What differentiates your company from your competition?

Michael goes to great lengths to explain that it is the consistent, predictable customer experience — not the product or service that attracts and retains clients. Anyone reading his words instantly identifies with the experience of trying out a new company (regardless of for what), having a great experience and returning…only to have a different experience the next time — and never going back.

So as our companies mature, we seek most of all: order.

Clearly, we must must create and enforce systems that cause the same things to happen in the same way each time we touch a client…measure the result…and always seek and strive to improve.

Can you do that without computers?

I know I can’t. At CRC, we use computers to automate delivery of many things to many clients. Moreover, we use computers to measure a great number of metrics. Some examples:

1. how many calls?

2. how many tickets?

3. average time on hold? to resolution?

4. how many tickets per person? average time open?

One of my favorites is the TNT report. TNT stands for “Today…NOT….Tomorrow.” And this applies to tickets. Any ticket that is opened ‘today’ must be closed ‘today’ or I need to know the reason why. (Of course, exceptions like a new office being set up next week don’t show up on this report.)

The point is…our systems are completely automated. That leaves people to interface with people and machines to do the work that they can do better, faster, more reliably and most importantly — more consistently. Another example is what happens if a new ticket gets opened but nobody touches it for 15 minutes. If that happens our management team gets an alert that there is a ticket open but nobody’s seen it.

Of course all of the above serves to differentiate CRC and begins to answer the question “Why CRC?”

But what about you? What about your business? Do you have tools like these to measure, monitor, and deliver service?

If not, why not? Computers are incredible tools that can keep business systems, service levels, and customer experience exactly where you define them. (You have defined them, haven’t you?)

But even if you define them, trying to measure, quantify, and manage them without automated help becomes nearly impossible.

Does your IT company understand this? Help with it? Set the proper IT example? Have programmers on staff to take your existing line-of-business tools and pull specific information from them?

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This post is continuing in a series that started with a monster post that discussed how to benchmark your I.T. service delivery vs. your competitors. That post is here: http://www.crcexchange.com/benchmark-your-it-vs-your-competitors-it

Go Green!

Besides making Al Gore happy, there are many reasons to insist that your IT Provider perform almost all of the work to yours systems via remote means.

1.  Instant help.  Companies not using a remote method of service delivery must ‘roll a truck’ to your office and that takes time.  Remote support means instant help, and getting an instant start on getting back to work.

2.  Cost.  These days, the cost of gasoline is driving up the cost of everything related to it.  An IT Support company that uses remote support does not need to pass fuel surcharges and/or higher trip charges along to you.

3.  Security, and interruption to work flow.  Simply: the fewer people who are in your office — the more secure it is, and the less your employees are interrupted and distracted.

4.  Less interruption to your staff outside of normal business hours.  A continuation of the thought above is the fact that when work needs to be done to your systems during off hours, in many cases you can avoid having to send someone to your office to pull an ‘all nighter’ as the service company is capable of making changes without needing to be on site.

5.  Ability to train users.  Our studies have shown that end users lean better when sitting directly in front of their PC and watching someone else perform the task they are trying to learn (on their screen), and then trying it themselves.

6.  Ability to collaborate.  With Remote Support, two or more technicians can remote in to the same computer at the same time.  They may be in different states, but both be working on the same problem.  This speeds up the entire process of getting and keeping your systems stable and running.

7.  No geographic boundaries: If a technician needs to look at how a server is configured on one coast to get the settings correct on the opposite coast, remote support tools give him or her the ability to do this quickly and with ease.

8. Business Continuity: Remote support tools also work to provide services across locations.  In an emergency if you need to conduct business from a remote location, remote support tools can give you this instantly.

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This post is continuing in a series that started with a monster post that discussed how to benchmark your I.T. service delivery vs. your competitors. That post is here: http://www.crcexchange.com/benchmark-your-it-vs-your-competitors-it

What is the cloud, anyway?

Wikipedia defines it as a metaphor for Internet in cloud computing, based on how it is depicted in network diagrams and as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.

To the average SMB owner/executive in the context of this post it means: transferring the care and feeding of your servers to a provider who can deliver their service to your users over the Internet, or even better: getting rid of your servers all together!

In the recent few years, a few things have come together to make it possible to have your ’server room’ be somewhere across the Internet and work just as fast — maybe even faster than having the servers in your office.

How it works

In the ideal scenario, your employees are outfitted with (and need) very little computing hardware — perhaps just a keyboard, monitor, mouse, and a box that connects to the Internet. A group of servers so powerful that they can each do the work of over 100 desktops create a ‘desktop’ for each connected user; and it is this ‘desktop’ on a server (miles away from your office) that is viewed with the inexpensive equipment on your employees’ desks.

