I am enjoying it immensely, however at this early phase the time commitment has let my posting here slide. That being said, hopefully some more lessons learned will be coming in the future.

Best Regards,

Elliot

That job?

That job is the backing up (and if necessary, restoring) their critical data. And I am willing to bet that the numbers they are mentioning are actually worse than they state.

The content of the article makes it fairly certain that they are referencing the smaller end of the ‘small to medium business’ – but I know that the problem exists at the larger end of the scale too.

And why do I believe that numbers are actually worse?

Because many smaller businesses don’t realize that some of the business critical tools that they use need special care and skill to make sure you have successfully made a backup.

For example, you have a folder full of documents or pictures? sure, it easy to copy them to a USB drive or DVD. but you won’t have much luck trying that with the database used by your accounting software, or the one used by your inventory, shipping, or invoicing software.

The first reason is that you usually don’t know where that database is, and secondly, those database files cannot be simply copied from one location to another – your computer server will always have them ‘locked’ in a way that copying is not permitted.

With no copy of those databases – you have no backup of your most critical transactional data.

That is also why I believe that larger SME’s can fall into this trap.

These larger businesses may have improved business class tools to perform this critical task, however their understanding of them may not be as in depth as they could. be. As an example, a larger business could post more transactions to its accounting system in one day than a smaller business may do in one week.

Yet that accounting database is still backed up only once a week, the same way it was years ago…

DDS Backup tapes circa late '90's

The SMB Takeaway

The information and data located in your accounting, you billing, your receiving or your inventory programs is the life blood of your business.

Ignoring the possibility that something could happen to it is the most extreme level of negligence. Sooner or later something will happen to it. (it is only ‘when’, not ‘if’)

No one truly listens anymore.

This is neither earth shaking new information, nor is it ‘news’. Since the introduction of television we have been getting information in sound bites and 60 second voice overs.

Our current Internet connected world? A few minutes on a search engine provides as much information as hours in a library.

For our businesses this means that we need to ensure that we can communicate our value in the same way that our customers will be receiving it: quickly, concisely, and on demand.

I want to point you to this excellent piece by Ardath Albee on the Marketing Interactions blog titled; Expectations and Experience are the New Competition

You know this, but it bears repeating: according to Selling Power, “Today, up to 70% of a customer’s buying decision is now made based on information he or she finds online well before a salesperson has a chance to get involved.”

I urge you to read that article as it provides a handful of statistics of what we as businesses are not providing to our prospective customers.

While overcoming our modern day attention deficit through communications will land hardest on our marketing teams, IT leaders must keep one thing in mind; marketing needs technology for these communications. Marketing needs more than one technology for these communications. And Marketing needs to monitor and measure the effects of communications.

The days of a prospect spending 30 minutes or more listening to your stump speech are long gone, so delivering information through multiple channels in amounts that take into effect our 60 second or so attention spans is critical.

Where is IT in this?

If IT Leadership cannot assist in providing the technologies and frameworks to assist in this, marketing will be forced to do it alone, without you.

Some already argue that marketing should be doing this on their own, bypassing business technology teams for their own technology tools.

I don’t agree with that sentiment as your Business Technology teams should (I emphasize that word ‘should’) already be familiar with the frameworks and tools that can assist in removing friction from internal processes, plus the capture and dissemination of data.

The SMB Takeaway

I guess the most obvious one, if as a general manager you aren’t effectively and efficiently improving your marketing, you have a problem. Secondly, Business Technology teams need to roll up their sleeves and demonstrate the value of effective and efficient processes.

I have now taken up more the 60 seconds of your time, so until next time…..

Photo Credit Earls37a via flickr

When you take out a loan, you understand that the money you receive today comes with a liability of repayment, and of course, that repayment comes with interest.

If you are an executive or manager in the small to medium business space, you should understand that a similar type of debt comes along with your IT spending too.

The term Technical Debt was coined several years ago, primarily as a way of demonstrating risks in the application development life cycle. (in other words when writing or modifying software programs- and before you state that you don’t write software programs, that contractor modifying your ERP or sales program? Yes, you got it…)

I believe technical debt goes beyond developers though. As soon as you have signed the check for some new piece of software or business tool, you are already incurring some technical debt. This is because you are now going to be living with that decision for a while.

As an analogy, imagine that you have recently purchased a 2012 model year car, then imagine that you visited your local auto show and you see that the upcoming 2013 model of the same car has twice the features, better fuel economy, and even a little bit less expensive.

As nice as that 2013 model may look, if you are like most of us, until you have fully paid the lease or loan payments in full, that fancier model is far out of reach.

That type of technical debt is unavoidable. Yes, you can argue that if you don’t buy anything, that debt does not exist. That is a truth, however you are also not obtaining any possible efficiency or value either.

Then, there is the interest payments due..

This next level of technical debt is both insidious and expensive. (and the reason the term was coined)

This technical debt results from poor standards, poor planning, poor or non-existing documentation as well as lax or non-existent controls.

I am not going to explain this one in detail though! Because Andrea Dallera has already done that perfectly in this post titled; On technical debt (now with chickens!)

Photo Credit Alan Levine via flickr

And for the record, yes there was a lot of twitter traffic that afternoon regarding IT resistance to change, and how the consumerization of technology is forcing change on corporate IT Departments.

Again for the record, the tweet that George prominently displayed on his blog was a true gripe I made. And yes, I twisted the title of CIO (Chief Information Officer) into the term C-I-No.

