What is the relationship between business growth, productivity and technology?

There is a concern about businesses that grow without increasing profitability, as they may be employing more people and increasing the risk of failure as they grow. I've had a few arguments recently about whether business growth is a good thing or not.

Clearly, adding more people or more revenue is not the focus for growing a business, but then we could argue that it isn't businesses that grow – it's the people within businesses who grow and develop, and as they do the business naturally expands.

My business, Combo, has featured on all sorts of lists for its record growth, so I feel I can add a level of experience to this conversation.

Firstly, achieving increased revenue did not make us a smarter company. It took a dedicated approach to developing our people and our technology to ensure that we were a scalable business.

Simply selling and servicing more computers did not make us profitable; in fact, quite the opposite. The bigger we got the more layers of management were required, and the less profitable we became until we developed two aspects of the business.

1. The first was our people, and here we were fortunate to receive a grant from DIIRD that allowed us to train out staff with around 100 days of training in a single year. This enhanced their capabilities significantly.

2. Next, we developed computer-based systems for monitoring computers and call handling, which allows us to deal with increased volumes of calls in a more efficient way.

So, increased staff knowledge, skill and capability, combined with productivity tools, allowed us to increase revenue without significantly increasing staff. Therefore, we were able to drive significant growth and, once again, run a profitable company.

Working with dozens of businesses every year, we see the good and the bad in terms of the use of IT as a business productivity tool, and we know that it takes a concerted effort and ongoing development of communication methods and systems, as well as job specific tools, to ensure businesses become scalable.

I've heard arguments about remaining a niche player, and so not needing to grow, and that small business can therefore be better than large business. But, is this a reason to stay small or is it instead a lack of vision in regards to where the same team of people could be with better tools for managing IP and communications?

My thoughts on the relationship between growth, productivity and technology is that each should be set in a framework of development, and that no component should become static.

If your business needs help with the development of its IT systems for communication, business planning, HR management or productivity, seek the help of a trusted advisor who has firsthand experience in the issues of a growth business and the solutions available for your industry.

Click here to read more IT Systems expert advice.

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

How do we know which NBN is the right one for investing in the future of Australia?

Australia is currently designing a National Broadband Network that will see us as world leaders in broadband communication in a few years' time. But now that the Coalition have revealed their plans to slash expenditure in this venture, we may find ourselves with a system that falls well short of the mark.

The Coalition wants to offer a poor quality service – a system that will be slow and ugly before it even goes live. Essentially, they propose to put a mediocre system in place for the marginalised rural and outer suburban dwellers, and leave it to private enterprise to provide better quality solutions to the more urbanised areas. They have agreed to lay out thousands of kilometres of fibre, but will leave the rest of the job to private companies who will have to build local wireless distribution points, which, according to Rod Tucker of The Age, would create "ugly street scapes across the nation".

The wireless and satellite systems being proposed by the Coalition are not going to cope with the data load that will be required in the years ahead. It would leave us with a system that would need an upgrade from the day it went live. In my business we work hard to create systems with a high ROI and low total cost of ownership, but this proposal offers the opposite - a low ROI and a high total cost of ownership.

I see this leading to a divided community, where communication and public transport will be great in some parts, but poor in others. This will have a spill over effect on the quality of education and other public services, creating gaping disparities within our population. If we want to ignore the rural sector and marginalise non-urban dwellers, this would be the way to do it.

What we have is two markedly different options. One the one hand, we have the government proposing to create a modern, high-quality broadband network. On the other, we have the opposition attempting to add to their poor record in building Australia's communication infrastructure. Part of this record includes their previous decision to not split Telstra into wholesale and retail organisations, the consequences of which have left Australia with the communications train wreck it has today.

Australia needs high quality broadband infrastructure in both urban and rural areas, to benefit the citizens of both. Development of our regional areas will ensure our population can continue to expand without pushing the demand for city real estate through the roof. And it's imperative that workers in regional areas have access to their business data, without having to travel into town to connect. It seems remarkable that a party claiming to have the best interests of SMEs at heart doesn't seem to have grasped the potential of IT for serving their mantras about building the economy and reducing waste.

I am not in favour of a government-owned communications monopoly, but I am keen to see high bandwidth delivered to businesses Australia-wide as quickly as possible, to facilitate the use of modern IT solutions.

As a provider of IT services to small and medium businesses, I am all too aware that the cost to small business of managing IT in-house is too high. As it stands, with distributed technology, such as in-house servers and phone systems, due to slow broadband services, IT is costing small business between $1,000 and $3,000 per employee per year. IT needs to be made more affordable and more scalable, and it is only through high bandwidth that this is likely to become a reality. Provided that the NBN is put in place correctly, I believe that the costs of IT can be cut in half providing a saving of $500 to $1,500 per SME employee per year.

If the opposition gets their way, it would be like all of us driving the distances we do today at 100 km/h in a model T Ford. It's simply unsustainable. It would not be too long before we strip it down to a chassis, and re-build from the wheels up to get the features we want.

Click here to read more IT Systems expert advice.

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

What is the greatest risk to our corporate data?

The obvious answer to this one is – whatever gets you first. There are a multitude of risks to our data when it is stored on spinning disks, connected to the whole world by thin wires. If the spinning disks don't fail and the thin wires don't let you down, your files are still at risk as they're accessible to the whole world via the internet.

Yet, despite this, the single biggest risk to your data is probably you or your staff. I'm not being sinister here; large amounts of data are lost through simple file deletion or mistakes that lead to the corruption of files.

Often, the most sophisticated security systems and the most robust of servers with redundant power and spare hard drives, and even fail-safe systems, cannot protect you from your own staff and their interactions with computers.

That said, it is still worth doing the following:

• Ensure you have a very good firewall that is managed and kept up-to-date to protect you from the latest attacks.
• Filter your email and web content to ensure it's as clean as possible to reduce risks of virus and malware.
• Run local anti-virus software to protect you from USB keys and other forms of mobile data.
• Have power protection in place and redundant hard drives.

As your business grows, it is also strongly advisable to restrict your employees' access to only the files that they need to do their work. This means that they can't accidentally wipe a folder of files that they have nothing to do with.

I must warn you at this point that security is a double-edged sword. The more you spend to lock your systems down to manage them effectively, the more you will spend to manage those same systems. It's not an expense anyone would suggest you plan to save in business though, as the issues arising from poor data management can cost a lot more than the issues arising from good data management.

Of course, if it's local damage you need to protect yourself from, the best solution is to have great backup of your work in progress. Today, you can have local backup done on a continuous, automated basis throughout the day with replication to an offsite store via the internet. Systems for this are improving rapidly at the moment, and exist at various price points and offer a range of solutions from back up only, to onsite or offsite recovery, to virtual servers or physical servers.

Depending on your budget, you can have instant fail over or slow fail over, or a quick rebuild process. Over the past few years, computers have become more important to businesses where they are relied on for many forms of communication and service management. Outages today are likely to be significantly more costly to your business than they were just a few years back. So, have your recovery windows been reduced to match the demand?

If your backup system is not as good as it should be, or is left to chance with media being exchanged manually, it is time to seek the advice of a backup specialist to get your data backed up automatically to offsite repositories. A bit like a free brake inspection on your car - it really can save you.

Click here to read more IT Systems expert advice.

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