In fact, the employee is remote-controlling the desktop on the server with his or her inexpensive set of tools described above. (If you’ve ever had a support technician take control of your computer from a remote location and watched in awe as they move your mouse and type things…it is this same concept — only in reverse!) In ‘cloud computing’ it is you or your staff member who is doing the controlling of another computer — with tools specifically designed to control a desktop session on a remote computer.

This concept also works very well if your employees use their existing PC’s and/or Laptops to control these ‘desktop’ sessions on the servers.

To make this work, the technology used by the provider must ‘remember’ each user, and how that user has set up his or her environment. This ‘memory’ also refers to installed programs, email, what is saved on the desktop — everything that would normally appear on the employee’s computer in your office must be kept on the servers in such a way that when the employee logs on to the servers, their unique desktop is available to them — and only them.

So, in effect, what is accomplished is taking all of the programs, data, and settings out of your office — and moving them to the provider’s data center.

Let me tell you why this is important

Data center environments have always-on-electricity and cooling, and provide these consumable resources within an extremely secure, tornado-and-hurricane proof building. The computers in the data center exist in locked cabinets and no passers-by can accidentally bump them off or brush against cords and wires. There simply is no safer environment — nor one more conducive to computing than the data center.

Further, since your provider has a great many servers in one location (often replicating data to another, geographically separate location), your provider is in a much better position to keep a careful eye over your servers.

Finally, the technology that high-end providers use makes it extremely easy to move servers to different hardware — meaning that your servers can made redundant easily. This is important to you because it means that if the server that your employees are working on experiences hardware errors, your users can automatically be moved to another server in minutes. It also means that if your needs out grow your current environment it becomes a simple ‘drag-and-drop’ task to re-provision your users on a more powerful set of servers.

A day in the life of an SMB leveraging cloud computing

Your employees come to work and right away notice that there is not a large, noisy, dust-attracting box where their computer used be. Gone are most of the parts, most of the wires; and in their place is a keyboard, monitor mouse, and a little black box — about the size of a telephone book.

This little black box has virtually nothing that can go wrong with it. And if the worst case happens and something does go wrong with it, it is simply swapped out for a new one. There is no data to be lost (or restored), no settings, email, pictures, etc. that need to be adjusted. Simply swap out the box.

Today, however, 99.9% of days, there is nothing wrong with the box. The employee sits at her desk and turns on the box. Instantly (no waiting for a computer to boot up), her desktop appears and she is ready to work. To her, it seems as if she is working on her own computer — only slightly faster, and without the noise it used to make. Nothing else is different to her.

As she works, behind the scenes, what she saves to her hard drive and/or desktop is periodically backed up — perhaps as often as every 15 minutes, but certainly every night at a minimum. She has no responsibility to make sure she saves important files to a system drive, or to worry about data protection at all. She simply works, and the provider makes certain the backups are happening.

Her manager determines that she needs a program installed, and puts in a request for service with the provider. The provider installs the application nearly instantly — from a hard drive located on the provider’s network just for this purpose. There is no need to arrive with CD’s. In most cases (and all cases with Microsoft), applications can either be rented, or purchased under an Open License Program. The provider sends an invoice for the license, and the user begins using the software almost immediately.

When the employee has finished for the day, she logs off and goes home.

Her boss calls as soon as she gets home. He has an urgent need for her to create a document and send it to him!

However, this is no problem for the employee. From her home computer, she goes to a secure website, enters her credentials, and has complete access to the desktop in exactly the same state she left it in. Perhaps she had been working on that very document — thinking it could wait until morning. She simply opens it up, finishes it, and emails it to her boss.

In fact, she can do the same thing from friends homes, hotels, on vacation, in a school or library — anywhere she can get an Internet connection and access to a standard web browser.

Another benefit of this model is how laptop data is stored. Instead of storing data on a laptop that can be dropped, lost, or stolen (and its data with it), the laptop user simply logs in to the same secure web page and works on a virtual desktop like everyone else. All data is instantly safe, and backed up with all of the other employees’ data.

The next morning, the unthinkable happens. The cleaning crew had been in overnight and overloaded circuits. The building has burned and nothing is left of the office.

The technology, however, is completely safe. Employees all work from home and continue to send and receive email, work on documents, etc., as if there had been no fire.

The business owner uses the insurance money wisely, and doubles the size of the company as it rebuilds.

As more and more users begin using the systems, the provider detects that there is a slight slow-down in performance. Without the users even knowing it, the provider re-provisions much more powerful servers and moves the users to those servers. Monthly charges increase with the number of users. Growth occurs with no pain.

And should business take a turn for the worse?

The provider simply re-provisions less powerful hardware, monthly charges decrease by the number of users, and the scale-back adjustment occurs with no pain

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This post is continuing in a series that started with a monster post that discussed how to benchmark your I.T. service delivery vs. your competitors. That post is here: http://www.crcexchange.com/benchmark-your-it-vs-your-competitors-it

Top-to-Top: We understand your payment needs

Whether your title is CEO, CFO, Controller, or all of the above, you know there is one ideal way to pay for any service a business consumers: a fixed, flat rate, that can vary with trends in your business.

