YOUR Skills And Technology

Posted by on January 25, 2012 No comments

This post was inspired by something a little different. Simply enough I received a vendor sales pitch for advanced business process tools and consultants for a particular software environment I have used before, and it sent me down a slightly winding path through memory lane. So it is off of my regular topic -

What are “High Tech” careers?

We all hear about current unemployment numbers, some job gains here, more losses over there, it is not a kind environment right now. Being in the technology field, the technology related press repeats this up and down news with IT related job gains over here, losses in this field, etc etc -

What bugs me about these ‘technology’ numbers is that that they really only consider hardware designers with Engineering degrees and Software programmers with Computer Science degrees. Just reading these things makes me shudder because these designations probably turn many people off about thinking “technology” in any shape or form. They associate ‘tech’ with geeks or movie video game type hackers.

To me that is a mistake, the skills that you as an individual possess, can be wonderful if you have the basic computer skills to leverage them in new ways, in ways that simply use a computer as a tool.

What do I mean by that?

I met a young woman years ago whose education was in theater arts, hardly technology right? Sure – not classified as a technology career, but on her own, she learned how to use a computer to model stage sets to the smallest inch, this allowed the theater companies director to determine that Act 2, Scene 3 needed more room on stage right, long before a carpenter was paid to hammer a nail, or before calling the carpenter to rip out what had already been built. (this was a community volunteer theater, not an On or Off Broadway big budget type of theater)

Several years ago we implemented a document management system that was critical to the maintenance and growth of our ISO 9000 certification. (if you are not familiar with ISO audits, they are not very forgiving of errors or omissions) Our most important consultant on this project? An individual with a post graduate degree in Library Science. Library Science you ask? This brilliant woman also knew the software tool we were implementing, but think about it; They weren’t hard cover or paperbacks, but there were over 10 Thousand documents in that tool that needed taxonomies and metadata that would allow them to be found and used. (without a Dewey Decimal System!)

Lastly, I know so many people with educations in Graphic Arts or Graphic Design – Traditionally those skills would be found mostly in photographic layouts or other design – today? We hire these geniuses to use their skills with software tools that create the imagery and video we create on a daily basis – again, not considered in ‘technology career’ statistics.

The Takeaway

Regardless of your education or skills, if you are comfortable around a computer keyboard – someone, somewhere, can use those skills – they may just not know it yet.

So I urge you not to think ‘technology’ is Engineering and Computer Science degrees alone.

Best Wishes in your career

Elliot

Mobile Web Vs. App for the SMB

Posted by on January 23, 2012 No comments

Mobile devices. From tablets like Apple’s (AAPL) iPad, to Smart Phones. (not to mention what other devices may show up tomorrow) There is no debate about this part; these devices have changed how we consume, view, and manage information.

For those of us in business, we need to be reviewing our internal processes to see where these mobile devices could possibly improve user or customer experiences, improve sales processes, or possibly reduce data entry in field service or inspection roles.

In this post titled; The iPad And The SME I wrote that in my opinion, the power of these devices is the ability to go beyond static online web pages, the power to be able to leverage the touch screen motions to move, size, flip, and change the orientation of images, tap fields to open or to modify – all through the application (or app) that can provide true benefits to our businesses. To quote myself on that post;

….Also imagine inspection or field service roles where checklists of tasks have to be performed. Do it on paper and perform data entry into a computer? or open the App and Tap, Tap that each has been checked?

Writing in a post titled; Why apps are not the future, Dave Winer disagrees with me.

 The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web.

To be fair, Mr. Winer is speaking as a consumer obtaining content from media and news outlets. However to me, linking or not, the static web does not have the power that I see providing the largest benefit in many internal business processes.

As an example, if you manufacture high end furniture, you already know that a retail outlet will be able to carry just one of your fancy sofa’s, they will also have a huge binder of material swatches to demonstrate to potential customers what that sofa would like in different colors or fabrics.

