Tech Standards? Or The Wild, Wild, West Of IT?

Gary Hamel writing on the Wall Street Journal blog blasts corporate IT departments for enforcing technology standards with a post titled; Why Don’t IT Departments Give Employees More Freedom? The premise is that if the best tool for the job is something that an employee provides themselves, or downloads from the Internet, so what? In Mr. Hamel’s words;

How is it that employees can be trusted to take care of important customers, safeguard expensive equipment and stay within their budgets, but can’t be trusted to use the Web at work, choose their own IT tools, or download programs onto the workplace PCs? Do IT staffers really believe that conscientious, committed employees turn into crazed, malicious hackers when you give them a bit of freedom over their IT environment?

Sounds Great In Theory -But Tell Me, Who Pays?

When it comes to business computers, the actual total cost of ownership of an IT asset can be as high as five times the purchase price, no not one time – annually! And a significant portion of that cost is supporting that IT Asset. Support is defined as direct, an example being technical services staff paying a visit to fix something, as well as indirect support. This latter support is when you spend your time helping a neighbor (or they help you) trying to figure out why that mail merge is not working properly.

Now, in my smaller business, we are pretty relaxed about people utilizing their own tools of choice as stated by Mr. Hamel. But in the past three or four months – that choice has cost me over 10 grand to do it. (more on that later)

Who Fixes What? (Or When I Just Go Home!)

Just in the past few weeks, I recall reading  about a larger organization (if I find it again I will update with a link) that has allowed its employees to provide their own computers or laptops. With the caveat that corporate support would not be able to help them if they chose the non-standard devices. In other words – you are responsible for getting it fixed if it breaks.

OK, So what happens when it does break?

In larger organizations, if a notebook or PC software or hardware dies, it will be either re-imaged with clean versions of the software, or new PC dropped into place with the corporate tools pre-loaded. Job done. In fact this type of computer support can often be done remotely.

So if I chose to forgo the corporate supplied PC, and provide my own Mac, and it dies. Lets see, I unplug it and trek off to my repair outlet of choice. They tell me it will be back to me by Wednesday.

OK. Do I sit twiddling my thumbs until Wednesday?

Maybe call my my clients and say; “Hey – can’t help ya until next week, will call you back then!”

Somehow I don’t see that going over well with your clients. So the question is;

If staff supplies their own IT assets, and they are responsible for repairing them, what productivity loss do you face when they don’t have their machine until next Wednesday?

Next: How About The Cost of Security?

Leaving hardware failure out of the picture, lets assume we allow everybody to install their software of choice on business computers. Read the following quote from an Information Week article by Avi Baumstein after  audits found peer to peer file sharing software on PC’s;

The results were shocking and scary–loads of confidential business documents and enough personal information to ruin any number of lives and create PR nightmares for quite a few companies. Among the business documents were spreadsheets, billing data, health records, RFPs, internal audits, product specs, and meeting notes

As smaller businesses, we are not immune to this either!

In this previous post, I wrote about a small business owner that was fired by three network support vendors.

And why did three IT Services companies fire this customer?

After every abusive , screaming support call, the service providers found the affected PC to be riddled with viruses and spy ware from the kids playing on business PC’s. His attitude was that he should never have problems in spite of his own irresponsibility.

My Personal Experience

At the beginning of this post I mentioned above the 10 grand dollar value.

As an organization, we are pretty liberal on what people do with their PC’s. And of a staff of about 20, three of them use that advantage more than others.

And yes. I have to rebuild or fix those three users computers every couple of months. In fact I just finished fixing one again that took a few days to repair. But lets leave out those softer productivity and labour costs for a minute. After all, maybe you don’t consider these type of things as costs. (but you should!)

How about hard dollar accounts payable costs? Does that strike a nerve?

One of these three individuals configured a three way data synchronization with our email server, his iPhone, and his Google calendar.

Immediately after he did this, I started getting errors on our e-mail server, all coming from his account!

Even after removing the e-mail server part of this synchronization, the errors rapidly escalated in severity and number.

Articles and support notes suggested completely deleting this individuals email account, taking the server off-line and running certain database repair & diagnostic tools.

To avoid bringing critical e-mail to a halt during business hours, I planned that work for late on the next Sunday.

Unfortunately – my e-mail server did not last until the next Sunday.

That Friday morning was nothing but a complete nightmare of error messages and failures that completely crashed the server. The crash completely corrupted all message stores, the file system, the works. At one point we could not even get that e-mail server to actually run the operating system.

After a few hours of work, I contacted one of my preferred vendors who specialize in this type of disaster recovery. It still took myself and two of their experts 3 days to get a complete rebuild of that server, a restore of all that data from backup tapes, and then use the database tools to clean up the corruption.