Unfortunately, the rest of the IT Service world hasn’t quite caught on to this model.  While some have, many are still selling block hours (or a flat rate for minimal service and then by-the-hour after that.)

This is not the way that SMB’s operate.  Most of the SMB owners who I know (myself included) don’t want to deal with multiple line items on multiple invoices with no way to predict what is coming next.  However, we also don’t want to be trapped in a flat-rate contract that refuses to go down in cost even if our service consumption decreases significantly.

On the growth side of the equation, we want a predictable increase.  If you grow your staff by 5%, your IT costs should grow 5%.  This makes a very complex problem of how to grow a company much less complex.  If only all business costs would follow this model!

When it comes to IT service, you should demand nothing less.  There should be an agreed flat rate, but that rate should rise and fall with trends.  (Note: I don’t believe it should rise and fall every month because that puts everybody back in the business of evaluating and verifying every invoice every month; but I do believe that if head count increases there should be in increase for IT service, and if head count decreases there should be a decrease in IT service.

It’s more than just the service

The above model works fine for service, but what about hardware?  What about computer room space?  What about bandwidth?  What about power requirements?  In short: what about all of the infrastructure that it takes to deliver the service?  Beyond some critical mass of the number of employees you have now — at some point in your growth you will need to buy servers, and beef up all of the above infrastructure.  Or then again, not.

There is a much better way to deliver computing resources to your employees, and that is simply: get rid of your servers and buy computing resources directly from your IT Service Provider.

Technology has evolved to the point where IT Service providers (the top tier, that is) who have established relationships with top-tier data center providers are now able to deliver the same computing environment that your users depend on today — with even more stability, speed, ease of use, security, redundancy, and overall service level to your business.

Top tier IT Service companies have many, many redundant servers, data centers, Internet connections, backup methods, power supplies, etc. — to the point where we are able to guarantee 100% uptime.  No ordinary business office can ever provide that level of service.  For example: no matter how good your infrastructure, if you only have one Internet connection going to your office (and it gets cut), you are out of business (technology wise anyway).

In the same scenario as above, if your Internet connection gets cut, simply send everyone home.  All users can access all of their work from their home PC!  In fact, if you fully subscribe to this philosophy, your telephone system will be in the Data Center as well, and all workers can work from home — completely — as if they were in the office.

While the above is slightly off topic, it actually drives home the point of paying for what you use because offered correctly, the Service Provider simply tacks on about 35% to the per-employee-management fee to deliver all of the benefits above.  Then, as business cycles cause ups and downs, you are in a position to increase or decrease staff by any amount, pay for what you get, and not interrupt your IT infrastructure.

Disaster Recovery

Many of our clients ask us about keeping a mirrored set of servers in our data center, and even reserving some of our extra office space (in case of emergency) (http://www.crcBusinessCenter.com) (we don’t need all of our 32,000 square feet as most of our employees participate in the Clean Air Campaign; so we lease out the top floor.)

Done as asked, the above request is very expensive.   However, if they subscribe to the philosophy of letting CRC deliver their applications, there is no need for them to mirror servers because we already have them mirrored!

In summary, technology has evolved to the point where you can buy it like a utility.  In this day and age, most people would never want to dig their own well for water, or build their own generator for electricity — they simply want to turn on the switch when they need it, turn off the switch when they don’t, and pay for what they use.

You should be buying your technology the same way.

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This post is continuing in a series that started with a monster post that discussed how to benchmark your I.T. service delivery vs. your competitors. That post is here: http://www.crcexchange.com/benchmark-your-it-vs-your-competitors-it

Everything you ever wanted to know about outsourcing your IT Department

Robert Kiyosaki said that while most people dream about vacations and boats, he dreams about accountants and lawyers — working exclusively for him.  That makes sense if a company is large enough to hire specialists, but I don’t agree if a company can only afford one or two of any profession that has areas of specialty.

Would you want your Real Estate Attorney defending corporate litigation?

I hope not.  Yet, every day we see companies that hire one IT Guy and expect  him to be the backup expert, the security expert, the Mail Server expert, the Database expert, the help desk, etc.  Often the result is the same as having a bookkeeper plan your tax strategy: disaster.

Being out and about in the Atlanta business community, rarely does a day go by that I don’t hear a story about how a company lost data.  Why? A hundred different reasons, but they usually boil down to just two: either the IT Guy (or IT Company) didn’t know what they were doing — or they were stretched so thinly that they were unable to devote necessary attention to the task.

By outsourcing to a large, established company: you get the right people, working on the right technology, at the right time, doing the right things.

