How do we fortify our IT support?

If your business is back in growth mode and your IT department is stretched to capacity you've probably tried to find new staff and found that the job market is short of well-qualified, experienced IT people.

The effort required to find and attract new staff has increased significantly but fear not, because an option has emerged that is entirely different to anything I've previously seen offered in the SME landscape.

The new option is to offload part of the work to give support to your in-house IT team. Of course there are always choices to make regarding what part of the work to offload.

Common practice has been to offload project work to consultants who have the expertise and experience to get the job done quickly.

But that has always left a bad taste in the mouths of the team left behind to administer the fallout of the system long after the consultants have gone.

Now there is the option to outsource the lowest level of tactical work to allow technical people inside your organisation to focus on the value-added solutions your company really needs, with an understanding of how your people really work.

The lowest level tactical work is the help desk, logging and resolving small mundane, but time consuming jobs that ensure productivity is maintained.

There are now tools that allow your staff to call or email an external help desk to log a ticket and receive instant remote support.

When the problem needs more local attention it is possible for the remote help desk to place the job ticket in a queue accessed by your in-house team, allowing jobs to be passed seamlessly from your staff to the help desk to your IT team, ensuring correct prioritisation of jobs and reasonable resolution time.

Those tools are available to medium-sized local IT firms to provide local support with site knowledge shared and accessed, ensuring that value is added by the remote team.

The benefits of the system are many and it will add great value to those who adopt it:

• Cost effective team expansion in a totally elastic offering.
• Breadth of IT team across multiple disciplines.
• Depth of IT on specific technologies.
• Multiple hands to ensure the ball is never dropped on critical issues.
• Your small IT team is partially managed by external task management against an SLA provided in a contract.
• Industry best practice is applied to your site by the remote management process, driving better efficiency.
• External people share your internal systems knowledge, reducing risk of loss.
• Internal staff can take a holiday without creating risk or exposure for business critical systems.
• Your entire business has a professional help desk to call on, ensuring there is a person there at all times.
  

There are risks with this solution and they need to be noted and mitigated via your selection process:

• The external company will gain access to your IP and must be trustworthy.
• The quality of people in the external organisation will impact on your staff, so they must be good.
• The timeliness of the external organisation could delay urgent requirements, so they need robust processes.
• The external body must cover your technologies, so they must have the required breadth and depth.
• The remote management will have an impact on your bandwidth, so you must have the right connections to facilitate the connection.
  

If your IT resources are letting the team down due to too many demands on their time and capability you can now get a very quick boost to capacity by removing the most tedious work.

That allows internal staff to do more meaningful, higher-level work in a better managed environment with great tactical support.

For now this service is offered locally but due to the inevitable future of our globally-connected world the service will switch to telco-scale organisations and be moved offshore to the cheapest capable resources.

It will certainly be interesting to see how the field of computer support changes in the next three years.

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

We put our IT projects on hold during the GFC and now we need to ramp them up – but where do we start?

Have I mentioned productivity lately? I’m pretty sure I have and I’m about to again.

Your priority with IT should be to build productivity first and foremost, but it is time I expanded on that and outlined three key functions of IT:

• Access to data.
• Security of data.
• Recoverability of data.

Applications help us manage and access information in a meaningful way, but just for a moment let’s look at project priority from a simplistic view because it serves a purpose in setting priorities in a sensible fashion.

In Australia, more than in many places in the world, we worry about access to data over the other two priorities – security and recoverability. The articles here and here are prime examples.

As you set priorities for IT projects you need to balance your budget and resources across each of the three areas of IT management.

On the topic of access you’ll need to consider these factors:

• Local networks.
• Wide area networks.
• Infrastructure (storage and processors).
• Applications (these will vary across all functions of business activity from communication to design, finance and so on).

On security you’ll need to consider:

• Perimeter defence of your data (stopping the public from accessing private systems).
• Internal protection from your own staff (reducing inappropriate leaks of internal information).
• Removing threats from spam, scripts and hackers.