Three days and a 10 grand service bill

The SMB Takeaway

It is easy to say; let everybody use what they want.

But you better be willing to pay for the excess costs! Because somebody has to pay them.

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Photo Credit peppergrass via flickr

Have I Mentioned Process Comes Before Technology?

I was recently talking with the president of a SMB, and during that conversation he mentioned some technologies he was thinking about implementing to improve some of his internal processes.

It is a constant refrain.

Technology Takes Last Place

Technology should be a distant last place in your considerations.

Technology is a tool that can be used by people.

A tool used by people to generate business results by following business processes.

Read these two reviews by John Caddel, and Bob Sutton referencing the same study on improving medication processes in hospitals. To quote Mr. Caddel;

I’ve seen both these situations in action: the ability of front-line personnel to understand and fix problems with the processes they use, and the effectiveness of often-overlooked simple and low-tech solutions.

The SMB Takeaway

Technology tools can help standardize, they can help speed up existing business processes. But if those processes don’t even exist right now. Don’t think (or let vendors convince you) that a software tool will be a magic bullet that can do it all for you.

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Photo Credit bunchofpants via flickr

Why Your Product Demo May Be Worthless

For B2B vendors that are in the business of selling software, One common method of driving customers to your product is providing a time limited, demonstration version of that product.

This can be a great way to let prospects try before they buy. When done correctly and simply, It can give prospective customers a real world look at the basic features and functionality of your product.

While there is nothing wrong with providing demonstration versions of your software;

If you don’t do it right, don’t bother!

A story of the the demo that can only be used by experts.

I have been looking for a particular software tool for my organization. The market and vendors in this tools competitive space has hundreds of products, so it is not as if there is zero competition. In my research I found one vendor that had a product that looked to have the features I was looking for, and it also had a demonstration version of the product. My first thought was great!

I downloaded that demo and then looked on their web site for installation instructions. None.

I extracted the downloaded package and searched it all for installation instructions. None.

I called their sales team for instructions. None.

Let me give a little bit of background, this tool is not a stand-alone product that you double click the SETUP file and follow the bouncing ball until it tells you to click FINISH.

This software is a departmental tool that can be configured to use a few different Web Server products for the front end portions that people interact with, plus several different database products for the back end data storage. The installation and configuration of this type of software gets a little more complex as you have to get the pre-requisite components  (web server and database server) properly configured and set up first.

What happens?

I start the application installation, then get some cryptic error message that kills it dead.

Now, unlike my my previous rant about graphics and tutorials, at least software and servers are in my skill level!

So I have been able to overcome the errors and blow ups one by one to determine what is happening after the installation dies! I fix that one piece, try again, it dies again, I track down that reason, try again….

You get the idea. frustration. Hours of time wasted and I am not even at the stage where I can actually evaluate the product!

Would everybody keep doing this trial and error install? For a demo version of software? Probably not!

Who is the audience of your demo?

If the target market of your demo software is senior marketing, sales, or operations staff. Would they be able to try it on their own? Do they even have an IT team available for the hours of what I went through?

Or will this type of frustration have them just saying forget it?

The three choices; easy, difficult, and the hard way

The easy way to provide a software demo is to ensure that it is entirely self contained, no external dependencies at all. Everything your software needs is installed automatically.

A little more difficult is acknowledging the dependencies mentioned above, but at the minimum having explicit warnings and instructions on what is required, and what will be expected.

The hard way is the trial and error that I have been going through.

If you are planning your demonstration software the hard way – you probably have killed any benefit of your demo!

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Photo Credit Doug Becker via flickr

Why That Tutorial Content on Your Web Site May Be Worthless

One common method of driving customers to your product or service can be a little freebie teaser to get prospects interested in talking to you. That type of freebie content could include case studies, white papers, and the topic of this post; The Tutorial.

While there is nothing wrong with providing context specific tutorials in principle;

If you don’t do it right, don’t bother!

The purpose of utilizing that tool is to demonstrate what you can do for me, increasing the likelihood of me purchasing from you.

If you just frustrate the hell out of me, you fail at that. Big time.

The Tutorial (not) for dummies

Yes, I am a tech manager. But one thing I know squat about is graphics and graphic software. Whatever your graphics software of choice is, I won’t be able to use it – trust me.

Anyway, I was pointed to a tutorial that would enable beginners (Me!) to use a pre-built template to add a particular graphic theme to a background image. I thought the idea was great, and downloaded the instructions and template.

The tutorial may have been perfect for someone with a graphic design background (not that anyone with that background would likely need a tutorial) but it pissed me off because it neglected the first, and most important part;

Step number one!

