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

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

SPAM Exists, Get Over It

In the “old days”, circa 10 years ago, to avoid E-Mail SPAM you bought anti-spam software and your IT staff would spend hours tweaking the rules that the software used to decide what to block (and what not to block).

These filtering rules got pretty complex, as spammers quickly learned not to use a pure word. You probably have seen SPAM emails with misspellings this in the title; Viagra, V1@gr@, vi@6ra .. you get the idea.

The trick was to build filters that would catch as much of that crap as possible, but without stopping the legitimate e-mail.

Today?

Anti-spam tools now are mature and can be contracted out to service providers for about 2 bucks per person per month. These tools are now mathematically driven and rarely (but still occasionally!) block legitimate e-mail.

The point is; there is no excuse any more for your staff to wade through through hundreds of SPAM emails looking for the few that are not SPAM.

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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

Automatic Update Hell

A lot of software that gets installed on your PC does that automatic update thing. (Yes Windows Included) And of course many newer software installations quietly upgrade other things in the background.

I hate that.

Here are two reasons!

1) Spent two hours trying to fix a laptop because a Microsoft freebie tool upgrade updated a part of Windows that now causes a multi-function print device to blow up.

So, we have to hope a newer version of the print driver and software comes out some day

2) My own machine updated to the Java Run time Edition 6 for an installation of another piece of software

Of course – it has blown up a device that only works with the version 5 of the Java Run time Environment.

You ever tried searching a vendor web site for older versions of software???

Ha!

Sorry – Rant is now Off!

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Sharepoint Danger!

A quirky titled column by Fred Yeomans titled; Danger! Do not implement SharePoint in your Organization!

The title may be quirky, but the context is truly valid for those of us in the small to medium business space.

The problem here is the way you think about your projects. If you are consistently talking about “implementing SharePoint” you are going in the wrong direction. If you are talking about implementing any platform, you are setting up for failure. Many of the problems we run into with SharePoint and other platforms arise from focusing on the technologies.

It bears repeating – business technologies, in and of themselves, won’t do a thing for you.

What technologies can do for you is help speed up an existing business process flow, or provide a solution to resolve a particular business pain point.

In other words, there has to be business value there first.

The SMB Takeaway

If there is a business value through reducing some type of cycle time, improving communication or reducing re-work and missing information costs, sure – look at some technology platform.

But beware of technology, just for technologies sake!

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Real SMB IT: For Heavens Sake, Use Templates!

Too often in the small business space we tend to re-invent the wheel. Again, again, and again, then again for good measure.

Case in point, my spouse also works for an SME, she was working on a document that three or four people had contributed to.

The document had to be cleaned and formatted to a consistent look and feel as each contributor had done their part in the way they saw fit. One used text and bullets , one used embedded tables etc.

It was a nightmare.

We worked on that G-D thing until after 1 AM

The SMB Takeaway

Whatever software you are using, take the time to develop styles and templates. It makes filling in the blanks so much easier. Time and time again.

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Hands On ITIL Helpdesk

I have written many high level overviews of ITIL on this blog, and to this day it is the most searched for information.

Unfortunately for me, very few of those visitors have left questions on other info they would like to see.

However, if you are someone who stumbled on the ITIL stuff here, Mary Weilage has an excellent post at Techreplublic titled; Implementing help desk software: IT exec offers a firsthand account about Jay Rollins’ search for and implementation of ITIL aligned help desk processes.

It provides an excellent summary of the questions, requirements and trade offs made along the way.

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