When selecting providers of outsourced services, is size an advantage?

The short answer is yes, but… What is the right size? For who? And when?

Over the past 10 years, I’ve run a business that has been through many stages as it’s grown organically from a micro business to a medium business over time. I have been able to observe who the right clients are, and so I have a very good sense of who is the right provider for each business. It’s similar to looking at the supplier from the client’s eyes.

My first client, other than my uncle’s business run from home, was a small not-for-profit where my sister worked. I was new to the idea of running a business, and wanted to gain experience. I had spent the previous five years working as an IT manager with Accenture so my technical skills were a bit rusty. I set my rate at $40 per hour as I knew they didn’t have a lot of money but needed help. They were horrified, and quickly moved back to voluntary labour, accusing me of being ruthless.

So, for small organisations with no funds, the best solution is to do it yourself, or use volunteers. This isn’t a great use of anyone’s time but it won’t use up any of the organisation’s cash reserves. (In this case, the organisation was in the drug rehab space and an employee had allegedly embezzled the cash to fund their own habit).

We then took on the local real estate agent, who was a loyal client for many years, and to their credit, increased what they paid for our services as our business grew. There was a prompt change in fees when I started hiring staff, and had to pay them a wage out of company earnings. So commercial reality got underway, and we sought larger organisations who could afford to pay for our services.

As any of us who have grown a business know, larger businesses have higher overheads. While working from home with a couple of staff at the office, rent can be absorbed by the household (even if our tax advisors would suggest otherwise), but running an office changes that. So, as the support business grows, fees must also increase to cover overheads.

Larger overheads demand larger and more affluent clients but larger clients demand more complex IT systems, which requires more capable (and expensive) staff. Again, the fees must go up to cover the additional salaries to provide a higher level of technical service to the client.

So from the client’s perspective, the small relatively cheap provider might seem ideal. If it’s a very smart one or two person provider, it may be very cost effective. However, if the technical people are good, they will attract more clients. At some point they must either offer slow response times, rushed solutions, or hire more staff. Thus, as your business grows and needs increase, you’re almost forced to find a larger and more responsive service provider.

You will also require breadth and depth within your solution provider. Technical services are typically split into level one, two, and three support, and then strategic consultancy and project management/delivery. To find individuals who can work across this range of levels with multiple technologies is simply impossible. The technical field is too diverse to attempt this, even for a genius.

Typically throughout their careers, technical people progress through different levels and stages, and move through different jobs to achieve this. Sometimes people retain their technical skills as they become competent project managers, but it’s only a matter of a few years before they fall behind the latest technologies and become pure project managers – and somewhat dangerous in a hands-on tactical task.

My other observation is on the quality of people attracted to a business. We all know that it’s hard to find good technical staff today – unemployment is running at under 1% in the IT industry. So attracting good staff is important, and this comes down to company profile and size. A larger company with a better reputation will attract a higher quality of staff. At least until the company gets too big and the personal connection is lost. So assessing the culture of your support organisation is an important step towards selecting the right team too.

Clearly it’s important that as the complexity of your business systems grow you have access to a larger team to deliver the solutions. At some point, the larger support companies will also establish productivity tools and automation within their company which will lead to a plateau in escalating costs, and a flattening out of the increasing fees. When you find a company that has good systems in place, you’ll get a higher value return on the dollars you invest. You may even get the opportunity to pay a fixed rate for an unlimited service as efficiencies of scale lead to predictable costs from the supplier.

How do you know when you have the right team? It will come down to the quality of advice, quality of service, responsiveness and price.

If you need more of any of these factors, it may be time to seek a more capable support arrangement, but perhaps at a higher price.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

Look out for fire season

As summer warms up and the grasses dry out, it’s time to reflect on our disaster readiness and ask ourselves – is our data safe?

In the Victorian Black Saturday fires of 2009, 173 people sadly lost their lives, 414 people were injured, and a large number of homes and businesses were destroyed.

These fires destroyed countless computers and backup tapes. People lost both personal and business records, and in some cases organisations were unable to recover records of debtors – resulting in them struggling to get paid. This year, with the fire season now upon us, it’s time to consider how technology has advanced to help us protect our assets – everything from family photos to business accounting systems.

In nature, it’s the water that falls from clouds that puts out fires, but in the case of technology, the benefits come from storing our data in the clouds.

Many of us still doubt the validity and safety of cloud solutions, wondering where our data is stored, and if it’s secure. Certainly governments have big decisions to make about the sovereignty of data, with some big questions to be answered. Who owns it? Can sensitive, national data be stored off-shore? Will it be data mined to create new forms of intelligence about people, companies, technology secrets and so forth?

However, my focus is on the individual, and the SMEs who struggle to deploy and manage systems that suitably protect their data. Often people believe they have a reasonable level of protection up to the point that their data is gone because, really, they had insufficient protection all along. While we can create systems that copy our local data to the cloud, for both PCs and servers, this is an extra step that adds cost and complexity – often slowing down systems when we most need them to perform. I know the systems that start backing up my home PC just drive me to distraction.