To me, a static web page showing the same swatches is useless – but how about a tablet app that shows that sofa staged in every fabric and pattern – full sized glorious images – expand, flip, rotate…

The SMB Takeaway

These new mobile devices are more than just a technology – they are a paradigm shift that we are only beginning to understand. Considering mobile devices as simply another ‘mini-computer’ to view web pages is to miss this shift.

 

Where I Agree to Disagree on Cloud Computing & The SME

Posted by on January 17, 2012 1 comment

An article by Todd R. Weiss written on an HP site titled; Small Business Cloud Challenge: Getting the IT Talent You Need

To quote the opening line;

With a typically tiny IT staff, it’s often tough for small businesses to find the time and resources to develop and begin a real cloud computing strategy

The article continues on describing the challenges facing SME’s in attracting ‘cloud engineer’ talent. (what is a cloud engineer anyway?)

Yes, I believe that the information in that article is wrong, and I have that belief for the reason I wrote here. To summarize that post, if you are a smaller business with limited or no technology staff, you take a huge capex and opex hit buying some kind of enterprise software tool – or you spend a monthly Opex expense and rent it online from the likes of Salesforce.com or Netsuite that can grow with you as you need it.

For larger SME’s, your IT teams already have the virtualization and development skills, the learning curve to move that effort to the ‘cloud’ is definitely not beyond the skills of your team.

As this article by Brian Hopkins at Forrester Research states;

Many SMBs I talk to are adopting a cloud-first policy and eschewing investment in big enterprise systems,

And don’t take my word for it, the December 5th edition of eWeek** has an article by Chris Preimesberger that states;

.. the menu and drag-and-drop user interfaces have become so familiar and easy to use that coding and scripting applications and cloud service have basically become a thing of the past.

For small to medium enterprises, the only question I have; Why would you not look at this cloud computing?

**The print edition of the periodical, I attempted to find the digital edition on their website, but searching by issue date and author name failed to locate it

Consumerization of IT

Posted by on January 12, 2012 No comments

An article by Stephanie Overby in CIO Magazine, subtitled; employee provisioning of laptops and PDA’s is the next logical step in the consumerization of IT

“numerous unsanctioned employee owned notebooks and desktop PC’s are accessing network resources”

The article?

It was in the print edition on September 15 2008.

The only thing missing is the iPad and other tablet style devices, and Smart Phones. We haven’t used the term ‘PDA’ in years!House Cleaning

Yes, I was doing some housecleaning.

And also yes, my wife calls me a pack rat.

I Don’t Have Time For ‘Process’

Posted by on December 29, 2011 No comments

Not enough hours in the day.

Hours spent identifying that invoice, more time spent tracking down why that important piece was missing from that proposal, then some more time trying to find out why that critical task slipped through the cracks.

All the hours spent on this niggling ‘busy work’ while trying to squeeze in the ‘real” job.

This is the daily experience of a Vice President in a smaller organization that I was speaking to.

Does it sound familiar to you? (I’m sure it does for many) We use many jargon terms for it, putting out fires, scrambling, keeping our head above water, perhaps you use a different one.

That same Vice President claimed it was too busy to even think of improving internal business processes.

My reply was that it was too busy not to consider improving internal processes! Efficient use of poorly spent time is pointless. Focus first on ‘effective’.*

Invest some time in improving business processes because that ‘putting out the fires’ busy-work will pretty much disappear. That saves you time over the longer term.

Formally creating processes for how repetitive work is performed is simply documenting how that work or task is executed, what role performs each step, and what role is responsible and accountable for input or output.

Because when everybody knows that workflow, knows who is responsible for what and when - you only need to actively manage any exceptions. Everything else pretty much automatically takes care of itself. And there will be exceptions, some will be individual mistakes that can then be corrected, some will opportunities to learn and improve the process, and occasionally there will be a new exception – right out of left field – but as you progress, there will be fewer and fewer exceptions chewing up your time.