If you are a business of any significant size, you may have experienced this;

You: “Can we ….” 

IT Team: “No…”  (now you get the idea of C-I-No)

The Tale Behind the Tweet

We needed to get a large amount of multi-media content to a senior business manager at a large customer of ours, and we needed to get it to him quickly. The problem was that this content was quite large in size. (these materials can be many hundreds of Megabytes – as much data as can be found on a standard CD-ROM)

With that much data, sending it by e-mail would not work.

We deal every day with large amounts of this type of content, so we have a server dedicated to FTP (File Transfer Protocol) exactly for this purpose – namely getting a CD or DVD sized amount of data moved to customers and suppliers.

Except this business manager had not been graced by his IT iron fisted overlords with permission to use FTP over the Internet (they blocked it)

So now this manager is on the phone, and four of our staff are clustered around my desk debating how do we get him his data?

OK, next idea, I have a personal account on Dropbox which is a ‘cloud’ based file storage provider. I upload his data to Dropbox, and share the data to that specific manager. Failed again – the C-I-No blocks Dropbox as well.

Alarm bells for deadlines are ringing, the number of people around my desk has doubled, and I am on the phone with a senior manager that needs his bloody data trying to find a way to get him the content he needs. We were stymied at every step.

IT Leadership has the very real responsibility to ensure that the hackers, viruses and other nasties that exist on the Internet don’t run rampant within your company. However IT Leadership that make it impossible for business staff to perform their jobs – they will fail.

When it comes to risk?

I coached that manager on how to download the content on his home computer and a USB memory stick.

Which would be more risk than allowing him to get his data from our FTP server.

It is not an easy balancing act, worrying about security, and worrying about people unable to do their jobs, but it is a balancing act that must be done.

Vendor marketing literature can blur the lines between them, however a technology consulting contract is not the same thing as an outsourcing contract. As a manager in the small to medium business, you should be aware of the differences.

Why?  While they may appear similar, the end result will be much different, what you are getting for your money, the contract deliverables and results are quite different.

Consulting

Consultants offer point expertise in a particular field. In other words, you are paying for their knowledge. We can see that expertise in what we call management consulting, where that knowledge is strategic advice in reviewing processes, frameworks, or skills. And we can also see it in operational implementation skills, where expertise in a particular technology or tool is engaged for a task because we don’t have that skill set.

When hiring a consultancy, the key point is that there are clearly defined results and time frames. In general consultancy engagements are short term, and at the end of a particular engagement, you have received new knowledge, or a new capability. I want to clarify what I mean by short term, you may engage a consultancy for strategic advice, and spend many years engaging them to review your progress, however each review is its own short term deliverable.

Outsourcing

When you negotiate an agreement to replace a staffing function, that is outsourcing. For example, you may contract with an organization for your PC Support. The difference is that this agreement is not going to be providing you new skills or new capabilities, you are simply hiring their staff to replace or augment your own. This type of contract needs different wording, because what you are receiving for your money are particular service level metrics.

With these key differences in what you are receiving for your money, it is important that the wording in your contract be aligned with the expected benefit you will be receiving. That being a new capability or new knowledge from a consultancy, or particular staffing services and metrics from an outsource agreement.

The SMB Takeaway

You hire a consultant to improve or fix, not to maintain a process or function.

Can you receive both outsourcing and consultancy services from one organization? Most certainly, as one example, you outsource your PC Support, and have the vendor provide consulting services on ways to improve that PC Support process.

It is still to your benefit to ensure that those contractual obligations clearly delineate the differences.

I don’t think many of us would raise our hands and argue argue that point.

In our service economy, customer retention and loyalty have become key measures of profitability.

As a growing business, you have worked to define clearly who your customer is, you have developed a particular set of activities that serve your customers, and work hard to measure and monitor the health of those customer relationships. Lets not omit that you have linked this effort to the economic well being of the business and its employees.

As your business has grown, you realize that all of these measurements and activities can no longer live in one person’s memory and Rolodex. You realize that the current ad-hoc approach needs to improve to ensure that you are capturing the required data that allow you to respond to customer or market demands.

Then, as marketing expert Ian Lurie states, it’s computery screeny stuff, make it an IT Project to implement a customer relationship system.

And as soon as you say ‘IT Project’, you are creating a problem. Your strategy, your vision, and all of the activities that serve your customers are key, and they go far beyond your technology team. A weak technology team will leave you in a mess. A strong one will do everything possible to document each step and requirement, then translating that into a tool.

A tool that IT thinks will be perfect for you. But IT won’t be using it will they? IT will not be spending their days using that tool that is so key to that strategy, that vision.

A regional Sales Director of an international services firm once told me that the tool they used was fine for many aspects of their sales cycle, but frustrating in others. As an example, the tool would enforce a minimum level of margin. On its own, you could state that avoiding selling below desired margin is a benefit, however imagine a penny-ante initiative that could unlock a huge new customer? Certainly you would want some controls in place, but a lower margin – perhaps even a loss leader that opens that door?

The SMB Takeaway

Sure, it is computery screeny stuff, but it is not IT stuff. Your technology team can enable your vision, can enable your goals. They can provide tools that capture the data that allows you to retain and serve your customers.

But it is a business project. It is business stakeholders that will successfully (or unsuccessfully) be using that tool. Not IT.

So it needs to be business managers, not IT Managers that make the key decisions

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

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.

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