Our small business has grown and internal communications are driving us crazy! What should we do?

Growing from a small to medium business involves a lot of frustration for owners and staff alike. We all know that tasks performed in a consistent and repeatable manner lead to better efficiency, productivity and quality, but how do you make that happen with a bigger team and changing roles?

Information Technology provides solutions to the inconsistency problem - particularly inconsistent recording and access to information. What many business owners do not realise is that they have already paid for a solution and just need to start using the tools they have.

Businesses that run Windows Small Business Server have access to an application called SharePoint. On this application platform we can run a Wiki to collaborate on information. Wiki is the Hawaiian word for quick or fast - a valuable quality when talking about information.

Wikis enable teamwork and collaboration by giving a format for multiple people to add information to a searchable central source. Documents can easily be attached or linked, leaving no excuse for leaving documents hiding in deep folder structures or buried in the My Documents Folder.

We can argue that this is not the best place for a wiki or we can build one online in the cloud, there are many possibilities, however many of you already have the tools and just need the right advice to get them turned on and working for you. The collection, collaboration and dissemination of information is more important than the platform if you have nothing today.

Once your wiki is live there are "no excuses" not to document.

As it is updated, relevant people can be automatically sent updates.

We implemented the system in our business after one of our team members learned the product and scored 100% on his Microsoft Exam. The benefits for our company have been many:

• Allows team members to simply edit the knowledge base.
  
• Grows the team's shared memory and knowledge.
  
• More efficient storage of guides, tips, hints.
  
• Repository for company policy and procedure.
  
• Repository for HR related information.
  

Some clues for making a good wiki are:

• Create sample pages and a skeleton structure - don't start with a blank slate.
  
• Edit often, encourage your team to edit and update as they go.
  
• Extend the wiki into new areas - team feedback, post project notes, organising events, discussing company goals, strategy tactics or operations.
  
• Encourage users to search the wiki for answers - and to update anything they find is incorrect!
  

Some traps for new players:

• Watch out for people who stick to the ‘old' ways - those who send broadcast emails or write memos / secrets in their My Documents. Actively encourage them to change.
  
• Make sure the wiki doesn't go stale, if the information is old, its value drops.
  

The barriers to entry for this technology are low, as all Microsoft Small Business Server sites have access to the software free of charge and the set up time is minimal (just a couple of hours) if you know how to do it.

The trick seems to be to focus on one area at a time and get some value out of that, and gradually extend its use as your experience and its usefulness grows. But it's relatively cheap to change your mind if something isn't quite working the way you need it to.

But get a small amount of expert help to get you started. It will save you hours of effort and frustration.

David Markus is the founder of Melbourne's IT services company Combo. His focus is on big picture thinking to create value in IT systems for the SME sector.

I need a new database so why should I stick a "toe in the cloud"?

Now, more than ever in global history, IT systems need to be as cost-effective as possible. In software development projects upfront costs are very hard to justify. This makes it difficult to get approval to develop an application on a standard hardware platform. Now there is a new way of sticking a toe in the water for relatively low cost but the water is just vapour. The toe needs to be stuck in the cloud!

If that does not make sense to you please let me explain. By the "cloud" I do, of course mean web-based applications or servers. When developing a database solution it is common to build a development environment and run up a trial version of the application for testing and development prior to investing on a full server and system for the production version. This test environment still has infrastructure costs and may still require space in the server room and ongoing management effort.

Today, it is feasible to pay for a small number of licenses or a virtual server on a month-by-month or annual basis to run up the build environment over a period of months or a year. Only when the application has been determined to be of value to the organisation do more licenses need to be purchased to facilitate full access. In many cases, the application will not even require reinstallation as the hosted infrastructure scales dynamically on demand.

This model supports both rapid expansion and contraction of a business or business unit as licenses can be added at any time and cancelled at the end of a subscription period. This is in stark contrast to infrastructure-based solutions that do not scale well at all and have fixed costs of implementation and licensing.

Having this level of flexibility with IT systems can foster an environment of greater innovation as systems can be turned on and off on demand, without high overheads allowing technical departments to experiment with applications for quality of solution and fitness for purpose.

Reduced development overheads means less risk and therefore a better chance of project approval. The "toe in the cloud" approach to development is worthy of consideration.