Data Protection

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how things would be different if a full time backup specialist — who does nothing but monitor backups (and solve issues the instant they occur) would have a much greater chance for success than a one-man-band (either inside your office our outside).  It should be noted that the danger can be mitigated using an adequate service provider for backup such as www.crcDataProtection.com.

Help Desk

When a member of your staff gets ’stuck’ on a certain task (whether that is their ability to get email, find a feature in their new Office 2007 software, or get access to their files on a server) your ROI on that salary drops to zero.  Worse, client service beings to suffer that moment.  In addition, her morale begins to deteriate, her mind loses focus, and you are paying good money after bad to have her sitting there unproductive.  If not using an outsourcing company and your one or two IT Guy’s are busy with other tasks, there is nowhere to turn; and your employee can not go any further on that task.  Hopefully it’s not critical!

In contrast, an outsourcing firm that has a call center and a  help desk can handle the issue, contact the user immediately, and get her back and running very quickly in most cases.

Security

We humans are too busy to re-learn things (and especially if we are stretched trying to do the job of many people as is the case when SMB companies hire one or two people to do their IT.)  For that reason, the IT Guy tends to want to install what s/he knows (and that may not be the best decision for your company.)  Perhaps Cisco would be the best solution for your company; or maybe SonicWALL?  Perhaps a whole host of others?  Each product has tradeoffs that make it the correct choice for some offices and the wrong choice for others.  Having experts certified in the various security appliances gives your company the ability to get the best fit for your application.

Chief Technology Officer

The CTO for a large organization creates (and is responsible for the implementation) of the strategic technology vision for the company.  S/he is tasked with exploring new and emerging technology, figuring out how it can apply to your company, meeting with the C-Level managers to colloborate on the vision, and then ensuring that the growth of technology in the company supports the overall growth and vision of the company.  This is a bit much to ask of your average technician.

Perhaps you could hire a CTO and a technician or two, but a CTO with only one or two reports is not going to be happy long term.  In contrast, outsourcing to a larger IT outsourcing company delivers a virtual CTO — somebody who fills the same role as above — on an as needed basis.  Best of all, s/he is acting as the CTO for many companies — seeing the best and worst of what is out there, and bringing that experince to bear on giving the best advice for your company.

(fill in the blank_______) Administrator

Email, Sharepoint, Web Services, Database, Active Directory, Line of Business applications…all are evolving at dizzying pace! There is simply no way that one person can keep up with all of the changes and best practices.  To do justice to any one of these is to work in the environment full time.  Having just-enough-to-get-by skills in all of the above means that critical things are going to get missed.  We see it all the time when we take over accounts…Microsoft best practice items not implemented…either the IT guy didn’t know or didn’t have time.  But the results are the same: crashes, outages, lost data, degredation of performance.

Patch Management

What are patches? Well, hackers look for security ‘holes’ that will allow them to ‘get in’ to systems and do what they will.  A ‘patch’ is a change to the software that ‘patches’ the ‘hole.’  Did you know that over 85% of attacks on PC’s and Servers are against ‘holes’ that have been publicly admitted by Microsoft and other publishers for over six months!!? 

Hackers know that a certain (large) percentage of machines are not going to get patched regularly, and that gives them time to perfect their attack.  Virus and hacking software is tricky business — and these people are experts: with patience.  They will take time to get the attack just right and then launch it — knowing that many people will not have any defense.

In many SMB’s, the job of ‘patching’ the computers falls to the IT Guy (who doesn’t have time because of all of the above.)  The result? Systems don’t get patched very often and your company becomes vulnerable to an attack that could have been prevented six months ago!

Outsourcing companies use expense software tools to automate the process of patch management (and more importantly…montior and mainatain the environment.)

24×7x365 Support

We once did a network audit for a client who said that a few years earlier, his building had burnt down to the ground at the same moment that their IT guy was on an airplane to India! Clearly, having one or two IT Guys is not going to get your company the same level of support as an entire team — already taking calls 24×7x365. 

This post could go on for quite some time, but by now you get the idea: Even a 20 person network has a great deal more work than one person can handle (or provide expert effort on each task calling for an expert.)

The final point: Cost

With all of these experts, the staff, the 24 by 7 by 365 support, the virtual Chief Technology Officer, etc. you may be thinking that it would be prohibitively expensive to outsource.  However, that is not the case.  On average, it costs less than the full time salary of ONE IT Guy to outsource and get the entire benefit package above and much more…for up to about 50 person companies.  At 150 people it usually costs less than two IT Guy salaries.  Beyond 150 people, it begins to make sense to have some onsite support — with an outsourcing firm doing most of the day-to-day work.

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This post is continuing in a series that started with a monster post that discussed how to benchmark your I.T. service delivery vs. your competitors. That post is here: http://www.crcexchange.com/benchmark-your-it-vs-your-competitors-it

Flat-Rate IT? What’s the catch?

