X-Box Support Incident From Hell

Three  days of X-Box live support hell. And what is worse, the root resolution would is so obvious.

As a parent – I should be able to control, or Administer all my kids accounts, heck I only have one, imagine if I had several of them!

This is being written on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon as I sit on hold for the 7th time, in about 6 hours of calls since Friday night.

You see, my son is a minor, so setting up his X-Box live account needed my name, credit card details – the usual bits and pieces.

Yet through the X-Box console he was able to change some of this information into his name.

So now the name associated with the credit card is no longer me, yet of course my name is not the “gamer tag” identifier.

So basically X-Box support is telling me to Eff Off.

There is a reason that in technology we identify parent – child relationships, in that the child (or leaf) objects inherit permissions or restrictions from the parent (or container) object.

Come on Microsoft, get it together on that.

PS it is still not resolved

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: Asking Why?

I admit that I have talked a lot about ITIL on this blog. But I want to re-iterate, as a small to medium enterprise, do you need ITIL to improve IT reliability and service levels?

The easy answer is No.

ITIL is one possible framework, but simply borrowing the Toyota Production Systems Why? question until you reach a root cause of IT service or asset failure will begin to demonstrate the power of digging deeper into the root cause of IT Service outages and failures.

It Ain’t Fixed Until You Know Why!

I am confident that as owners or managers in the SME space you have seen this;

You: The accountant can’t print

IT: OK, the accountant can print now

Umm,Sure.

Sure, you definitely want IT related issues and problems resolved rapidly. But it is important to understand that rapidly must be balanced by  permanently. And to get to permanently you need to understand and document what the root cause of the problem was.

Understanding these root causes will also assist in removing and identifying repetitive problems (which I will elaborate on in a later post)

Simply asking the Why? will begin to demonstrate the root cause of what caused the original service failure or complaint. The key is to keep asking Why? until the answers become outside of your scope of control. In many cases one single Why? will give you the answer, in other cases a few more may be required.

Take a look at how identifying the root cause can really demonstrate the contextual differences on a particular IT Service Incident or failure;

Using the same example as above, after digging into the root cause of the can’t print complaint, the root cause end results could could be;

* Improving Training

You, The accountant can’t print

IT: OK, the accountant can print now

You: Why could the accountant not print?

IT: The new version of that software requires you to set the printer to landscape mode first

The Lesson Learned: if this is your only accountant, you know that this issue will be very unlikely to re-occur, or if you have many, that a simple training exercise will eliminate further incidents of the same kind.

* Poor Internal Processes

You, The accountant can’t print

IT: OK, the accountant can print now

You: Why could the accountant not print?

IT: The toner was out

You: Why was the toner out?

IT: Nobody knew it was the last one, we had to order more

The Lesson Learned: you know in this case that the next logical Why? is the assertion that no one monitors toner stock. So again our cause and effect demonstrates that if we improve how we stock, manage, and install these printer consumables, we are unlikely to see this incident again.

* IT Trend and Cost Analysis

You, The accountant can’t print

IT: OK, the accountant can print now

You: Why could the accountant not print?

IT: The printer jams repeatedly, accounting is still using that 8 year old printer, the service contractor told us last year that repairing the thing was more expensive than buying a new one

The Lesson Learned: This cause and effect points out one of two things, if the printer is that old and not fixable, you either invest in replacing it, or determine that the effort to manually fix that jam when it happens is a price you are willing to pay.

The SMB Takeaway

I hope this demonstrates the importance of identifying the root cause of IT incidents and failures. There is a second benefit as well that details with perception, that will be coming soon to a Dime A Dozen post near you!

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Photo Credit Margaret Anne Clarke via flickr

Delete Microsoft Word’s Tilde (~) Temp Files

As much as we may not like it Microsoft Word crashes now and then. Now if Word crashes too often, it can actually be caused by other factors in your network, which is beyond the scope of this post.

However in some cases these crashes can be caused by too many temporary files left by previous times MS Word has crashed.

When you open a Word document, the software automatically creates a temporary copy of the document. That temporary file has the same name, but starts with a tilde (~) and is located in the same directory or folder that you opened the file in. It simply looks like this;

Sample MS Word Temporary File

When you finish working on that document, save it, and exit MS Word, that temporary file gets removed automatically.

However if for some reason MS Word crashes on you while editing that document, that temporary file can be left behind. This is normal as when you restart MS Word, this temporary file is what is used to try and recover what you may have lost when the program crashed.

But again, sometimes even after that attempt at recovery, the temporary file can still be left behind.

One small business that I am familiar with had all of their customer related documents in hundreds of folders located on a server, and in each of the folders there were dozens of these temporary documents,  totaling almost a thousand of them scattered through all of the folders.

The Repeated Crash

The sample picture I have above shows Sample.doc with the ~Sample.doc temporary file. In some cases, if MS Word crashed on that Sample.doc and the temporary ~Sample.doc file got left behind, the next time you try and open the original Sample.doc, you have a pretty good chance of MS Word just blowing up again.
And then again.
And then again

Search And Delete

Periodically, search your server document storage folders for left over temporary files starting with that tilde and just delete them.

You may be surprised that many exploding documents no longer explode when trying to open them

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