The SMB Takeaway

As a manager in the SMB space, I guarantee that if your time, day in and day out, is being chewed up and lost scrambling to fix the same problems – the problem is you.

The examples I mentioned in the first paragraph?

Hours tracking down why and for what you are receiving that invoice? How about a simple purchase authorization and requisition process. When the invoices arrive, accounts payable already has all needed information.

The missing piece on that proposal? how about simple templates, checklists and subject matter expert reviews of key portions?

We have another jargon term to bring up – you know that situation when work just gets done as everyone knows the why, the how and the who of tasks? we call it a well oiled machine……

* Quoting @MarkOOakes on Twitter

A Small Business And Sharepoint

Posted by on December 22, 2011 2 comments

I had a hallway conversation with the owner of a small business that provides outsourced IT support and technical services for other small businesses.

As old techies are wont to do, we were swapping war stories (in other words, technical issues we had fought and beaten in the past!) when he mentioned a problem that he was having at one of his small business clients. For this particular client he had installed a Microsoft Small Business Server product to give his client basic email, file storage, and printer services.

Now this Microsoft small business product also contained a basic version of a collaboration tool called Microsoft Sharepoint Team Services. First, I must say that this next part is incredibly unusual, but his client had found this Sharepoint collaboration software by themselves and were actually using it.

I made that incredibly unusual comment as some tongue in cheek humor! And that is because many companies explicitly invest money and time into these types of collaboration products and then attempt to drag their staff kicking and screaming into using them. And here was a small business that found it by accident and just dove in – head first.

My friend described how his client was using this Sharepoint collaboration tool for various types of documents and had placed huge amounts of data into the software. And this is where his problem was found, his client was experiencing software crashes, corrupted documents and various other problems. I had previously mentioned that I had implemented a 10 thousand document ISO 9000 PMF repository using that same Sharepoint collaboration tool, so he asked if I had any idea on the issue.

I had the privilege to tell him that I had a really good guess.

The ‘Express’ version versus the ‘Full’ version

For many years Microsoft Corporation has fairly successfully given some basic products away for free, but to get more advanced functionality commonly used in our businesses, you needed to pay for the full version of the software.

As an example, for years you were able to use a free copy of Microsoft Outlook Express  for your basicMicrosoft Office email needs, in fact it was installed by default on many computers when you purchased them. But for shared calendars and other more advanced functionality, you needed to pay for it and purchase a full copy Microsoft Outlook.

And Microsoft has done the same thing with this Sharepoint product. Sharepoint Team Services itself is a a freely available download for licensed Microsoft Servers, and when you install it? It  uses the Microsoft SQL Server Express database engine. Notice the word ’Express‘ again. It works, and is also freely available.

But similar to my Outlook example, these freely available Express versions of these tools have some limitations that do not exist in the full featured ‘pay for it’ versions of the same software. The full featured ‘pay for’ products are Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server, and the full Microsoft SQL Server product.

And my guess about his clients issues was based on these limitations. Because one of the limitations in the Express version is the physical amount of data that you can place in the SQL Server Express database. If you reread the above paragraphs, note that this small business owner said that his client had put ‘huge amounts of data in it’.

I suggested he take a look and see if they had put enough data into the software to be running up against the limit of what that Express version of the database software could handle.

As a note, a couple of weeks later he told me they had.

The SMB Takeaway

I give this small business credit for their head first dive into the software, although they should have told their IT Services provider, as he did not know they were using it – it was not being backed up! Think what they could have lost…….

However it brings up a lesson that in ITIL terms we call Capacity Management. (My first post on ITIL for small to medium business is here)

Capacity Management is defined as meeting current and future business requirements in a cost-effective manner. In English, it basically means purchasing IT assets based on your expected usage not just today, but next year. As a bad analogy - if you have decided that next year you and your spouse are going to have a baby, buying the two seat sports car right now would be poor future planning or poor Capacity Management.