If a company hasn’t experimented flat rate IT, they may be skeptical about what is covered and what it not under the flat-rate model. Of course, coverage can vary by company; so be sure to check references and/or testimonials of any company you are evaluating.

What Flat-Rate should be:

In much the same way that an all-you-can-eat restaurant allows each paying person to consume all of the food that one person can eat, flat-rate IT allows a company to consume unlimited IT resources with the only limit keeping things reasonable is the size of the company.

Staying with the analogy, if the next evening a returning client brings a date to the all-you-can-eat restaurant there will be two fees to pay. In this model, it is fair to the consumer (no matter how hungry) and fair to the business.

Now picture your computer network. After a network audit, designed to catalog your current infrastructure, you should be offered a fixed monthly fee to receive IT service. Receiving IT service means both getting and keeping the infrastructure stable, and also ensuring that your IT strategy and your business strategy are congruent and grow together. Anything that applies to the foregoing sentence should be covered under the fixed rate as long as the number of users remains the same.

If the number of users increases or decreases, then it only makes sense that the monthly charges should increase or decrease accordingly.

Taking it to the next level

The preceding paragraphs speak to companies that have their own servers. However, an even better alternative is to allow your IT Service Provider to deliver your applications from their hardened data center. In this arrangement, your current servers are retired, and your applications are delivered from non-stop, hardened equipment that is safer, faster, more stable, and better managed than could ever be possible by having your servers in a standard office. Offered correctly, this option simply increases the fees from the above by approximately 35% (but removes all (server) hardware costs from your IT budget.)

It’s important to note that in the paragraph above, you will still be responsible for software licensing fees (for applications) but not for server operating systems. Also, you will need PC’s or dumb-terminals for your employees and still have the expense of that hardware.

So what’s not covered?

The one topic we haven’t covered so far in this post is ‘project work.’ Project work is defined as things like server migrations (e.g. moving your servers to the Service Provider data center, adding additional servers to your infrastructure for new applications), helping you to move your office.

Project work can be covered in Flat-Rate IT, but it usually adds 50% to the original quote and most companies opt not to pay for it.

The best part about flat-rate IT

Your provider is responsible for 100% of all IT problems within your organization. If you’re having problems, the provider can’t make money. In fact, the only way that the provider can make money is by creating an incredibly stable IT environment for you. So, recipients of flat rate IT tend to have the most stable networks of all!

Summary

Flat Rate IT means putting your costs on autopilot, and not spending money on IT unless you need new hardware or create project work. It is fair to the client (no matter how much work they need) and it is fair to the IT Service Firm (because they can budget their income, have less costs around creating and tracking invoices.)

If you are still paying by the hour, you should think seriously about demanding flat rate services.

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Are your company’s I.T. services growing or dying?

When you’re green you grow. When you get ripe you get rotten.

My Dad told me that over 40 years ago, and it still holds true today. Namely, if you think you’re “done” regarding anything of long term significance, it will slowly but surely degrade to its rotten end. This certainly holds true for all things business: if they are not growing, they are declining.

How do you know if the internal functions that support your business are green or ripe?

The best way is to never think you’re “done” with any part of your business — especially I.T. which is changing faster than any other internal service to your business. Compare your company to peers — even competitors — to see what they pay and what they get, and then size up those results to see if you are getting maximum value from your IT.

The only problem is that your competitors probably won’t tell you how they are implemented.

The next best way to find out if your I.T. is delivering as much value as your competitors may be receiving is by reading blogs written by industry experts, like this. To that end, here is what the companies getting the most value from I.T. are doing, and what you should do if you want to receive the same value.

• Flat Rate IT: the old ‘break/fix’ method of your IT provider waiting for you to have a problem, then billing you by the hour while he learns how to fix it is dead. You should be paying a flat rate to cover 100% of everything that may go wrong; and this flat rate should cover pro-active maintenance to keep things from going wrong. (In fact, a flat rate provider has strong incentive to try to drive your outages and problems to zero.)

• Outsource: all but the most simple of businesses need many different skills on occasional basis. In this day and age, no ‘one’ person or ‘two’ people can be experts in all of the different specialties. Hiring one or two IT guys and expecting them to do everything well would be like hiring one or two General Practitioner doctors and letting them perform brain surgery one day, heart surgery another, and eye surgery the day after. In contrast, by outsourcing to a large IT company that attracts, hires, and retains experts in all of the disciplines such as security, wide area networking, business consulting, programming, server maintenance, business continuity, disaster recovery, compliance, online systems, web presence, Search Engine Optimization, and Search Engine Marketing…you are assured of having a brain surgeon when the task is in the brain — and an eye surgeon when the task is in the eye.