So the next step is to move our data to the clouds and use cloud applications to access the data. Technology has advanced to ensure we can access that data from just about anywhere via wireless networks. Telstra’s new 4G network, which fails back to the 3G network should the 4G signal be unavailable, is one of the fastest wireless networks in the world, and offers excellent coverage to most parts of Australia. This allows us to access our applications in the cloud from anywhere in the country. Many public areas from cafes to airports offer free, wireless networks, so we can access our cloud systems while travelling as well.

We can now use tools such as Office 365 from Microsoft to store our personal or company email in the cloud – giving us the benefits of shared calendars, central management with archiving and backup, and all provided at very reasonable rates. Given that it includes spam filtering, which many of us already pay a monthly fee for, the additional cost is easily justified by the reduction in infrastructure and maintenance costs. Imagine no more shuffling of backup tapes or hard drives, and knowing that a large company like Microsoft has your back. Love them or hate them, they can afford to invest in systems and infrastructure most companies (including publicly-listed businesses) can only dream about.

As for security, large companies such as Microsoft have a team of people dynamically monitoring their digital perimeter to ensure hackers are stopped at the gate. Of course, even 24-hour-a-day monitoring and constant security action is not enough to be 100% secure – but it’s a lot better than the effort most SMEs go to for managing, patching, and monitoring their firewalls. So as long as we stick to major brands of providers, we are probably safer in the clouds.

On the accounting front, we are seeing each of the software companies come to market with a cloud version of their tools – MYOB and Quicken already have products out there. Xero has come from nowhere to be a key player in the cloud-based application space and they seem to have a competitive product that can offer innovative solutions and improved reporting functions. Microsoft Dynamics has its online offering, and SAP (along with many others) are not far behind.

Photos can be stored in online albums from Facebook to SharePoint online. For each land-based data technology, we are seeing a cloud version appearing. We have SkyDrive and DropBox competing for mindshare by offering free or cheap online file storage.

For applications that are not available via software as a service solutions such as the ones mentioned above there are private cloud solutions whereby we can make use of part of a large system run by a hosting company such as Telstra with their Infrastructure as a Service product offering (IaaS). This platform will allow us to move proprietary server based software to their data center system and cease worrying about managing the infrastructure layer. This service is making it possible to run a business without servers.

This emerging technology is now changing the face of IT support, which is no longer about selling and supporting servers, but about assisting people to connect with their information systems and integrate the solutions they need to run their business. Finding advisers who understand this new technology area, and don’t want to sell you the latest server, is a challenge but is the new age of IT support.

So as summer approaches, think about the security of your data, and how safe it really is. How will you get to it after your computer and local storage systems – including backups – have been destroyed?

The more you have in the cloud, the less you have to worry about – and the more you can enjoy your holidays.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

Why don't our technologies get used?

One of the unfortunate truths in the IT industry is that IT systems get implemented by technical teams. If the change is well managed the organisation can find productivity gains and motivation that drives massive benefit to the business’s bottom line.

Or, as happens all too often, some of the staff don’t cope with the new system, resulting in the need for new staff to drive the advantages of the change, with a high cost of staff churn.

However, there is another scenario that leads to even higher costs and no step forward. This is when the system goes live, and people simply don’t adopt it and use it.

So, what should small businesses do to minimise the damage caused by poor change management?

• Careful planning to align IT with business objectives before implementing new IT systems is critical.
• Involving the entire team of people who will work with the system will improve the likelihood of success.
• Understanding and planning for change management as part of the process will help.
• Wherever trials of the tools are available, run them. And, have a plan for the trials to ensure they mimic real life.
• Be committed to changing work processes to gain the benefits of the new system. Plan the change as part of the implementation.
• Provide ample training just before, and well after, implementation.

There are other key messages and cautions around application selection, but they are for another day. Here I want to focus on the human factor of uptake of new systems.

What we don’t want to do is spend our money implementing new systems to find the staff won’t, or can’t, use them.

Understand why you are changing the system as this will inform your plan – and ensure you are in the right mindset for change. Simply replacing a system that sits behind a job role without improving work flow and process may improve productivity slightly, but redesigning the job around new capabilities in the system could significantly improve the return on investment.

To get your staff excited about using the new system, get more of them involved in testing phases and selection phases to give them the opportunity to use the new application features. If you leave your people out of the process and then hit them with a big change when you go live, you can expect significant resistance and lots of stress. After years of using a system, many of your workers will do their work like a robot. No matter how good the new system is, it will involve re-learning old skills and this will lead to frustration in the first few weeks.

So running trials and having a significant number of your staff do a proof-of-concept will encourage the staff to feel like they’ve been involved in the decision. Also, it will show up faults, limitations and restrictions before significant investment has been made.

