come down to your needs. The less you need to change any server configuration, the more fully managed it can be.

I have posted previously that we currently outsource hosting to a third party. In our case we are using the co-managed model. The hosting provider takes care of operating system updates and database backup etc.

Our on-line LCMS (learning Content Managent System) tools require frequent updates and modifications, so we maintain those.

A 189 Dollar Web Site

I was driving and saw a flyer taped to a light standard. The flyer was offering business cards, car wraps, and yes, Web Sites for a hundred and eighty – nine bucks.

Umm well……..

Sure, for really small organizations, there are free tools for building a basic web site, these include Roxer and Microsoft Small Business.

And sure, there are even free web hosting providers as Peter Hagopian states here.

Do We Outsource Our Web Site Development?

But as Teresa Morrow states here,

…your website is probably the predominant space for you to showcase to your potential clients your services and/or product

Outsourcing the design of your web site can make sense, but I disagree with outsourcing your content.

While design firms can make a web site look fantastic, they can neglect the fact that the “visual” may be great, but keywords, and links may be poor, or there is so much multimedia that navigation through the site is difficult or nearly impossible.

You must take ownership of your website content. It should be updated regularly, and it must present you as effectively as possible.

At a previous position I held, we fully outsourced a major re-write of our web site, but we demanded a “template” within the code so that our communications team had an area that they could “copy and paste” new text into the site in a way that would not destroy or alter the formatting and design.

So the 189 Dollar Web Site?

Well, I don’t recommend it ….

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A Common Thread?

Here are three references, all geared towards IT in the SMB space – they are all different – yet there is a common thread that they all allude to.

Ann All in this post called SMBs and the Outsourcing Decision at IT Business Edge quotes;

SMBs showed far less interest in outsourcing than their larger competitors, planning to spend less on consulting/outsourcing/training services and managed services than the big guys.

Then Darren Dahl at Inc.com has the following quote in this article “How to trim your IT budget without making sacrifices.”

Some businesses are ditching their IT departments in favor of outsourced teams.

Third, Jared Goralnick has an excellent blog post called Wake up: your technology adviser sucks quotes;

The influencers who spread outdated, expensive, and erroneous information should get a clue or quit their jobs–because they’re not helping anyone.

The Common Thread?

How can a business manager in the SMB/SME space make an informed judgment on the correct technology options for their business when;

Well, when you have no idea of the correct technology options for your business?

Who do you ask?

What is different about that type of relationship?

What lack of knowledge needs to be overcome?

Can I trust where that knowledge is coming from?

I included the article above by Darren Dahl as an example because it is skewed on the portion of outsourcing the entire tech team – the business owner is a techie – so the above questions don’t apply.

And Jared’s article is brilliant – if you have been following this blog – you will know that I echo Jared’s opinion (see About Me)

I will follow up with some future posts on some of the questions for business managers to ask.

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