If you need assistance with web-based software or infrastructure solutions seek expert advice as this is the newest frontier in the Wild West of IT. There are plenty of gunslingers out there and a little advice can go a long way.

David Markus is the founder of Melbourne's IT services company Combo. His focus is on big picture thinking to create value in IT systems for the SME sector.

How far behind the bleeding edge is the right place for my business?

In IT we talk about the ‘bleeding edge' of technology as being the very forefront of technological development. It is called the bleeding edge because of the very high risk associated with being an early adopter of new technology. When we adopt a technology that does not take off we can lose a lot of time, money or both.

For some technology companies it is essential to work at the bleeding edge to find and exploit opportunities that technology developments present.

For many investors who recall the dotcom bubble bursting and many of my colleagues who lost jobs or lost personal fortunes on start-up ideas, this bleeding edge is no fun at all.

For many of us in business, investing in bleeding edge technology is a risk we can not afford to be involved in. If we are after stable systems for our core business functions, the bleeding edge is not likely to be the place to invest.

So how do we know what is the right technology and when is it mature?

This is a very difficult question to answer as some systems we think should be mature and stable just are not as good as they should be. I think we can safely put Windows Vista into this category as the business world has labelled it a dud. Windows 7 is about to be released and is getting great reviews, but unless there is a compelling reason to leap into it, it is worth leaving to the geeks for awhile.

My staff will be onto it as soon as it is released - some are already running pre-release versions as they should. But not on production systems.

The same goes for the new search engine out from Microsoft that I have commented on this week. Yep, we should all try using it and see if Bing represents improved functionality for planning holidays or solving problems with its unique decision engine. This is a low-cost, low-risk use of the new technology, but we should not radically modify our web pages to be optimised for it just yet.

So part of the job of a technical advisor in any business needs to be to get to know the business drivers and know when is the right time to introduce technology.

While it can be great fun learning the functionality of a new tool, it needs to be considered as an investment. You do not want to be the test pilot for every new product on the market unless your business is in the innovation space. Even then you need to be selective and get real results from your investment.

David Markus is the founder of Melbourne's IT services company Combo. His focus is on big picture thinking to create value in IT systems for the SME sector.

Why should I outsource stuff when I can have a full-time resource at my beck and call?

For the past several years I have been encouraging businesses to outsource their IT. Over the past fortnight I have had reason to reflect on what I am asking people to do, and contemplate it from the client's perspective.

It was not outsourcing of IT that got me - as I have a great company looking after my computers - it was the marketing department. I made a mistake that I often see my prospects making. I assumed that a full-time person working on my marketing would be a better use of money than outsourcing to a marketing company.

I had chatted with some marketing people and did not feel they understood my business well enough to be a good place to outsource to. Really, in hindsight what I had meant was that I had not found a company I felt I could trust to do a better job and provide value for money. I outsourced HR ages ago but hung onto marketing.

So the key for me with outsourcing is trusting that the company I will use can provide the solution required, while trusting them to provide value. Clearly outsourcing will access much better marketing skills than my in-house solution could bring to the party; after all, there are several experts on their team with different specialisations.

So having figured this out, it got me thinking: how do businesses select an IT company to outsource to? Clearly they need to find a company they can trust to deliver value for money as well as good technology solutions. It's well-known that a lot of IT solutions cost a lot of money and provide little or no value to the business. So clearly they need to select a company that really knows the requirements and has a good track record for resolving problems in similar companies.

I think that in small business there is very poor understanding of industry certifications and so it's easy for pretenders to claim years of experience and look as good as the real experts.
Industry exams are not the be all and end all of the IT industry but in my opinion they help sort out the people who know what they are doing from those who think they can. Companies that chase industry certifications tend to be more quality focussed and are more likely to give good advice based on education and experience.

I know that I have spent a lot of money on training already competent technical people in new technologies to get new industry certification at the company level. This gives me confidence in the ability of my team.

So I have now found a marketing person I trust and have met his team of experts, I am sure I will now get better results for my marketing budget. I am also sure that if you are looking for an IT company it is worth taking some time to understand the various levels of certification to understand what a qualified company has done to be ready to provide services to you.

When you have the right team in place, you will be able to do more at a lower total cost to be more effective and efficient.

David Markus is the founder of Melbourne's IT services company Combo. His focus is on big picture thinking to create value in IT systems for the SME sector