IT departments rarely contain a psychologist, especially not a change management expert, so the human factors are usually glossed over or completely forgotten. The best IT system implementation teams in large organisations have a change management expert on board as it is known that managing the process well will lead to better outcomes. In small business, we can’t have such a diverse team and so it’s up to the business leaders to do the thinking for the tech team, and make sure some change management principles have been considered.

Trial applications are not always possible as the platforms need to be built before they can be run. Cloud computing is changing this and products such as Office 365 or Dynamics CRM from Microsoft offer trial accounts. If you can’t run a trial, try to visit a business already using the tool.

Write a plan for your trial. Just looking at a few screens containing data or reports will not inform you of the functionality or user experience of the application. It’s best to design a test that will demonstrate the key functions you will use – this will give you more value out of your test phase. If the testing is too hard or stressful, who will implementation work for you?

Changing work processes is not a trivial activity but it is interesting to see the inefficiencies that we have built into our work practice. We had a classic redesign recently. When our business was only a few people, there was a rule that any ringing phone had to be answered within three rings – by whoever was free. The rule was still silently in place after we grew to 25 staff. Clearly, having the finance team answering calls for the help desk was not ideal so a better process was required. There are lots of ways to improve work flow and process but it takes an active eye and mind to change. The time we change our software tools is ideal for adopting new work flow rules and practices to ensure productivity is improved. Running a few workshops around the implementation of the new tools may have a far reaching impact.

Once you have made use of your team in redesigning the processes and getting the new tools implemented, it’s essential that suitable levels of communication and training happen to ensure the team is empowered to use the new tools. Training just before, and a little while after, implementation tends to work well – talk to training experts to ensure you get the most out of your new applications.

There is no guarantee that the new systems will go in well and be accepted, but if you really think in terms of managing the change, not just the technology, your odds will improve significantly.

Good luck with your improvements; I really hope it’s the best possible experience for your staff and business, and that the upgrade is as good as it can be.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

Vlog: Redundancy - what happens when IT goes wrong?

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

Sci-fi fantasy or furture technology?

Is it possible to imagine a future where computers are so small we shift from wearing them to implanting them?

We are already implanting technology to repair hearing faults. No doubt eye sight will also be repaired by devices, and it is only a matter of inevitable miniaturisation before we begin to implant other nano computer devices.

As we improve genetic engineering and as technology shrinks, it is likely that we will internalise IT systems.

As we learn how the brain works better and understand the electro chemical reactions that occur, it is feasible that we will develop a brain technology bridge that allows us to surf the web for information with a mere thought or communicate globally using wireless networks.

Imagine thinking an abstract thought such as: “I wonder what the weather will be like tomorrow?” – and the data is fed into your brain by a nano bot connected to the weather bureau.

What if you are curious about your bank balance? Presto! The facts are delivered.

Cloud computing is just a step on the path. We have so much more to fear later!

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

How does process allow us to capture creativity?

As an entrepreneur, one of my greatest fears is losing a good idea – mine or someone else’s. Be it a business idea, or an idea for a story, or an idea for a painting.

Innovation in SME businesses is vital to growth in flat times as innovation is simply the enactment of ideas and creativity. Ideas themselves don’t have to be new and they don’t have to be carried out in a way that is different to drive results.

There is a common belief that process-driven organisations are unable to be creative, as they are bound by their procedures. I would like to argue that it is quite the opposite. Once we have the process to deal with a recurring task, it frees up our minds, and our time, to allow us to get creative about solving another problem.

Processes are about controlling the quality of delivery of existing concepts, be they products or services. If we have no processes to structure our business, we must solve every problem as if it is a new problem – which is far from efficient.

So when we have an idea and can capture it in a process, policy, or design, we are then free to have ideas on improvement in new areas of the business.

It is of course important that our processes are live, and this is where an intranet such as SharePoint has huge advantages over paper-based solutions. We’re able to capture a process in an instruction set, and then iteratively update the process each time it is run to ensure that it is constantly improving. Encouraging your staff to get involved in the level of creativity is bound to drive ongoing success.

When running a helpdesk, the objectives are pretty simple, yet so often poorly implemented and managed. Simply put, a helpdesk should quickly capture a client’s problem accurately and then move the problem off to the department or individual that is most capable of solving that issue the fastest. Targets for helpdesks should revolve around minimum resolve times.

However, if there is no process for solving a particular problem when it arrives at the helpdesk, then someone needs to use their creativity to solve the problem from scratch. On the other hand, if the work done to create the solution is captured in the knowledge base, then next time the issue can be resolved by the person who answers the call quickly and efficiently.

The concept of capturing ideas in processes so that more calls can be resolved by the person who answers the phone is an empowering one.

Having clients appreciate that it is not always possible for the best person to answer the phone before the nature of the problem has been defined can be tricky. It is, however, up to thought leaders in the IT community to educate the customer base on call logging as detailed information of the problem really is the best way to solve issues.