My friends client found the software by accident, but this goes beyond the one software tool shown above, if you are looking at purchasing any type of IT software or hardware, consider where you will be next year, and the year after that. Buying a new server just big enough to hold all your office productivity documents and spreadsheets today, what about the new document or spreadsheet you create tomorrow?

 

Fixing this $%#!@&% mess

Posted by on December 19, 2011 Comments Off

Excellent, truly, truly, excellent post by Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing titled; The IT department isn’t killing you – you are

I urge you to read it, to encourage you, let me give you a teaser;

Dear CEO/VP of operations or whatever you are:

Information technology departments don’t kill businesses. CEO’s using IT departments kill businesses.

The post is downright hilarious – for all the truth it conveys. In fact, it is so true it is painful. As a technology manager, technologists do get sucked into these black holes.

If someone in marketing crashes the whole site by adding an extra “>” in the footer, what do you do? Uh-huh. You call IT. It’s all computery screeny stuff, so they must be to blame. And, when you point the finger at them, they say “OK, give us control over the web site, then.”

Mr. Lurie is referencing your marketing function, but the same happens in many business functions. Sales has no real idea who your largest customer is, but it is ‘computer screeny’ stuff, call it CRM and make it an IT Project.

Finance takes four months to close the books, but it is ‘computer screeny’ stuff, make it an IT Project.

Mr. Lurie also gives some ways out of that trap, I’m not going to repeat them here, read his post, I will state that his second option, along with its reference, is the one I choose.

Unless your business is a hot dog cart in Times Square, technology is woven through the very fabric of your business. Most, if not all, of your business processes will contain an element of technology in them. But just because there is one piece that is ‘computer screeny’ – does not mean that;

a) IT should be in charge

b) IT should be responsible for that ‘>’ in the footer that crashes the web site.

IT Leadership should, and must be joined at the hip with each piece of your organization, IT can provide tools that help standardize or automate, can provide tools that allow analysis. But at the end of the day, these are business tools – not technology tools.

Thank you Ian……

 

@Montberte: I don’t think there’s intelligent life on other planets. Why should other planets be any different from this one?

SME Software Teams: User Experience

Posted by on December 14, 2011 No comments

Just about a year ago, I presented a couple of arguments that technology leaders need to change their point of view on technology in this post titled; Consumer Tech: A Next Generation Point of View

Here is an interview with CIO Dick Escue at RehabCare Group, a physical therapy provider with more than 9,000 employees. 

in 2006, he decided to make user experience — not privacy or security — the number one priority of the IT department

Oh, did I mention, from the hard dollar category, he also saw a 92 percent reduction in broken devices?

‘Nuff said……

Photo Credit Stephen Heywood via flickr

A Lesson From Microsoft

Posted by on December 12, 2011 Comments Off

Sure, Microsoft Corporation is an 800 pound gorilla in the software business that many love to hate. But I want to travel back in time here and point out something that is often overlooked, and definitely worth considering in your business.

Some Background

I have written previously that I was late into the computing era. When I first turned to the field, Novell Netware was the king of the hill in network technologies for SME businesses. However, as I wrote in that same post, Netware had a weakness that I knew would eventually kill that dominance.

Being an IT Administrator at the time, I started to look carefully at what product I thought would be the next in line to take that networking crown away from Novell. Back in the early 1990′s, the choices were the ‘big company’ products such as Digital Equipment Corporations’ VAX minicomputers, and the various UNIX flavours including Sun Solaris.

In the small business space, there were two companies trying to make a name for themselves in our business technology networks – one was Microsoft, with the now familiar Windows, the second was IBM

IBM OS/2

IBM OS/2

with the OS/2 operating system. At that time, OS/2 version 2.1 was getting stronger, and IBM marketing was touting that version 3 would be even better.

There is a second thing you should know; in the SMB IT field, as an individual, traditionally you have been on your own when learning new skills. Companies generally are loath to provide new skills training, and help wanted advertisements were full of job postings wanting 3 years experience with a 1 year old new technology.