On recoverability you’ll need to consider:

• Maintenance and storage of multiple versions of your previous data.
• Recovery platforms and methodologies.
• Recovery timeframes and their business impact.

As you consider those components you will discover multiple constraining factors, including resources to manage and run the projects, and finances.

With the skills shortage we’re now encountering money alone will not solve the problem, because large organisations running large IT projects are drawing IT skills out of the SME market.

Solving one part of the problem without addressing the other two will not drive the required benefit without significantly increasing risk.

If we bring it back to productivity we need to identify the key impediments to growth and then design robust, secure, redundant and recoverable systems to fill the gaps that will drive productivity the hardest.

Let me elaborate on that using an example from my own business.

We had a good team and were winning awards for our service delivery, innovation and business growth – but we needed to be more profitable.

For us the key to profitability was productivity and scalability, so we invested in a job management system to get the scalability.

Then we set up the software and captured large amounts of data and finally we put in place robust security systems and a state-of-the-art online backup tool. Problem solved.

After that investment we were ready for a lot more work so we looked at our sales and marketing systems and improved the way we went to market and the use of our CRM system. It was already cloud-based so we didn’t need to worry about security or recoverability because it was already built in.

Sales and marketing started driving increased demand and then we had a delivery problem.To deal with that we modified our job-handling systems, split our help desk strategically and introduced account management staff and systems.

All that business development hinged on managing data and changing business processes, but in each case priorities were set according to the gap in the business, after careful analysis of the gap.

So where are your gaps now and how will you remove them AND address risk reduction at the same time?

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

What does my IT guy need to know this year that he did not need to know last year?

As economic recovery leads to business growth, there has already been a lot of talk about how 2011 will be a different year for IT.

Recently, I have watched over one hundred businesses respond to expanding IT requirements. In particular, the hype of cloud computing is becoming a real issue. As a solution, it promises cost savings and enhanced capabilities for single-PC businesses and huge companies alike. In 2011, even more applications and functions will flood the market and create a wealth of choice.

Unfortunately, there is also a lot of risk. Targetting larger companies to host solutions seems to be the winning formula. In 2010, many of the big players opened their doors for hosted applications. In 2011, we'll see massive uptake of those solutions in a game-changing way.

So, this is the year IT support providers need to be able to offer you a breadth and depth of knowledge in cloud-based solutions. For every infrastructure or software upgrade you do, consider the cloud-based alternative. Weigh the pros and cons, savings and sacrifices. Some cloud solutions will be seamless, others will require change. Regardless, all infrastructure teams will need new knowledge and training so they can migrate from in-house solutions to cloud solutions. But because the field is so new, this is difficult to find.

So, how do you ensure you are getting the best possible advice? Even the industry leaders in IT solutions for SMEs are grappling with this problem. Only a few have started selling cloud-based solutions, and many see them as a threat to business. After all, if applications are hosted on cloud-based servers, infrastructure support is obsolete. So how do you manage the opportunities and threats involved? One answer is to ensure your IT people actually know what they're doing as they move you to the cloud.

Each time we move a company's technology to the cloud we get the same result: parts of it move well, parts of it move with compromises, and parts of it just have to stay on-site. We are investing heavily in our own research and solutions-testing to find the most robust services for our clients, but we still have a long way to go. Often it's a matter of working with our clients to find a solution that fits, and running the testing processes with them. As proactive as we are, we just haven't had the chance to test all the possible solutions out there.

But if you still rely on a small, one-to-two-person IT team, this rapid shift in technology will stretch them. They simply do not have the resources to research, test and deploy these new technologies, while also maintaining existing solutions. Add to that the severe shortage of skilled IT workers and you are in for a difficult year. What's more, with business picking up, demand for updated IT will only grow. So it's a good time to consider outsourcing specific tasks and finding good technology partners to ensure your business is supported as it grows.

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

What's in store for our computers in 2011?

Faster, smaller or thinner will be the theme this year.