So in your business where are you failing to capture your creativity and harness it for future efficient use? Are you constantly making up new solutions to solve old problems?

Who could help you to better capture your creativity and so become an innovative process driven growth company?

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

What is the right cloud for me?

Have you ever studied clouds? As a private pilot, I have, and I can tell you that when flying at low levels, the one to avoid is the Cumulus Granitus (accumulated granite). When it comes to IT clouds, there are a few clear choices. The ones I want to talk about today are the abbreviations IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Understanding the differences and what they offer should make it easier to determine the right one for your business.

Today, it’s no longer a clear choice to simply upgrade your in-house server to a newer model as your old equipment heads towards end-of-life. It’s imperative that cloud alternatives be considered and costed. They may not always stack up, but as more people are shifting to cloud solutions and prices are coming down, clouds are worth considering before making an investment that will see you restricted to in-house servers for another three-to-four years.

I’m sure that when you select a provider of cloud services and solutions they will be reliable, secure, will have scale and a proven track record of protecting data. Importantly, your security, redundancy and recoverability from a disaster will be looked after.

Now it’s a matter of understanding which technology platform will work best for you. Looking from a distance, cloud technologies may seem to be similar in what they offer but the differences will impact the nature of the service offered, as well as the price.

If all you need is a simple set of tools, then Software as a Service (SaaS) with a hosted application will let you subscribe to, connect to and use without worrying about how the application is installed or how the data is managed. This is the simplest form of cloud computing to use and manage, with examples such as Office 365, Xero and Salesforce.com. Each has an Application Program Interface (API) that allows software developers and integrators to write code that connects programs together. As such, it’s common for SaaS solutions to allow integration with other local and cloud-based solutions. For example, integrating a CRM and a finance application to share one address book allows the users many benefits. You could automate updates, pull financial status information into the customer database, and inform other divisions, like sales, if an account is on stop credit without having to visit two systems.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a more customisable solution where you may own the application and install it on an operating system platform provided by a reseller from a data centre. You are not buying or leasing any hardware, just the right to use part of a larger system from the operating system upwards. So now you are responsible for installing the application and managing the data. It’s more usual to do this with an application you previously ran in-house and wish to outsource the layers of technology that add no value to your business – without losing control of the environment.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) adds the layer of the operating system to what you are managing, and lets you customise more of your environment than PaaS would. This option is best for more complex tools that need special server configuration. This is worth considering if you have legacy applications that require maintaining an older operating system, or if you have strong integration with the operating system.

The most basic form of cloud, often thought of as private cloud, is Server Virtualisation which I hope is not news anymore (we have been using Server Virtualisation in the SME space for many years now)! This simply adds a layer to the technology stack called the virtualisation layer, which is software that’s installed on a server or PC before the first operating system goes on. Basically, it allows the one piece of hardware to support multiple virtual instances of operating systems. This allows us technical people to shift logical servers from one piece of hardware to another, and manage load balancing and availability between multiple physical servers. This is a great way to reduce large data centres with multiple single server installs to a much smaller space with multiple servers installed across just a few pieces of hardware – which of course is significantly cost saving.

There are benefits to be drawn from selecting the right cloud strategy for your business, so make sure you find a trusted technology partner who can ensure you are making the best choices for your future.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

Understanding the clouds around you

What will be the top 10 technologies for 2012?

As we look forward to the year ahead, the Gartner Group has released their predictions for the “Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012”. The following complex ideas evolved from the Gartner Symposium held recently in Orlando.

The definition of a strategic technology is one that may have a significant impact on business in the next three years. Significant impact can be a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for significant investment or the risk of being a late adopter.

The top 10 strategic technology predictions for 2012 include:

Media tablets and beyond

This is mobile technology, the assumption being that it is wirelessly connected and will take multiple forms, from a user’s own smartphone or tablet to custom corporate platforms.

The strategies to be considered here are the business-to-employee scenario and also the business-to-consumer scenario. The strategy must consider impact on behaviour, content, and importantly, security. This will have a bigger impact on the larger players who are delivering applications to the consumer market, but will also create new opportunities for start-ups based on innovative apps.

Mobile-centric applications and interfaces

We can expect to see new interfaces based on touch, gesture, search, video and voice. This will drive the need for new development skills creating simpler small apps. By 2015, mobile web technologies will have advanced sufficiently so that half the applications written as native apps in 2011 will instead be delivered as web apps.

Contextual and social user experience

The contextual application will anticipate our requirements based on information such as our current location, temperature, activity calendar or even current TV show being watched, plus much more.

Social information is also becoming a key source of contextual information to enhance delivery of search results or the operation of applications.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the internet will expand as sensors and intelligence are added to physical items, such as consumer devices or physical assets, and these objects are connected to the internet.