Yup.

Step number one was missing in action.

This tutorial assumed that my uber-excellent graphics skills would enable me to insert my graphic image of choice into that template, and that I could then joyfully follow along with the remaining steps in the tutorial.

I failed at step one. It did not tell me the basic information needed to get started. Namely how to put my image into their nice magic template. Finally in frustration I just deleted the thing.

When doing a tutorial, you cannot assume that just because you know step 1, that everyone does. In fact, if you are going to assume, assume the opposite, that we are all idiots and need it spelled out in capital letters.

But what if???

Of course!

If your tutorial has an implicit understanding that it is only of value to those with existing PhD’s in aeronautical engineering, just say it!

You will save the rest of us frustration and time because you are defining your audience right up front.

The Definition Of Insanity

Can be defined as doing the same thing, the same way every time, and expecting the results to change. (try W. Edwards Demings’ red bead experiment!)

Building a process oriented business is not a set it and forget it operation. It is defining and monitoring the desired outcomes. And identifying that if a desired outcome does not happen, that you have an opportunity for improvement.

In other words, if the desired outcome fails, what can we do to reduce the risk that it will fail next time?

In talking about process, you need to look specifically at what breaks. You need to look at the why, and the how of what went wrong. Is it a people problem? A process problem? or a system problem?

(within the context of ITIL I give some samples starting in this post titled; ITIL And The SMB Part 3; Incident Management)

Although please note that you do not need to go the ITIL route to become more process oriented.

It can be easy to overlook;

When something fails, there is an associated cost. That cost could be rework, lost time, maybe even lost business. Costs can be soft as well, for example, reduced customer satisfaction.

As an example of improving process efficiency, the large package delivery companies load their trucks in a first-in, last-out manner based on the drivers delivery route. This simple step reduces the amount of time finding the correct packages for offload at each stop, and reduces the risk of missing something. And of course missing packages can negatively affect customer satisfaction.

The More Things Stay The Same

When you start building a process oriented business (not just as an IT function) there are two critical pieces to start with;

1) Define the optimum outcomes. A process is nothing without a business outcome. This defined business outcome is also the measure that you can use to improve and monitor your processes.

2) Continually monitor and improve your processes. There are always opportunities for improvement. There is an old saying in music, that the spaces between the notes are just as important as the notes themselves.

The SMB Takeaway

Like the spaces between the notes, process optimization often comes hidden in the areas as work migrates from one individual or group to another.

Improving them, or identifying why something did not work, you need to understand – you need to look at the what the why and the how of what you are trying to perform.

Was it a person error? a process error? a system error?

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Real SMB IT: Web Site Improvements; The Site Map

This post is the next in an intermittent series looking at your smaller business web site from a marketing perspective -  When you don’t have marketing staff!

This series started with this post, IT In Marketing? here and covers looking at real world web site improvements that SMB’s can make that don’t require major work or extensive help from experts. Stuff that can be typically done by a smaller business either by themselves, or in some cases just basic tech staff assistance.

In the previous post in this series, I wrote about the importance of adding a Site Map to your Web Site. That post also links to a full definition of what a Site Map actually is, and what it does as well.

I wanted to dig deeper into this topic for one reason; When it comes to a Site Map on your Web site, you actually want two of them!

Your Web Site is collection of pieces of content broken down into various pages. These pages could include Contact Us information, products and services you provide, case studies The works. That can be a lot of content scattered over many web pages. These site maps simply ensure that it is easy for visitors to find the information and content that they are looking for. Because if they don’t find it quickly, odds are that they will just go to the next web site.

The first Site Map; For Humans

The first Site Map that you create is for those of us in the human category. It is simply a hierarchical set of links that ensure that people that are on your Web Site don’t get lost. If they find themselves in unknown territory and get lost trying to find the information they were looking for, the site map is a quick way to ensure that they stick around.

Similar to a table of contents, the site map is a link that when a user clicks on it, takes them to a page that gives a quick summary of all content, and the links to all that content on your Web Site, it could look similar to this;

About YourCompany

* Overview
* News
* Our Philosophy
* Why Choose Us
* Our Staff
* Careers

Services & Solutions

* Overview
* Product_name
* Solution_Name

I am confident you have seen those type of links along the side, or bottom of other web sites. Again, need a quick check of where you are in that web site? The above sample tells you quickly and easily.

The Second Site Map; For Computers

More specifically, this second Site Map is a computer readable format that allows the search engines to quickly and efficiently index all the content that exists on your Web Site. You want to ensure that all content is properly indexed so that if some one searches the Internet for; “Who sells this widget in my town?” your information can appear in their search results.

