What IT gear should I be planning to purchase before year end to make the most of the 50% tax break?

This is really important to every small business that uses computers. I wrote about this back in April when it applied to all businesses but now the key message is to the smaller businesses out there.

If your business will turn over less than $2 million this financial year you have just enough time left to plan and purchase all the IT gear you need for the upturn that is clearly on the way. We all hope not to see the Government stimulating our economy like this again in the near future so now is the time.

As a result of the new shoots of growth we are seeing businesses are looking to upgrade their IT equipment. They are experiencing good sales and know they need to expand their capacity and capability in terms of the IT systems in their business to support the growth.

If you run a business with several computers, now is the time to be planning your server upgrades or deployments. With the tax break it is okay to finance the systems, so the total financial impact in the short-term is very small.

You will get the 50% rebate this financial year even though your repayments will be stretched across three or four years. With some great financial packages available from hardware vendors such as HP and Cisco or software companies such as Microsoft it is a perfect time to fortify your IT systems to ensure IT does not impede your growth going forward.

With the economy on the rise it is a great time to get the big ticket items taken care of. I would be considering the following big-ticket items for my growth business:

• Windows Small Business server
  
• Terminal server for remote access
  
• Printer/photocopier
  
• Large format printer/plotter
  
• Backup and disaster recovery box
  
• Phone system
  
• Firewall
  
• Uninterruptable power supply (UPS) for servers and phone systems
  
• PCs/laptops/workstations
  
• Upgrade PCs to dual screens (so the set is over $1,000)
  
• Data projector
  
• HD TV for displays
  
• New car with company logos (okay so that one is not IT but it feels good!)

The purpose of all of this equipment is to improve the communication, presentation and security of your company and to ensure you are working as productively as possible while maximising the tax benefit available. By fixing IT systems you remove the impediments to growth.

With the downturn behind us many of us will be hiring more staff over the year ahead and the war on talent will force us to look for every strategic advantage we can find. IT is one of the biggest drivers of strategic advantage in growing businesses.

Remember, you must order and be invoiced before December 31, 2009 and you will be assessed on this year's income, so if you tip over the $2 million mark this year you will not be able to claim it. You have until the end of 2010 to install and use the equipment.

David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.

What should my IT staff be able to do in an SME?

I run a medium-sized business with 30 staff. What is a reasonable expectation of what my IT person should be able to do?

In an ideal world your 30 person business would hire one IT expert and that one person would be able to:

• Keep all the PCs, laptops and servers running
• Monitor all your printers and keep them maintained, unjammed and topped up with consumables
  
• Configure all your mobile devices
• Administer all your business applications
• Teach all your staff how to use your IT systems effectively
• Redesign and fix any systems that aren't working properly
• Let you know when your systems need refreshing and manage the projects to refresh them
• Give you high level strategic advice on where your business should be going with IT
• Answer every question from every staff member about any aspect of IT, no matter how complex or plain dumb, with patience, intelligence, plain English and a sense of humour.

Now give them a small budget to buy the right equipment, and away you go, right? Wouldn't that be great! And every now and again, once in a decade you find someone who is SO brilliant that they can do all that as well as play foozball with the rest of the team, and guess what? After 12 months they go off to get a high powered career in the corporates. Or to do massage therapy - it never seems to be anything in the middle.

The problem you are experiencing is very similar to the problem of building a house. You need an architect, a builder project manager, a carpenter, an electrician, a tiler and so it goes. Just because you want a small house, doesn't mean you need fewer tradies, it just means you need only part time resources for each of them. But each of them needs exactly the same tools and training to do the job well for a small house or a large mansion.

IT is just as specialised and requires the same sort of classification and distinction. In the case of IT, the roles are:

• Help Desk technician / 1st level support
• Network Engineer / 2nd level support
• Senior Network Engineer / 3rd level support
• IT Architect
• IT Consultant / Strategist
• Trainer
• Business Analyst
• Programmer
• Systems Designer

Just because you are in charge of a small enterprise, doesn't mean you can afford to (or deserve) mediocre inputs on any of these aspects of IT. A generalist handyman can do a fantastic job of maintaining the house that you have, and that's fine given that a house has a lifetime of about 15 years before it requires significant renovation. And they tend to have been built properly in the first place.