As more things are connected and measured we will see more live data feeds, so this connection is reaching a critical point to become commercially viable. For example, imagine your car service centre monitoring your car continuously and knowing you have a flat tyre as quickly as you do.

Key elements of the IoT include:

Embedded sensors:

• Embedded sensors that report change of state.
• Image recognition to identify all forms of images from copyright searches to locating vehicles by type.
• Near Field Communication (NFC) payment: allowing users to make payments by waving their mobile phone in front of a compatible reader.
• There are other applications for passing data on their way in this area too.

Next-generation analysis:

• Access to more data and faster systems, including cloud-based processor banks, is driving faster data analysis of both off-line historical data and on-line live data; leading to faster business decision cycles.
• Likely to have a profound effect on what relatively small organisations can do in niche and competitive areas due to reduced requirement for investment to enter the analytics arena.

Big data:

• With more data available at higher speeds, complexity of data warehousing is going to reach a new level.
• Not sure how much of an impact this will have on SMEs.

In-memory computing:

• Flash memory will become cheaper and more available.
• This will lead to faster processors and development in memory processing which, for us, will mean faster computers.

Extreme low-energy servers:

• Emerging technologies of low energy servers may become popular for low processing requirements, but won’t have much of an impact on the SME marketplace.

Cloud computing:

• For us, this is the big one. Gartner is predicting that over the next few years Oracle, IBM, SAP and most other enterprise-level providers will have cloud-based products in the market, and will be fully engaged.
• This will be a disruptive force that changes the IT landscape for most industries.
• Gartner are predicting an increase in competition with Microsoft’s Office 365 products expanding.

Much of the technology discussed in this report is going to deliver us services and information, rather than devices. Therefore, my interpretation is that we now have an interconnected world with portable connected devices in our hands, laps and desks. From now, the major frontier in IT will be around how large organisations will structure and deliver information to us.

Essentially, what we’ll be given over the next few years will be more information, better focused to meet our specific interests and needs.

There will be very exciting opportunities for niche players to exploit these new rich veins of information and communication. There will also be risks of missing opportunities to change to new business tools and being left behind by your competitors.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

How should we train our IT staff?

How should we train our IT staff?

How should we train our IT staff?

If you have internal IT staff, training is a big expense and you need to get it right.

In an SME environment, training is essential to motivate your staff and ensure you have the latest skills in your team. But, if IT is not your core business, training IT staff can be a challenge.

• When should you train them?
• What courses should you send them on?
• What are the alternatives?

Training is something that even IT-focused businesses struggle with, and it’s much harder for companies with a small IT department of less than five employees. Your people need to have the range of skills to design your future solutions, manage and run the projects to implement the new solutions, and be able to maintain the systems once they go live.

Training is ideal for companies that have found a strong group of technical people that include both strategic thinkers and tactical doers. If these individuals work well together and get each aspect of the jobs done, then it’s worth investing in training to ensure the team continues to perform and deliver the right solutions.

When you should train them will depend on your business cycles. If you’re in a stable or declining cycle, then there isn’t much point training on new technology that you do not have the budget to implement. You want to withhold your training budget for a time when growth is at least anticipated and the systems need to be refreshed to cope with the anticipated increase in load.

If your systems are reaching end of life, and there are new solutions available, send your strategic thinkers to tradeshows to see the latest gizmos, gadgets and tools. This will allow them to start making plans and doing product selection. In-depth training offering a deep dive into technology is not appropriate yet as this learning is quickly forgotten if it’s not used regularly. You should also be aware of the costs; multiple days and lots of course work or intensive study are a distraction away from day-to-day operations.

As you gear up to product selection, it’s worth doing some more intensive product knowledge training to ensure the selected solutions really meet the anticipated business requirements.

Once the product selection and pre-purchasing is done, testing can start. It may be time to do technical training now to ensure the product is suitably tested and not glossed over at a high level.

If the product passes the testing phase, more time can be put into technical training to ensure the implementation phase goes as smoothly as possible.

It’s vital to have a sufficient cross section of your team trained on the products; either by inclusion in the training or some team level hands-on supervised learning to ensure the quality of on-going maintenance is reasonable also. Certainly if the installation team is trained but the maintenance team is not, there will be very poor accountability for problem resolution once the project is completed.

So, the courses to send people on will typically be vendor lead, unless you are dealing with global companies like Microsoft and Cisco who have set up course standards that are taught by independent training institutes. There is also very good computer or book-based training programs available that can work very well for people who don’t like classrooms. It’s best to understand how your team prefer to learn.

The alternative to training your own people is to outsource specialist tasks to experienced contactors or consultants who come in to do focused components of the work.

Of course, there are costs and risks to both methods. Think about losing a newly-trained employee in an industry famous for its high job churn rates, or demotivating staff who want the opportunity to train on a new system and fail to respect the consultant brought in.