I'm not predicting a lot of change in how we do things in the year ahead though. We have apps on the app store for whatever portable platform we've chosen, and with 2010 behind us, we're all aware of the cloud and suspect we should be in it. One thing we do know is that Microsoft is all in!

So, this year, our devices will get slimmer, our operating systems will get thinner, and our connections will get fatter and faster. Let me unravel that techno-babble for you so that you can throw it around at your summer BBQs with a little more confidence...

On the device front, I'm talking about our PCs, tablets, and smartphones. They will get smaller and lighter, with longer-lasting batteries. They'll also get faster processors, so will work even faster for us.

On the connection side of things, better broadband connections with greater bandwidth (referred to as fatter pipes) will allow faster internet connections and better functionality of mobile devices.

The thinner operating systems refers to the fact that as we move our applications to the cloud we'll need less power in our desktop operating systems, as we'll simply need web browsers to run our applications. And so the operating systems will become simpler, slimmer models of the current systems. The iPad I'm typing this article on is a classic example of a thinner operating system.

So, it's time you started doing some strategic planning on how you will help your staff to leverage these emerging trends in your business in 2011. Of course, don't be afraid to ask an expert to help you with this process. There is no way you can be running a business and be up-to-date with what needs to be done with IT.

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

We don't spend much on IT - is that okay?

Without being rude – hello, it is 2011, not 1911! You should be spending as much on IT as is required to achieve strong productivity.

If you can spend nothing on IT and have full productivity, then you have a nice business model and no dependence on communication, supply chain management, financial tracking, online marketing, stock control, asset management, payroll, BAS statements for GST, computer-aided design or manufacture, document management, customer relationship management, knowledge management or any other of the many things IT is used for. I suggest you enjoy your low-tech business for as long as you possibly can, and spend little or nothing on IT.

It may be the case that you can still run your sales business off a card file system; amazingly, I have seen businesses where this is still in use. In fact, just recently, I saw a real estate agent who swore by his card file system and saw no use for computers to drive productivity. He also spent a lot of hours in the office ensuring his staff were actually at work and making their calls. Little did he know that a good CRM system with click to dial could tell him how many calls each sales person was making in a day, who to and how long they were on each call for.

He also had no idea of sales in the pipeline, except for those reported to him in the weekly sales meeting. He would not know about the dashboards that can show sales in the system, and progression steps towards an outcome. Of course, he could also boast he had the most experienced sales team around, as not one of his sales crew was under 45 years of age. Not that I would say they were crusty. They just knew how to work a card file system. They were also very used to being constantly watched over by a micro-managing boss.

On the property management front, he provided about the worst service to tenants and landlords I have seen in nine years of running my business. Yes, he had a card file system for that too! No call request tracking system, no account tracking, and no automatic arrears reporting.

So, if this is a good model for your business, then no, you don't to need to spend a lot on IT and, yes, that is okay.

However, if you would like to have reliable IT systems that reduce your reliance on staff, appeal to younger workers and give you information at your fingertips to ensure sales are not slipping by untracked, that clients are not being kept waiting for days for answers, and that your invoices are being paid in a timely manner, chances are that 2011 is a year for a new beginning. Start it with a sound IT strategy, and a budget that will help you to make the right decisions and invest in solutions that provide a greater return on investment (ROI), rather than a cheap price and low ROI.

IT experts who work with thousands of computers know that a planned and well-executed IT strategy will lead to a lower total cost of your productivity increase. Spending on under-performing components will lead to bottlenecks in systems that reduce the effectiveness of the whole system. So, design of the whole system is important. Finding IT advisors who have worked with hundreds of businesses will give you a better chance of getting a good functional design and the best possible ROI.

So, in 2011, if not spending much on IT works for your business, enjoy it. Otherwise, seek guidance as soon as you can to ensure your money is spent as well as possible to maximise your productivity results.

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

With Windows and iPad each almost a year old, what is the verdict?