But IT environments need to be refreshed every three to four years and generally speaking you want to do the infrastructure and the applications separately - so a major architectural review needs to happen every 18 months with a good chance that something significant and strategic will need to change. And if any aspect wasn't properly designed in the first place, your handyman is unlikely to have the tools or training to fix the underlying cause.

Also, since the last time you looked, the technology and options available have radically changed, so you need to start from scratch with what business purpose you serve and what IT is required to support that purpose. Your handyman, who (hopefully) has spent the last 18 months stabilising your house to get rid of all the glitches, is not going to be positioned, trained or perhaps even interested in upsetting the applecart and starting again.

So if you are having trouble getting the results you need from your IT, and you only have one or two (very stressed) IT people in your organisation, this might be the reason why.

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 do we get our IT systems ready for new starters?

As the economy recovers, we are hiring again. How do we get our IT systems ready for new starters?

Staff induction is a key activity in any growth company. Getting induction right will make your company stand out and be more desirable than those companies who do not put the effort in.

All too often we get the last minute call as a new staff member is starting and there is no IT gear in place for them. Clearly it is important to get your induction processes right so that when a new person arrives they feel cared for, valued and useful to the organisation.

Being given a very old computer that was just dusted off will not impress anyone, especially a Gen Y person who has a great computer at home. You could let them start and then drip feed them with the IT environment they need over the next weeks and months. What if this leads to a disengaged employee who costs you thousands of dollars before they ultimately resign and cost you even more?

So what do you need to have ready to place a new starter into a good IT environment?

• Policies
• Security settings
• File access
• Applications that let them work efficiently
• Hardware
• Mobility solutions

Note I start with policies as it is dangerous to hand someone a loaded computer without first handing them the rules that limit the use of such a dangerous device. Safety briefings come before hands on use with most power tools in industry, computers should be no different.

Today it takes only a careless moment on the web with social networking to say the wrong thing about a company one has just entered or to blast out emails to a list of clients or a list of old contacts. Clearly policies on acceptable use of web, email and social media are very important to the reputation of your business. Starting here is always a good idea.

So once you have your policies in place and printed in the induction manual that gets signed off you can keep them on your intranet and send updates to your staff as they are modified over time.

Next you need to set up your server based accounts to ensure the correct security levels have been set up, giving them access to the information they require to do their job and keeping them out of the files they should not be looking at such as finance, HR or R&D.

Next, ensure you have the right applications to support the work the staff do efficiently. Not too many companies would hire a bookkeeper today and point them at a spreadsheet to manage the company accounts. They would have a finance application that automates and controls a lot of the processes and integrates with the ATO. Yet so many companies hire sales staff without a sales tracking application and admin staff without a document management system or task management system.

The right tools improve the productivity of your staff and the visibility of the work they are doing and save you hours of work and thousands of dollars. If you haven't got all of these, spend a little time researching what applications assist which staff roles.

Today there is a small business version of just about every productivity tool used by the big companies. Read more on software systems here. Then of course you need to include the training in the correct use of each of these applications, plus the setup and configuration of the right access levels for the job role into your induction process.

Now you are ready to select hardware. Standardisation across your company is the key here. Keep it as simple as possible to reduce IT costs. Read more on hardware selection here.

If your new recruit is going to be out and about make sure they can work from anywhere to drive quality of information and productivity of your staff. Mobility is relatively cheap today and will enable your staff to do what they need to do when and where they need to do it. You can read more about this too.

So when is the right time to start all of this?

Of course the answer is, if you are going to hire staff you need to have most of this ready before you look for the person. When you are so busy in your small business that you are forced to hire one more person, it is not the time to build significant new processes or procedures. Chances are you will not have time to do it properly then. So start now to ensure you are in better shape when you need to be.

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.