Let me start by saying that we strive to go beyond being “vendors” for our clients by combining our expertise and experience in technology with their expertise and experience in their industry and their organization.  That combined approach allows us to be a “technology partner”.  Be careful of the “technology vendor” who is more focused on their quotas and sales spiffs than they are on listening to your needs.  I don’t mean to get off topic here, but this is an important distinction to us!

As far as the relationship goes, there are some keys to it being successful and they all start with trust.  You need to trust that we are truly working on your behalf without some hidden agenda and we need to trust that you have given us all of the information necessary to make our engagement a successful one.  Nothing is worse than getting halfway through a project to find out that there were requirements that we hadn’t considered.  All we really want is to have the project go flawlessly so we can call it a success and you can go on improving your business.

Unfortunately, a flawless technology project really only exists in a utopia so I have written this short 5 point download about ways to mitigate those things that will go wrong.  I hope this helps you manage your future relationships with your technology partner.  If they don’t want to work in this framework, maybe they should be called a vendor.

Most of you tech savvy business people out there have had a LinkedIn account for years, but have you been truly using it to increase your business opportunities? If you want to reap the benefits of a LinkedIn account, you need to commit to actively using it on a consistent basis. At the very least you should look at your profile every day to see to see who your contacts are networking with, and if there are more “People You May Know” listed in your profile. Remember, your contacts’ new contacts are now in your network, and the groups they have joined may be of interest to you.

If you’re interested in learning about some good LinkedIn practices that help you make the most of your profile and find great contacts quickly, download part one and two of our three part series.

Without a doubt, the answer to the above question is THE BUSINESS!  But it’s amazing how often we forget this when looking at new technology to implement in a business.  Far too often, a cool new technology noticed by a business owner or the desire of their IT company to play with a new technology drives the decision for an implementation.  While there may be merits of the technology, the decision to affect a business’s production environment should be driven by a business need.  For example, we have clients come to us all the time saying something like, “Shouldn’t we be upgrading to Windows 7?”.  Our reply is usually, “Why?  Do you feel that one of the new features can help with a business problem you are having?”  While the answer is sometimes yes, most often it is because they have a friend who got it or saw a good ad on TV.

As a technology partner for our clients, we use the mantra that business needs should always drive technology implementations, not vice versa.  To help our clients make the best use of their technology investments we will work to understand their business so we can help them make informed decisions.  Some of the things we want to determine are:

• Is there a business problem you are having that is driving this?
• Have you considered all of the costs of this implementation?
• How will this affect your interactions with your clients?

By working in this fashion, we believe it build good long term relationships as we are not simply looking to book every billable project we can get our hands on.  In the long run it is a win/win.

We have compiled a more thorough list of the things we evaluate when helping a client determine if a new technology is right for them.  Download our “10 Reality Check Items to Consider in any Technology Implementation“.

When I was working from home the other day, I started to feel a sharp pain in my side.  At first, it was just annoying but it really started slowing me down.  I was working on filing the forms for my defense in the murder charges that had recently been brought against me which really isn’t that fun so I decided that instead of continuing, I would give myself surgery to see if I could find the cause of my pain and resolve it.  I figured hey, I’ve been living with this body for 38 years, who knows it better than me?

So I got out my trusty pocket knife and jammed it into my side just above the area where the pain was so I could look around.  I took out a few organs and made quite a mess before I realized that I was probably in over my head, so I jammed everything back in and used my trusty Swingline stapler to close my side up.  Then I went back to the murder defense because I was there, who could defend me better than me?

Sound ridiculous?  Of course!!  But for some reason, we step into situations every day where non-technology folks decide that they can setup a new server or firewall themselves because they figure “how hard could it be?” only to find out that their “work” has not not only delayed the project, but for us to undo what they did will take twice as long as if they had simply let us take care of it.

We have created a checklist of questions to ask yourself before embarking on an IT project on your own.  By answering these questions honestly, it will help you decide if you should call a professional.  You can probably come up with a similar checklist for when to call a doctor or lawyer as well.

Download 5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting an IT Project on Your Own

Great question.  Maybe you shouldn’t?  We talk to clients about this all of the time and have counseled many businesses into and out of replacing network equipment currently in place.  Often the issue if forced when there is an outage of an aging server but in our network support model we try to be more proactive about the process and help a business owner understand the potential business benefits to replacing a server, leaving it as is, or even extending the warranty for another year.

The first thing you should do in considering a server replacement is calculate the ROI for the project.  Unfortunately, there is no magic number for the payback of a new server as all businesses are different but we have compiled 10  Things to Consider when making this ROI calculation.   The list includes hard calculations like the average hourly wage of your employees and the amount of time spent on repetitive processes but it also considers less concrete items like peace of mind of the business owner as that is also definitely worth something in today’s stressful business world.

Some quick guidelines as to whether or not to replace would be:

Replace if:

• There a positive ROI (as discussed above) for the project
• The server is out of warranty (if it is, it will more likely have a hardware failure) and it can not be extended
• The server does not meet your basic business functions and is holding you back

Extend the Warranty if:

• The warranty can be extended and the server is meeting your basic business needs
• You do not expect your business needs for the server to expand greatly in the next 12 months
• You would like to replace the server and it is borderline, but you need to plan for the expenditure in the next budget cycle

Generally, a server will be an effective business resource for 3-5 years depending upon business growth.  After 5 years, server hardware can become unreliable, sluggish and apt to fail.  If you are in the gray area somewhere, you may want to consider calculating the ROI of replacement to see if there is a real payback for your business.