This second map looks a little different, and after you create it, humans don’t see it. The data for this machine readable site map is in a data format called XML and sits in a file called Sitemap.xml right at the root of your Web Site.

This XML site map can be created manually (ugg) but there are also tools that can do it automatically for you. Note that the tool I used to generate this sample is shown in the second line below.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>
- <!– Created by Devintelligence.com Sitemap Generator
–>
- <urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84″>
- <url>
<loc>http://www.yourcompany.com</loc>
<lastmod>2009-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
- <url>
<loc>http://www.yourcompany.com/about_news.asp#27Oct08</loc>
<lastmod>2009-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>hourly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>

As you see, this one is not pretty! but again, once you create it and place it on the root of your web site, humans won’t actually see it. The only time the you need to see it is if you add new pages to your web site, make sure the the site map gets updated as well.

The SMB Takeaway

For the human readable site map, you will most likely need the help of your web site developer, the second you can do yourself very easily.

The two of them together ensure that all content on your web site can easily be found, by people, or by computers!

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Real SMB IT: Repetitive Problems

(Let me guess – You have that complaint as well?)

What are repetitive problems? And what is so bad about them?

Repetitive problems are IT service issues that either do repeat on a regular basis (eg. Jane Can’t print) or seem to occur on a regular basis (eg. The Internet is dead).

In both cases these issues will both suck the life out of your staff, and leave a lasting perception that IT staff or suppliers are never meeting expectations in the quality of IT service and support delivery.

The Quick And The Dead

Sure you want IT related issues and problems resolved rapidly. But it is important to understand that rapidly must be balanced by permanently.

You do not want IT staff or suppliers fixing the same problem again and again. Avoidance of these repetitive problems comes down to investigating and communicating the root cause of that IT service or asset failure. Identifying and communicating this root cause permits a reasonable discussion and decision on mitigating that possible repeat of that failure.

In some cases, it may not possible or desirable to permanently kill all repetitive issues. As an example, perhaps your current budgetary considerations make replacing that defective printer a low priority. But at least having that decision agreed upon and documented can remove that vague perception that your IT staff or supplier is not delivering adequate service.

The SMB Takeaway

I have talked with many SME business owners and managers over the years, and a common theme in complaints about their IT service staff or outsourced service providers is when failures occur in the same IT service or asset consistently and repeatedly. So the discussion must be held on that root cause, that why?

These type of Repetitive problems must be avoided and killed where ever, and when ever possible.

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Photo Credit donnjmck via flickr

Real SMB IT: DNS, MX, What Is It? (And Why Should I Care?)

Could your business be kicked completely off the Internet?

The answer is yes!By kicked off the Internet, I mean invisible. Impossible to find.

So lets start with a little background.

At its most basic, all computers on the Internet communicate with each other with a unique number called an Internet Protocol (IP) address. As an analogy, just imagine this number as similar to a phone number.

But! when you visit a Web Site, or send an e-mail, you are using words, not numbers. you type in the www.yourcompany.com, or you send me an email by typing elliotross@company_name.ca

Since the computers communicate with each other via IP address numbers, and we humans prefer text and words, something is needed to translate those human readable words, into the machine readable numbers.

Enter DNS!

If you think of a phone book, you look up the words Elliot Ross which points to the listing for my telephone number. The domain naming system (DNS) provides a similar ability for our computers to translate human readable text we type into the machine IP address.

If you want to see this in action, simply open your Web Browser and paste these numbers into the address bar: 74.125.45.100

You will see the Google Web Site appear. (at least at the time of this writing!) I say at the time of this writing, because the machine readable number can be changed, and just like the phone book, If I change my phone number, as long as Elliot Ross is pointed to that new phone number – you won’t have any problem.

That little MX just stands for Mail eXchanger, in other words, when you send me an e-mail, that little MX tells the internet that to reach me by e-mail, “send that e-mail to this server over here!”

And Why Should You Care?

The first and easiest, if you think you cannot get on the Internet when you type in a company name, DNS problems are a common source of the issue.

But that is NOT what this is about

A SMB that I am acquainted with had an issue where an unknown individual tried to hi-jack that DNS information from them, and make it point to servers that were not associated with their business.

To continue with my phone book analogy, imagine that when you look up my name, the phone number that my name points to is yours, not mine.

So I would never get any calls.

Except on the Web, it is not missing some phone calls, it means that you completely disappear from the Internet. No Web Site, no e-mail. Nada.

There are checks and balances to make this difficult to do, but it goes to emphasize;

You must make sure all critical information about your on-line presence is owned by you.

Not your supplier.

Not your contractor.