• Pay for what you use: coupled with outsourcing and flat-rate payment, paying for what you use becomes much easier. This entire concept is know as Managed Services for IT, and Managed Services pricing can be simple or complex — depending on the provider. Complex pricing revolves around a price per PC, Server, Network, mobile device, etc. Simple pricing can be as easy as $x per employee. Of course the huge takeaway here is the fact that as you grow, you have predictable cost increase; and if you reduce staff, you automatically reduce cost by a predictable amount as well.

• Consider moving your servers and applications to the ‘cloud.’ In order words, most large providers offer a hosted option that will host all of the functions that your servers provide in their own SAS-70 compliant data center. With thick, concrete walls many redundant options for power and Internet, and 100% always on mentality, your business users will be better served by this increased infrastructure. As providers are already watching over and delivering critical services to other clients, your resources receive the same management and attention. Pricing here can be a simple add on per user in the best case.

• Remote support: 99% of work can and should be done remotely for the equipment that is in (or left in) your office. Issues should be resolved immediately without waiting for somebody to drive to the office (or the only IT guy to get freed up.) Only in the most unusual of circumstances should a technician be necessary on site (after set up, of course).

• Business Continuity: It’s best to think in terms of your business continuing rather than recovering — should a disaster occur. The ‘old way’ of protecting computer systems was to make a copy of all of the critical information, store it off site, and wait for a disaster to occur. Then, when the disaster occurred, weeks or months of labor were poured in to getting things nearly back to where they were. Contrast this with today’s method which is to get critical data encrypted off site as soon as it is created, to have complete images of the servers (that will restore to any somewhat-similar server), and to test the arrangement quarterly. Today’s method further protects the environment by creating back up servers in remote locations that can take over in case of disaster — thereby allowing the business to continue uninterrupted.

• Stable uptime: Computers and teeth have at least one thing in common: both require high maintenance to ensure that little problems (which will always occur) get fixed painlessly and inexpensively — lest the procrastinator end up dealing with an expensive and painful emergency (at the worst possible time.) Proper IT implementation requires that computers be monitored 24×7x365 by expert systems and technicians — who notice things like a hard-drive about to be full — and provide remediation the moment the problem is caught.

• CTO Strategy and business planning: As your business grows and as time marches on, your IT solution will always be falling behind unless you are having regular strategic planning sessions with a Chief Technology Officer. The CTO is should be up-to-date on the latest trends, traps, and technology and should be helping to guide you through the maze of: what is essential, what is too much risk, and what should be evaluated — for your business. Correct IT service delivery provides a virtual Chief Technology Officer and regular calls and/or meetings — in business English (not technobabble) to help you to guide your company where you want to be.

• Intrusion detection and prevention: threats come from all sides (virus, malware, SPAM, hackers (both internal and external)), and your IT service company should be on top of preventing 99% of these and detecting any of the 1% that get through the first layer of defense before these intrusions become risks to the company. Proper delivery of IT should provide you with reports that monitor threats detected and eliminated, and ongoing effort must be applied to keep your network safe.

• Helpdesk: Best-in-class IT Outsource providers deliver 24×7x365 help desk solutions to keep your staff working at peak efficiency all year long. Any technology-related question should be fair game (from ‘how do I create a mail merge?’ to ‘I need help evaluating a mobile device’ to ‘I would like a program installed’ and even ‘I am having trouble scanning a document from our printer to our network.’ In today’s business climate, many people are working at odd hours, and best-of-breed IT Service companies understand that people need to get their work done, and are always available for your staff to call.

• Hardware/Software acquisition: Large IT firms have relationships with the major hardware and software vendors, and should be able to provide Fortune 100 pricing and support options along to your company. Strong vendor partnerships allow IT firms to get the best support from the vendors — and thereby get and keep your systems up and running quickly.

• Routine maintenance: part of what keeps IT infrastructure stable is a dedicated, failsafe maintenance method to keep the latest security patches on computers, tidy up their hard drives from fragments of old and deleted information, and scanning them for viruses, etc. Larger IT service companies have software called ‘agents’ that exist on PC’s and Servers to automate this maintenance and ensure that everything continues to run smoothly.

• Software upgrades, and rollout to users: Many companies have line-of-business applications that are unique to their line of business. Examples are legal trackers, construction and job-cost estimating and invoicing systems, etc. Best-in-class IT outsourcing companies require that you keep this software under maintenance contract with the vendor, but will take on all of the work to interface with the vendor — including roll out of new and upgraded versions.

• Vendor management: Since most of the office equipment and systems in your office now tie back to your computer network, it makes sense that your IT vendor should be the entity to communicate with your ISP, your telephone vendor, your dial tone provider, etc. This feature further reduces your costs, and ensures that technical people are communicating when and where they need to be.