Balancing your team and getting the right people trained at the right time is complex, so plan ahead, have a training budget assigned to each major change you wish to implement, and consider whether you should be doing that job in-house or outsourcing it. The result of your decision will have a lasting impact on the cost of IT in your organisation.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

Ten ways IT can help grow your business

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

What is the real value of a Standard Operating Environment (SOE)?

This article is going to use a lot of three letter acronyms (TLAs) – but bear with me, it’s not too technical!

When it comes to IT maintenance and support, it’s apparent that SMEs are paying much more per PC than their corporate cousins.

I was speaking recently with a consultant in my business about help desk metrics and how to improve response times for our clients. He told me that when he ran an internal help desk at HP with an SOE and good work practices, he handled thousands of calls, achieved an average ticket resolve time of six minutes, and an impressive two-out-of-three calls being resolved by level one staff (who are the cheapest resources in a technical support business).

This got me thinking about how we score servicing thousands of computers in SME businesses where an SOE is unheard of. I realised pretty quickly that our statistics would not even come close to these resolve times, and that many calls are escalated to more senior staff to find a solution – driving the cost of resolution even higher.

We all know that where there are computers there are problems, right? Well, I would go so far as to say the more computers there are, the more problems per computer will occur. And, the more variation we have with our computers, the more variations of problems and therefore, the more solutions required. This all results in more time and expense; and for the employees involved, more downtime.

So, I’m now convinced that the only way to drive down the total cost of IT support is for SMEs to turn to a vendor that offers an SOE-like service. I would love to know how SME readers feel about having IT sales people dictate the technology they should use to access reduced price services.

The way I see it is that we choose to run our own businesses, so we have the freedom of choice and can run with flexible systems. Yet we are limited in the systems we can afford to support. There is a fierce battle between productivity and creativity that is leaving SMEs struggling with the cost of technology.

So, what can we do to maximise total cost of ownership (TCO) without locking ourselves down too much?

The answer is to standardise as much as possible, across as many PCs and businesses as possible. We do this by minimising both the brands of technology we sell to clients, and the models of device within the brand. We build our computers from scripts that produce standard results in minimum time, and try to reduce the number of operating systems in use. To do so, it’s important to keep devices up-to-date and move clients to new operating systems as soon as they prove to be stable enough to ensure longevity of the platform. We also introduce usage policies to minimise risk and variation.

We then document solutions to problems as we resolve them, keeping a knowledge base of problem resolutions. To have level one staff resolve problems quickly, we give them access to the store of proven solutions as level one staff lack the time to do the research required to find a new solution on the fly. They may also not yet have the skills to develop a solution on their own.

Of course, building the standards and knowledge base requires internal infrastructure, applications and human resources which come at a high cost, and so becomes part of the scalability issue of a support business. You can’t build the knowledge or the structure until you have scale, and you can’t grow further until you have the productivity. This forms part of the challenge for internal IT departments in rapidly growing SMEs.

It is this scalability issue that causes relatively small companies with four or five IT staff to work very inefficiently. Essentially, they never built the productivity tools. A couple of hundred computers did not create the scale that justified the building of the systems and so the work grew. By the time we reach 300 PCs, the SOEs and systems really start to make sense. So it is common to see lower head counts per PC supported in large companies than in the medium companies that failed to outsource or build knowledge bases and SOEs.

The key for SMEs is to partner with organisations that have the systems and the scale to have a quasi SOE in place that lets them work to a tight Service Level Agreement (SLA), and reduce the time that goes into solving each IT problem – thus driving down the TCO.

If you take anything from this article, make it this: It takes a lot of smarts to make complex systems simple and drive the cost of management down. Find an intelligent team that can make your life easier and cheaper by removing the impediments to growth caused by IT.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

How do we know if it’s time to get help with our IT system?

There are lots of reasons why IT goes to the bottom of the agenda in a small business. We often see businesses drop IT off the radar after upgrades, due to tough financial times or because of the loss of an IT employee.

Unfortunately, IT has its own way of putting itself back on the agenda. This can occur suddenly, with a malfunction costing a fortune in downtime or if your system fails to deliver the services the business requires. Worst of all, is having one incident that causes down time that can cost more than replacing the entire system properly. (You will not have this experience until you have a significant number of staff dependent on the systems to do productive work.)

If your internal IT people are too tactical, they are not going to notice the bigger picture of how the decaying systems are impacting your business. Wasting management’s time by discussing options back and forth becomes costly – particularly if the options have not been properly explored with their costs calculated.

Many IT companies in the SME arena will offer cheap technology assessments to impress prospects. This work is often a loss leader in the hope of winning projects and ongoing maintenance, and when it is done free may lead to serious oversight of your real requirements. It takes significant time to assess where you are up to and what your real needs are.

A good assessment will determine:

What you have, what you can keep and what you need to upgrade or replace to gain productivity, security and continuity of access to data.

