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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Social Media: Break Glass In Case Of Emergency!

A Facebook group with 4,200 members is complaining that your product ’sucks’.

And Twitter streams start echoing that complaint.

And to top it off, major media outlets such as the Washington Post start using those Facebook and twitter complaints to collect information for for news releases about the issue.

The thing is- all of these are not coming from your direct customer, but indirectly from your customers customer!

I think that this would classify as a B2B vendors greatest nightmare.

Bob Evans, at Informationweek.com points out that A Maryland school district with 22 high schools and a $4.1 million investment in an IT system from Canadian based supplier, Harris Computer Systems, had 8,000 students napping in gymnasiums because the software would not correctly generate the students class schedules.

At this point there has been no clarification of what the root cause of the issue is;

Is it a software failure?

An implementation failure?

But in the end, the reason does not matter!

The wide open world we call Social Media is amplifying and echoing a very negative view of the product. The Information Week article points out that a representative of Harris stated that they are assisting the school board in any way possible, but is that enough?

A look at the Harris Web Site does not reveal a blog or other method documenting how they are working to assist their customer in rectifying what is an embarrassing issue.

The transparency and immediacy of Social Media puts many organizations into the difficult position where their internal Public Relations teams are not fast enough, not relevant enough, and not transparent enough to attempt to undo the damage being done.

What makes this more difficult in the B2B space, is that our response must walk the fine line between transparency and blame.

I do believe there is a lesson here for other Canadian business in the B2B space, if this type of event happens to you;

Are you ready?

Do you have a transparent reaction planned?

If you don’t, you might just want to think about that.

Two notes about the above post, the above content was also posted to IT In Canada

And Second, Tim Walker at Hoovers challenged us to do our own posts utilizing the same Creative Commons image by Sherman Tan, challenge met!

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Photo Credit Sherman Tan via flickr

Saying It Clearly

An excellent post on the SMB IT Pros blog, titled; Say It First Say It Clearly

An excellent post, and something that I try to live by. Although I am 100% convinced that I am not 100% successful.

The context of the above article is that it can be too easy to craft words into proposals that outline risks and issues within IT environments. But perhaps are not explicit enough of those risks.

Those wordy documents can sometimes muffle the tone of what IT is really trying to say; If we don’t fix this, it is going to crash and die.

There is a caveat though, these type of calls rely on some experience, because everything in IT will crash and die eventually, the when is the hard part.

The SMB Takeaway

Sure – you might get another year out of that dieing infrastructure. And if the risk of loss is less than the dollar value of the replacement, feel free to but your chips on the table.

But be warned, if the dice roll against you – it was your decision, because at the end of the day, it is your business you are gambling with.

Gambling with your IT infrastructure?

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Photo Credit V1LL14N via flickr

Bruce Schneier On Passwords

Security expert Bruce Schneier passing on some password tips.

I failed a few

Bet you do too.

The Schneier on Security Blog

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Real SMB IT: Dishonest PC Repair

Venus Flytrap

Every couple of years somebody publishes an exposé on some class or type of service business that is fishing for honesty and integrity.

Disappointing as it is, it had to happen. The August 10 2009 print edition of Business Week (I could not find it on-line) had a brief note by Arik Hesseldahl titled; Shifty PC Repair.

Same idea, set up a basic sting operation where a machine has a known minor defect (in this case just a loose memory chip) and take the machine to various service outlets.

In this UK example, only one of six sting targets actually just fixed the problem. While some over charged for non-existent problems, some actually copied data off the machine. If that is a business machine with possibly confidential information, you see where that can go.

The SMB Takeaway

That behavior is deplorable. Period.

But to reduce that risk, as I have written before, planning for the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) when purchasing IT assets is critical in the small to medium enterprise. That means planning for the fact that sooner or later something will need to be repaired.

So here are two ways to reduce that risk;

1) When purchasing desktops or notebook computers, spend the extra few dollars for the vendors on-site extended warranty service

2) On out-of warranty older equipment, have a trusted local vendor that will do the work on your site, and have the repairs watched.

The key point here, they may be able to squeak in a little padding on the bill, but when they are sitting in your facility they sure can’t use a USB stick & grab your entire Quick Books database.

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Photo Credit Wikipedia

Do You Learn? Or Blame?

A hat tip Michael Krigsman at ZDnet for pointing me to an excellent piece by Sarah Jane Runge on organizations choosing to point the finger of blame when failure occurs.

Before I point you to Sarah’s post, let me quote Michael;

Smart leaders use failed projects as a springboard to improve future performance. Lousy ones abdicate responsibility by ignoring negative political behavior that perpetuates cycles of failure. What kind of manager are you?

Sarah Jane Runge; The Art of Scapegoating

They should instead be asking themselves where they messed up and analyze whether, why or how their IT investment and project decisions were under-analyzed, under-scoped, under-supported, under-communicated or under-trained.

The SMB Takeaway

If no one is accountable for an objective, a task, or a strategy – As Peter Drucker is quoted as saying; it is at best a a good intention.

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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

Data Theft And Your Ex’s

A fairly scary eWeek revelation regarding theft of corporate data with a Symantec sponsored survey, performed by the Ponemon Institute.

The piece that I wanted to reference in this blog is this one (empasis mine);

Equally troubling from an IT security perspective is that almost a quarter of the participants had the ability to access data even after they left the company, with 32 percent of these respondents admitting they accessed the system and their credentials worked.

The SMB Takaway

That survey identified that almost 60% of individuals kept corporate data after leaving.

You can definitely make sure that they don’t keep it because they are still accessing your systems after they are gone.

Data Theft

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Photo Credit vernhart  via flickr

This Hurts, Even To Read

Read this article By Gene Kim at Information Security Resources.

28 hours ago, when we started testing, my team started finding failures left and right.  Which is what we expected, given all the corners that were cut by the developers because of deadlines

That quote is one snippet, one gem in a long line.

There are enough lessons for an entire book. And don’t think that because you are an SME that you are immune.

In fact because you are an SME, you probably don’t even have the segregation of development, quality control and downstream production servers that Mr. Kim describes.

In Short?

If you cut corners, some where, some when, you will pay for it, and next – make sure Plan ‘B’ is ready to go. And yes Plan ‘B’ can be a rollback to the state that existed before you started.

But here is the problem, if you were doing all this first on your production servers and environment – can you even go back to the the way it was?

(hint: My odds would be better than casino odds betting against you!)

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Are You Being Nickled And Dimed?

Unfortunately this is all to common, you have that new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software or some other software tool.

You make the capital investment, go through a long and painful installation, configuration and training process and then;

Finished right?

Maybe not!

Once the software is installed the change requests start coming in.

Some of these changes will be great – they will add value, or improve decisions. But some of them won’t.

Every change has a cost. Both in time, and possibly work flows and training. Not to mention Quality Control and testing.

Do you manage these changes?

Do you understand the value equation in these change requests?

If it takes ‘x’ hours for one particular change, is there value there to be received?

One small change may not seem like much – but add them all up and the costs start to rise.

And when it seems that money is already spent – it can be difficult to see these operational cost leaks.

The SMB Takeaway

Nickles And Dimes

You have spent money, and time on that software implementation.

But you can’t consider it ‘complete’.

Put all changes through the same value ringer that the initial project went through.

As the old saying goes; Watch the nickles and dimes, then the dollars take care of themselves.

Photo Credit stargonautone via flickr

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