With Windows and iPad each coming up to their 12-month anniversary, we are seeing two strong success stories. The uptake of both has been huge. Microsoft is close to a quarter of a billion licenses in sales, while the iPad is looking at several million units manufactured.

The iPad has provided a fantastic viewing experience with a clarity of screen-based image that is very pleasant to work with. Now, because the iPad is about to be a year old, iPad 2.0 is likely to be released with some extra features; better processor, more storage and lower profile (if the rumour mill has it right).

At the same time, Windows 7 will be released on more platforms, including tablets like the HP slate.

Clearly, the demand for mobile computing is growing. Even as I write this, I am working off a server in Melbourne from a train passing through Chatswood in Sydney. So, I can see why the demand for mobile computing is real and will not go away.

The iPad has some clear limitations, such as the inability to attach a document to an email (do let me know if you have solved this problem), but it is very portable and is pleasant for media consumption – largely due to its lovely screen.

Clearly, these tablet devices are driving a new market, but will we see tablets replacing other forms of computers or simply being a media consumption tool, as an addition to the PC and laptop?

Windows 7 has proven to be a robust platform for applications, and is seeing great uptake, giving Microsoft the confidence to cease selling Windows XP. My hunch is that Windows 7 will be with us for a while, as was Windows XP. So, now is a great time to be adopting the technology as an industry-standard platform that will enjoy longevity.

The iPad 1.0 on the other hand is destined to be the toy of yesterday pretty quickly, as more powerful, more capable tools of a similar profile are released.

This year promises to see huge competition between the tablet players and mobile phone market, as each platform tries to be the ultimate communication and portability solution. As the applications move to the clouds, the simple browser on a tablet will take on a whole new dimension, where capabilities of the device are less important than connectivity and display quality.

Meanwhile, Windows 7 will quietly dominate the desktop space and try to get established in the mobility space.

It will be an interesting year ahead for us all.

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

How do I know my IT management costs?

There are plenty of reports on this topic from companies like IDC and Gartner who have a focus on the cost of IT per computer for large organisations. These reports take multiple cost factors into account, such as the obvious cost of hardware, software and support, but also the less-tangible aspects such as staff productivity and cost of downtime.

In the SME space, there are other factors to consider; such as who's time is going into fixing the problem. We often see the wrong resources being used to resolve IT issues, and it can make a significant difference to the real costs of IT.

So, what are some wrong resource scenarios?

Often, in small business, the person who starts doing the computer support is a senior member of the team who is forced to dabble in IT when the business has a need for the function, but no budget for the right resources. This may continue to the point where a key resource is spending a significant chunk of their time on the distraction that is the IT system.

Often, there is simply not enough capacity in a business to support the equipment, and so staff work around problems unproductively in what is typically a stressful environment.

Sometimes the person responsible has some knowledge in IT, and has fallen into the role but really lacks the strategic knowledge to drive the change and systems required as the business succeeds and grow. This person can become the expensive roadblock to progress. They may be generally okay at IT, but lack the specific skills needed to access the right or new technology that would make all the difference.

So, bringing this back to costs, the SME business may be spending as much per employee on IT as its larger counterpart, but not be getting the benefit of the investment for all the reasons listed above. It's important to frequently consider how the IT systems can be improved without spending more money but instead by having the best possible resources assigned to resolving each problem.

After all, there is no point having people standing around discussing how good it would be if the IT system would just perform better. So, look to productivity as an indicator of IT success and create a roadmap for getting the right resources in place and the right solutions designed, implemented and managed.

Remember, it is unlikely that the person who can design or implement the right system is the best person to maintain it going forward. Design is a creative process that requires an understanding of business processes and knowledge of a wide selection of technologies at a strategic level, whereas maintenance is a repetitive task that requires rhythm and specific knowledge of the systems in place.

Engaging with a team of experts who have strategic advisors all the way though to hands-on doers is highly likely to get you a better financial result than making use of the in-house skills of people who simply fell into an IT role. You are also likely to get a better handle on the real costs of IT by stripping it out of the day-to-day activities of your entire workforce.

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