A balanced report will also outlay the cost of ongoing maintenance of the system you will have.

In the last week we have seen a system costing $75,000 over the past 12 months to maintain. We have been able to put forward a replacement plan costing $2,500 per month to finance and another $2,600 per month to maintain that will improve productivity significantly and save the company $13,800 per annum. The new systems will streamline business functions, allow for scalability and ensure IT is performing for three to four years.

So, my advice here is:

• Don’t spend too little on the assessment.
• Get a thorough assessment of your needs to ensure you align your IT plans to your business plans.
• Then, invest in a system that will support your organisation over the next few years.

So you know it is time to get help with your IT system if you are spending the money but not getting the solutions you require or if it is showing up on management meeting agendas but there are no facts to report for options going forward.

It really is worth investing in a robust, stable system to minimise downtime and malfunctions. Aligning your IT to your business plan ensures that IT never impedes your growth, and is well worth the investment.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

Do we really need high-speed internet in Australia?

A lot of my time recently has been spent focusing on cloud computing, specifically how it will impact on my business and what opportunities it can offer my clients.

It is very easy for me to forget that many business owners and senior managers are still trying to get their heads around what it all means.

Using the history of wheel-based transport versus the history of the internet let me illustrate an interesting analogy to outline the necessity of high-speed internet in Australia.

History of Wheel Based Transport	History of Internet
3500 BC wheels are attached to hand drawn carts	1836 Telegraph
2000 BC horses are domesticated and used for transport	1876 Telephone
770 Iron horseshoes improve horse transport	1962 -68 Packet Switching networks developed
1662 first record of a public horse drawn bus	1969 – ARPANET commissioned by DoD as research project (basis for internet)
1740 a clockwork carriage is demonstrated	1971 Now 15 nodes and 23 hosts on ARPANET First E-mail Sent
1769 First steam powered locomotive for roads	1972 Public demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines
1771 First car accident as car crashes into brick wall.	1973 ARPANET goes global UK and Norway
1801 First steam powered train	1974 TCP is defined for use on ARPANET
1807 First internal combustion engine vehicle (hydrogen gas)	1977 Number of hosts on network exceeds 100
1814 First practical steam powered railroad locomotive	1979 News Groups (still active today) are created, Collaboration tools begin
1862 First Gasoline driven vehicle	1982 TCP/IP is defined
1885 First Benz practical Automotive	1983 Name servers created as network is too big to know all points
1908 Henry ford generates mass production of the motor vehicle	1986 Potential identified as 5,000 hosts exceeded
2008 GFC almost wipes out car manufacturing in USA	1987 Internet moves from University and military to public 28,000 hosts
	1990 300,000 Hosts firs ISP world.std.com is launched
	1991 World Wide Web WWW is released
	1992 Multimedia hits internet term “Surfing the internet” is coined
	1993 2 million hosts a doubling of year before exponential growth is on
	1994 ARPANET/Internet concept now 25 years old
	1996 Microsoft starts the browser war with Netscape. Combo is created.
	1999 Browser war over, Microsoft declared a Monopoly
	2000 Number of web sites doubles in 7 months
	2004 Facebook launched
	2005 YouTube.com launched
	2007 Google passes Microsoft as “the most valuable global brand” over 1 billion on WWW
	2009/10 Cloud becomes the next big thing at a public awareness level
	2011 Office 365 launched by Microsoft

The point of these dates is to illustrate that it took 5400 years to go from the wheel to the modern motor vehicle and less than 200 years to go from message on-a-wire to a global multimedia collaboration tool.

Today it would seem that there is a greater sense of urgency to improve communication than there is to improve transportation.

While there is no question that faster transport has changed the way we think about the world computers are responsible for changing the way we think about what we know.

Do you still use a fax in your business or do you scan and send your documents? This is a great example of technology being rapidly superseded by a new development.

When the automobile became a reality no one thought the idea would take off for all sorts of reasons – people should not move so fast, noise, distribution of fuel and danger to horses and other road users.

We are now used to adopting new technologies and tend to worry more about convenience in the moment than fearing the risks of early adoption.

So how do we extend the analogy between transport and the cloud?

Today we have motor vehicles, planes, trains and boats.

In computing we have mobile devices, PCs, laptops, servers, private clouds and public clouds.

• The mobile device is like a motor bike. It will work almost anywhere, is lightweight and conveys one or two people from place to place without the need to pedal.
• The PC is more like a car. You typically lease or own one and use it for the full range of tools and applications you require.
• A taxi is like an internet café, where you use the technology in sessions.
• The company server is more like a bus than anything else. You all ride on it but have no direct ownership of it. You can use it as a place to chat with many people but you do not plan to do collaborative work there other than with people you know and trust.
• The server farm in your office is akin to a rail road. It is private infrastructure that we all use part of to share information. It is also a private cloud and it is where larger-scale collaboration begins to happen.
• If you take the entire network of roads and rail, including international airports and ports, you now have something that aligns with the public cloud. This gives you instant global reach with your communications, with multiple utility scale server farm environments running at a level of complexity that no one individual can comprehend.