• Telephone systems support: Like most things in business, telephone systems are affected by, and interfacing with the Internet. A capable IT firm should be well versed in major telephone systems, and particularly in Voice over IP, and how to ensure quality of voice service if you are using it.

• Sales help: no discussion of IT should be complete without a mention of how computers and the Internet are integrating with the marketing and sales process. Incredible tools are available to capture and nurture leads, to educate, and to build permission-based relationships with prospective, new, and existing clients. Best-in-class Information Technology Companies understand these tools and are helping all types of companies (even companies in residential roofing and related industries) to better use these tools.

• Non-technical increase in efficiency: All of the above should be implemented with an eye towards trying to save the average employee time during the day. In an average office of 50 people, saving each person just 10 minutes per day results in an extra person-day of productivity for your company every day. While this appears to be a soft cost savings, it translates to real dollars in not having to hire one additional person because the work is being absorbed by the 50 existing employees.

• Cost savings: Hiring just one IT guy costs an average of over $5,000 per month, and results in one person who can never get sick, go on vacation, quit, or leave the company for any reason without exposing the entire network to crash and disaster. If outsourcing a 50 person company costs approximately the same $5,000 per month, but gains a person-month of productivity, the business can see an increase in hard cash of $5,000 per month simply by replacing the sole IT resource with an Outsource company — and gain the efficiencies and peace of mind of knowing that the company is always there to cover IT: 24×7x365: no vacations, no sick leave, etc.

In summary: how much of this are you doing, and how much of it do you need to do?

Without a Network Audit, it can be difficult to know; and that is the final point of this post: the Network Audit should be free. We commonly see companies charge $1,200 for 3 days of human labor that can be accomplished in 30 minutes using the proper tools.

With the proper tools it’s easy to find out how far (if at all) your company falls short of the current state-of-the art.

And if you believe that your competitors may be ahead of you in this area (or that you have a chance to get ahead of them), and the audit is free, why would you not want one?

You can get one here at: http://www.crcsecure.com/free_network_security_audit.asp.

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Everyone knows that we entrepreneurs wear a lot of hats.

What they don’t know is that in order to wear all of those hats, we have to self-educate to the point of a Master’s Degree in each of the departmental hats we wear. Of course, we need to get this education during the same time we have to grow and manage our businesses. Making matters worse, things are always changing; so we must not only attain the level of executive (fill in the blank with Marketing Officer, Sales Officer, Technology Officer, etc.); but we must also keep up with continuing education.

There are only four options for filling these critical roles: not-at-all, do-it-yourself, hire-someone, or outsource.

Not-at-all: Well, this won’t work for long. Depending on where your company is in the growth stage, it might be able to coast without critical leadership and execution in one or more department(s), but sooner or later things will come unglued.

Do-it-yourself: Many SMB owners work 100+ hours per week, and one of the main reasons is that they have not succeeded in delegating critical tasks. This lack of quality-lifestyle is the opposite of what most SMB owners wanted when they started their company. Yet, when not-at-all is not an option, do-it-yourself is the next most selected way. Of course, to do-it-well, one must become an expert in doing a job that s/he may have never wanted (Marketing? Sales? HR? Accounting? Technology?). This option translates to extremely long hours of an instant climb to competency — and effort to stay at that level.

Hire-someone: While this sounds like a great idea, there can be a major fly in this ointment: some departments (like IT) require someone who is capable of thought-leadership, but also somebody who is willing and able to execute the day-to-day tasks. Very often in the average SMB, there just is not budget to hire an entire department to fill a role. For example, in technology, you need a CIO or a CTO for strategic direction and planning, and you need networking staff that will be happy to be taking computers apart at 2am trying to figure out why they will not boot up. Often, the case is that only one person can be hired; so the SMB owner/manager tries to find one person who can fill both roles. Good luck with that.

It is very difficult to hire just one IT person as each area of IT is a specialty. Networking people are needed (occasionally) when you need to connect offices, allow people to work from home securely, or connect securely with a client or vendor. Systems people are needed for new servers, migration to new email systems, etc. Security personnel are needed occasionally to test your network. Programmers, web-hosting personnel, Database Administrators, and Business Analysts all have their role. No, one person, is an expert in all of these fields; and most SMB’s need the services of each — occasionally — for a short time — every so often. The above facts make it extremely difficult to hire one (or even two) IT staffers and get the broad range of services that you will need over time.

Outsource: Some departments lend themselves to outsourcing better than others. IT is an excellent fit for outsourcing, but sales may not be such a good fit. Nobody can sell a business like its owner, but not every owner is a technician (and even those who are will be better served by selling — rather than being technical.) Because IT is easily measurable, and because IT personnel do not need the in-depth business knowledge necessary to sell or deliver a company’s products or services, it is much easier for the average SMB to outsource IT than other departments.