Download 10 Things to Consider when Calculating the ROI of a Network Server Replacement

As many people in the business community are trying very hard to make the most out of a year when all the cards seemed to be stacked against us, it is easy to put off the task of figuring out what we will spend next year to move our businesses forward again.  While budgeting for technology can seem daunting at times, it is the best way to make sure that you take into account all of the things that will help your business run most efficiently with minimal downtime.

We must first consider the standard operational items such as preventative maintenance and support - which every business should have in place.  There are also a myriad of other items that often get overlooked during the budgeting process that can pop up during the year causing undue stress on the budget and the management.  Some things to consider include  software renewals,  such as anti-virus or backup software.  You should also review your current hardware to determine what is out of warranty.  Based upon the function of the device, a warranty renewal or hardware replacement may be in order.

For those of you who have already considered the items above, congratulations!  You are ahead of most businesses at this point.  There are a few more strategic items you might consider,  a new business resumption plan or updates and testing to the one you have to ensure its viability.  Also, in today’s world of hackers and viruses, many businesses are being proactive about auditing their network and web site security to protect their valuable business data.

While this all may seem overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be.  You can use a budgeting template much like the one we use for our clients or simply hire a technology company to review and plan all of this for you.  We have seen many cases where our involvement early in the process has helped our clients plan better and avoid unexpected expenses during the year.

Download the Technology Budget Planning Worksheet

With all of the buzz about Microsoft’s latest plight in the search game, Bing, I decided I should do a little research.  Naturally where did I start?  Google.  As Google has become virtually synonymous with web search, Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle even with the troops that they have, but hopefully this will help those who are trying to make a decision a little bit.

To begin, Microsoft is claiming that Bing is supposed to help users make intelligent decisions, not simply push back results so that seemed like a good starting point for comparison.  I decided to do some parallel searches with Google and Bing to see where it got me.  My first search was “Where should I eat dinner tonight?”.  For both search engines, this was just too vague.  As a seasoned searcher, I added “in Hartford” to the search to see if that helped.  While a few restaurant guides came back in each, none were very relevant or targeted for my purpose.  For example, there were ones for “restaurants close to the Hartford Court House”.  As helpful as that may be for your repeat offenders, I try to stay in the more mainstream areas in Hartford and out of trouble.

Then genius hit me.  As someone in the network support business, I searched for “Network Support Hartford CT” to see some relevant results in today’s business world.  The results in Bing were mixed.  While 3 of the top 4 results were network support companies (including ForeSite in position #2), only 5 of the 10 results on the first page were relevant.  In Google, 8 of the 10 were related to network support though 2 were for jobs in the network support field.  While I personally believe that we should be the first result in all engines we were #3 in Google.  When you remove duplicate sites in both search engines, and the paid results in Google, the results were very similar though and it would be tough to make a decision on this alone.

Bing did have one feature that I thought was helpful which was the Document Preview feature.  When hovering a result, it tries to grab relevant text from the site and display it in a pop-up window without having to go to the site.  This was helpful to see if the displayed result was relevant without having to go to all of the different web sites listed.  This is not ground breaking, but was helpful.  Bing’s last feature that was obvious was the recent search results on the left hand side of the search page.  I’m not sure how helpful this will be over time, but I could see a few applications for it if you are looking for something you found in the recent past but can’t remember what you searched for.

So, I think this is a “no decision” unfortunately for Microsoft as they will have to come out with some real bells and whistles to de-thrown Google in the search business.

Being in a service business providing computer support and web development, our product is our people’s time.  As our technical staff work on many projects and clients within a week, time planning for their weekly schedule is critical to ensure the best possible use of their time as well as the proper availability for emergencies that crop up.  To manage that in our world, we have implemented a categorization process for the types of work we perform and track what percentage of our time goes into each type.

To begin, we examined the work we did over a 12 month period and determined that the work was either recurring scheduled, planned projects, or “pop-up” work that occurs during the week that we didn’t know about ahead of time but had to handle.   I’ll refer to those types as Scheduled, Project, and Pop-up for the rest of this article.

As expected, the scheduled work we had a pretty good handle on and could calculate how much of our week would be dedicated to that.  The piece we had the least control of was the Pop-up work as these types of requests would come from our clients as they had issues or needs that couldn’t wait until their next scheduled visit.  While that was unexpected work, we found that on a week to week basis, the percentage of our time that this took was fairly regular.  So now we had two of the three variables somewhat accurately calculated.  But what about the project work?

In a client oriented network support and web development business, it is unrealistic to expect that your technical people will be 100% billable unless that are working on long term projects or placed full time at a client.  We use 80% as a target for our people which helps to account for vacations, personal time, internal meetings and training.  With that target, we need to figure out how much Project work we need to fill the gaps between the predictable Scheduled work and the peaks and valleys of the Pop-up work to hit our billable goals.

In planning the workload properly throughout the week, we have increased productivity of the individual engineer’s and developer’s as well as managed the workload to avoid missing SLAs or burning out our staff.
Additionally, proper management of the different work types has led to higher billable ratios and happier workers.  All around, it has been a win-win.