Transport is constantly evolving to be faster, more efficient, more comfortable and safer. Internet systems are constantly evolving to be faster, more efficient, easier to use and of course, safer.

The rate of adoption of the internet makes the evolution of transport look sluggish. As billions of people go online and seek tools to work faster and smarter to share information, collaborate on ideas and seek entertainment the future will develop in ways that we cannot predict.

If you are happy riding an unshod horse as your primary mode of transport you will believe that we don’t need fast internet in Australia.

If you intend to be part of the rapidly evolving, data enabled world, than there is no question that we need all the bandwidth we can get our hands on.

Of course cost is important and timing is everything, particularly as technologies get adopted and unit prices decrease when more people are buying them.

It could also be assumed that a new technology will emerge to create alternatives to the tools we buy today, so change is guaranteed.

The bad news is that there is little truth in saying it will get easier. I believe we will be faced by complexity of change and choice, which is great news for the support industry, but hard work for any of us getting old and trying to stay up to date with technology.

● David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

What does IT have in common with urban design?

Australia has some of the most beautiful, liveable cities in the world, but it wasn't by chance that they ended up like this.

Why? Because we're a relatively modern civilisation where urban planning is a prerequisite.

We utilised the knowledge from the creation of other cities and as a result our cities flow well and are visually attractive.

They're not without problems of course but Australian cities compared to the sprawling shanty towns of South America or India provide comfortable living with good sanitation and transport options.

It's because we have good policies and strict guidelines (I can hear developers crying) on future development that Australia continues to build structured urban environments.

We have review boards that apply those principles to proposed developments and hold the construction industry accountable to the standards in place.

So how does that relate to IT systems?

Too often we see small businesses letting their IT systems grow without forethought or design and they expect them to compete with systems designed by experts in large organisations.

Today there are technologies that scale to suit SME environments where good design of the IT landscape can make a huge difference as the business grows.

It is best to unwind shoddily-built IT systems early in the business's growth cycle in order to reduce the impediments that bad design will create.

Ultimately the benefits of well designed IT systems are reduced total cost of ownership and better productivity of your computer-using staff.

So what are the elements of design that should go into this work?

1. Understand which systems will be required to be in place for all elements of your business – from finance to marketing.
2. Once you know which systems will be required match your IT to them, allowing for planned direction and growth.
3. Identify risks to your data, such as security breaches causing exposure or loss.
4. Design the protection, redundancy and recovery systems your business needs.
5. Design the networks to be robust.
6. Design the end points of PCs and mobile devices.
7. Design the maintenance plan to ensure the environment is monitored and managed proactively to avoid down time.

Do you want to run the risk of letting your IT systems grow into a shambles? Make no mistake, companies that invest at the beginning of growth and get their systems right are competitively placed to communicate, share information, start new ventures and expand without restrictions.

It's the small decisions we make along the way that determine the outcome.

You can decide to cost cut or invest in a planned strategic approach to build a better future. So are your IT decisions aligned to your business vision?

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

How big is the computer waste problem and what can we do about it?

While many businesses make efforts to reduce paper usage, recycle kitchen products and encourage their workers to cycle to work, how many are thinking about their computers?

We may not think much about throwing out a computer every few years as it becomes obsolete, but we really should be encouraging businesses to buy PCs that last five to six years, as opposed to three to four.

Recent numbers published by IDC indicate that the Chinese market is about to exceed the US market with sales figures for PCs for this year coming in at US73.6 million units to China’s 72.4 million. This represents just 43% of the global demand, as global annual sales are in the range of 340 million units. As these devices all have a limited life cycle, we can see that in a few years there will be 340 million PCs going to scrap.

It becomes clear that if we all spend a little more at the point of purchase to extend the life expectancy by just 12 months, there could be as many as 100 million less PCs being scrapped, recycled or going into landfill every year.

Of course, from a productivity point of view, I would never ask people to work on old, slow computers as this leads to wastages of a different kind – businesses costs. Issues with poorly running PCs include:

• More expensive technology services.
• Disruption to workflow.
• Training and familiarity issues as software and systems get changed over time.

We encourage businesses to plan their IT strategy in a way that allows them to maximise the productivity benefits of buying a better PC in the first place. Ensuring they make the right decisions at the point of purchase allows them maximum ROI both financially and environmentally.

I am pleased to say we are now seeing the world’s largest manufacturer of PCs, HP, offering four and five year warranty extensions. This should give businesses the confidence to select a slightly higher performance model and anticipate the additional useful life of the device.

So, do you have the right strategy to maximise your businesses productivity and minimise damage to the environment at the same time? Having that strategy align to your businesses plan will ensure IT is not impeding your growth.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.