If you select a sufficiently large IT Outsourcing firm, all of the skills mentioned under ‘hire-someone’ above are available — only as needed. For each area requiring expert skill sets, only experts perform these tasks for your business. This, far and away, is a superior model than you sitting down with a router and an instruction manual attempting to enable secure access to your network for your work-at-home employees! It is also far superior to hiring an expert on Microsoft Servers (who will likely use the free Microsoft Tools to deliver secure access to your network because that is what s/he knows — when clearly there are far superior methods of delivering secure access.)

The goal to owning a business and having a personal life is achieved by getting yourself out of the systems that run your business.

If you’re considering a change in how your company manages IT, consider outsourcing the entire IT department as the method with the most benefit for all of the above reasons. Once you’re out of the IT business, you can gain back some of your personal life. Next, you may want to start working on HR, Accounting, etc.

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If you’re like most SMB executives, you’re always doing 17 things at once. If some of those responsibilities are Sales and/or Marketing: read on…

Your website has become the primary face of your company. Anyone who has any interest in your company for any reason starts there. So you spend considerable budget having it written, and then promoting it on and off line as much as possible. Finally, a user fills out a ‘contact us’ form and submits the form… What happens then?

In many cases: nothing. Perhaps you reply (hours later) and the person who hit submit never answers, or says they were just doing some initial research. You shrug and go on to the other 16 things that need your attention, and this person gets lost in a sea of “should have done’s” and business goes on.

Unknown to you, he also filled out a form on a competitor’s website. On your competitor’s site, the lead information automatically went in to a CRM system — perhaps Salesforce.com. Salesforce auto-responded with a friendly email (immediately) and sent some links that are likely to interest the reader. The links offer different ‘online courses’ that he could opt-in — to help him with his education about your competitor’s products or services.

After opt-in, your competitor’s technology begins sending a short email with a link to that day’s course every few days or weeks (timed to match the average buying cycle of your prospect). As time goes on, your competitor is in front of this prospect on a regular basis, and providing education — something valuable to the prospect.

Perhaps the prospect also checked the ’subscribe to newsletter’ box. This fact was automatically captured, and integrated with the lead, and a no-spam emailing service such as VerticalResponse.com — tightly integrated with your CRM system, begins emailing newsletters in addition to the online course emails.

Over time, the prospect develops a relationship with your competitor’s company, and gets to know them — and begins to feel comfortable with them. When the prospect is ready to buy, he has forgotten that he ever filled out your form, and goes directly to the company that he now has a relationship with — your competitor.

So, if you are not already using all of the technology mentioned above, why aren’t you?

Often people don’t use these technologies because they think it is going to be time consuming and expensive to set up, but this is simply not true. A competent IT Service Company can make the necessary changes to your website, sign up and/or integrate with a CRM package and email auto-responder in less than a few hours.

Unfortunately, most companies are using small IT companies that don’t put much in to marketing, but rather rely on word-of-mouth and referrals to gain new clients; and they simply can’t share what they don’t know.

When you interview Outsourced IT Services, one of the important things to consider is how they go to market, and what they bring to the table to help you to do the same.

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As CEO, you only have two responsibilities:

• Create a perpetually increasing deal flow of better quality clients
• Continually evolve  your products and service delivery to maximize client satisfaction, and therefore: lifetime client value

Sounds simple, yes?

In a word: No.  The price of admission is 100 hours per week, and you had better be spending the majority of those hours developing, testing, refining, and perfecting systems that get you out of the day-to-day tasks and replicate your passion, enthusiasm, efficiency, and delivery — without you needing to be in the picture.

So here’s the sanity check: How many hours per week to you spend managing technology?

The only sane answer should be: less than one.

If your answer is, “none, because the CxO does it,” that is still the wrong answer.  The senior management team needs to be working on the business and not in the business as much as possible.  Yet, so often the job of managing the I.T. infrastructure falls on the back of this team.

Why is it that CxO’s end up managing technology?

Technology is so critical to most businesses, and the costs for evolving it, managing, it — and getting it wrong — are so high that these tasks are often absorbed by the most senior people in the small to medium business.  Ironically, it is these same people who least have the time to manage something so intense.

How managed IT services gets the CxO team back to business:

A competent IT Service Company,  having spent years developing best practice policies and procedures for IT, has the resources to better-manage the IT infrastructure than even the CxO team is capable of doing.  By plugging in to a proven system, the CxO team sees the IT Infrastructure stabilize…the problems diminish…and the users become more productive.  After a short time, the problems almost completely disappear due to the experienced proactive management by a capable IT Outsourcing Company.

Gradually, the CxO team finds that it no longer needs to manage the IT services within its company, and only needs to log in to a web portal and get an instant, graphical representation of the health of its network.  This simple step takes a few minutes per month — and allows the executive team to refocus on the two tasks at the top of this post that matter most.

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