This meant that my research and learning would be costing me money from my own pocket.

So, both Microsoft Windows, and IBM OS/2 were pushing for market share in SME networks, I had to ask myself; Do I focus my skills development on just one of these products? If so, which one? Or perhaps I should cover all bets and take a deep dive into both of them?

As a pretty typical IT staffer, I purchased copies of both products, installed them and started the typical half play / half work of testing how they worked. The next step was to start looking for the more advanced learning materials. And that search changed things in a big way for me.

Dollars

IBM published in depth technical books about its products. These Red Books contained the needed in depth material on the deep inner workings of the operating system, but they were about a month of my wages – per book.

Microsoft also published the same in depth materials, available in what they called Resource Kits, and they were about a hundred dollars, and included a CD that contained digital versions of other Resource Kits. Buy one physical Resource Kit book, get 10 digital ones free. You can guess where I invested my dollars.

The Network Effect

The definition of Network Effect, is that the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it. As the old example states, one fax machine was useless, the more there are, the more you could use them.

Microsoft did not stop this network effect with just my Resource Kit materials either. Technical professionals could subscribe to Technet, Software Developers could subscribe to the the Microsoft Developer Network, and businesses that worked with Microsoft products could subscribe to various marketing and sales channel materials. And the key thing?

Sample Binder of Learning Materials

Sample Binder of Microsoft Learning Materials (2000)

These subscriptions were low in price, and bought you so much material that you know Microsoft spent more on shipping to get that material to you, than you paid for the subscription price. There were absolute boxes of binders, hundreds of CD’s, case studies, sample software, and other learning materials.

If you worked with Microsoft products in any way, to build this network effect, they pretty much gave you more information on a monthly basis than you could hope to assimilate.

And by doing that, they built a huge ecosystem of tech professionals of all types familiar with, and recommending Microsoft technologies.

The SMB Takeaway

I spent my hard earned money learning more about the deep technical details of Microsoft products, IBM OS/2 went to the dustbin of computing history.

And the lesson?

Look at your product or service. Is there anywhere that an investment in this network effect could mean you become the product or service of choice?

And the nice thing ladies and gentlemen, in our digital Facebook, youtube era, you don’t need the cost of sending 12 boxes of materials annually to do to it.

A Micro Business Doing the Web Right

Posted by on December 9, 2011 No comments

The term ‘small to medium enterprise‘ covers a lot of ground. (perhaps too much) This SME or SMB category of businesses covers a broad range, from owner / operator solo-preneurs, through micro-businesses with a handful of employees, and right through to organizations with a hundred employees and revenue in the millions.

And this post is for you solo-preneur or micro-business sized ladies and gentlemen. More specifically those of you in a ‘low technology’ field. I am using a generalization here, and I fully realize that generalizations are generally inaccurate! But in general, a solo-preneur who builds Internet Web Sites will often have more of an understanding of web marketing and knowledge of a strong web presence than a solo-preneur electrician, mover, or plumber.

But it should not be that way. And here is a ‘low technology’ micro-business that does understand this.

The Story

Simply enough – I was trading in my old car for a new one. And like many of us, with a hundred thousand kilometers (62 thousand miles) and a few years of kids, dogs, and all the chores that our cars do for us, it was pretty dirty. From dog fur and coffee stains on the seats, salt stains on the carpets, to dirt from the potted plants we bought last spring in the trunk.

Before talking a trade in prices, it definitely needed a very, very, thorough cleaning.

I did what most of us do; I used the Internet to search for automobile detailing in my region.

And what did I find?

Right at the very top of the search results were these guys, in2detail

Take a look at that link, right from the start – photographs, great colour, lists of services from fleet to RV detailing. And the Call Us right at the top of the page.

Needless to say – I called them. And yes, the work was as good as the web site.

The micro-business takeaway

People will be searching for your product or service – don’t make it impossible to find you.

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