That includes the contact information for your Internet domain and its DNS records. They may help you set that information up, but the contact name and information must be yours.

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Photo Credit merfam via flickr

Real SMB IT: Don’t Edit E-Mail Attachments in Outlook!

I personally know two people have been upset (OK livid) having each lost a lot of work by making this mistake!

You know you have probably done it too!

Like many businesses, lets assume that you are using MS Office and Outlook at your office. Lets also assume somebody E-Mails you a Microsoft Office document, you open the e-mail and then double click on that attachment. Up pops that document and you start editing away.

I know you are careful; you religiously make sure that you hit the Save button periodically! but still, after a couple of hours and a coffee or two later;

* With the document still open, you close MS Outlook, you notice that Outlook makes some weird message asking if you want to save your changes, and heck – since you haven’t changed anything in the  e-mail itself, you just click no.

* Or, perhaps MS Outlook or MS Office crashes on your computer. Boom! - a big time blow up forcing you to restart MS Office, or possibly even restart the whole computer.

You guessed it (or have been there!) All your work could be gone. Hours of work could have vanished.

Save that attachment outside of Outlook first!

When ever you receive a document or spreadsheet as an attachment in MS Outlook, you first open that attachment, but! before starting to make changes, select the File menu, and click the Save As thingy and save it to a folder on your local PC, or your shared network storage first!

Because?

When you edit a Microsoft document that is located in a directory (folder) on a physical disk, the software opens the document and creates a temporary copy of the document in that same folder. That is normal and the mechanism used by MS Office to recover your data after any possible crash of MS Office.

But! If you edit that document while it is still an e-mail attachment???….

First, even though you are editing a Microsoft Office document, it is still truly a simple e-mail message that you are editing. No matter how many times you hit Save, that saving of the document does not save those edits to that e-mail! You still must save that entire changed e-mail. And second, editing that e-mail as an attachment doesn’t save that temporary working copy of the document in a easily accessible working directory.

When you edit that document while it is still an attachment, there is still a temporary working copy, but it is not sitting neatly in your My Documents, or other easy to find location.

Depending on your version of Windows, and the version of Outlook etc, the edits you are making to that document get saved in temporary places controlled by the operating system. Those areas are hard to find and pretty ugly. For example, if you use Outlook 2003 those temporary files will be hidden in;
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLKxxx

In this example, username is the user name that is used by the person who is currently logged on to the computer, and xxx is a randomly generated sequence of letters and numbers.

And Outlook 2007?

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\xxxxxxxx

The SMB Takeaway

You get the idea, those crashes happen, don’t edit attachments within the original e-mail. Save them first

Using IT To Focus On Your Customer

Early on in a B2B organization’s growth, you probably had one or two key customers. Your business was geared solely and completely to focusing on those customers. You focused like a laser beam on their needs, their wants, and their requirements.

However, as we develop more customers and grow our business, we can begin to develop a tendency to focus  inwardly rather than that laser like outward focus on our customers. You can recognize this tendency when people’s job descriptions become so specific on tasks, that there is no mention  of how those tasks affect, improve, or alter the satisfaction of your customer base.

I freely admit, many of these ideas I mention below blur the line between marketing and IT (which is why both those functions should be joined at the hip) but as many growing businesses don’t have full time marketing staff, lets look at some ways that IT can help fill in the gap.

1) Actively monitor what people are saying about you, and about your competitors. Setting up tools such as Google alerts, or Twitter search will alert you to conversations that are happening. These conversations could give you insights on improvements to your offerings that competitors don’t have, or even highlight a prospect who is dissatisfied with a competitive product. Funneling this information through the appropriate parts of your business could be as simple as an e-mail.

2) Actively monitor how people are using, or hoping to use, products such as yours. To do this, ensure that you have set up analytic software on your Web Site, and secondly, using tools such as Google’s Ad-Words key word tool, look at the search queries that people use when looking for tools or solutions in your space.

As an example, in my organizations product space, I was able to identify that the term E-Mail was often used in conjunction with the keywords I was looking at. I can translate little piece of data that into;

Show me products in this space that can send E-Mail for me.

This shows me that having our solutions E-Mail enabled (they are) is something that we should call more attention to in our marketing and Web Site content.

3) For your existing customers, If they order from you every month, is re-ordering a round of faxes and telephone calls? or can IT create a system that allows these orders to be created easily and electronically?

4) Actively record and report on all issues that come in to you via telephone or e-mail. Data that is too often ignored! but if 10 calls a week are about the same concern or issue; what are you waiting for?

The SMB Takeawy

Nothing magical about the above ideas, they boil down to one thing; listening, and responding to what your customer needs.

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