We talked about the huge volumes of eWaste out there and the things you can do to help reduce it in an earlier post.   But the reality is that eWaste will still exist as we need to upgrade our computers, cell phones and copiers.  So what else do you need to think about when getting rid of this equipment.  How about the fact that your confidential company data may be on it for the taking?!?!

Most people consider deleting their files from the hard drive of a computer they replace, but did you know you how easily that information can be retrieved unless it is deleted with a special program that restricts recovery?  How about the emails that are on your cell phone when you turn it in that may include your customer’s credit card information on it from the last big sale you made?  And your fax/copier/network printer?!  This unit probably contains more confidential information than your kitchen sponge has bacteria after being used for several years.  Scared?  Good.

Several studies have been done recently that determined that confidential information is being recklessly discarded to the great peril of the companies that discarded it.  CBS news did a piece on copiers that revealed medical records, criminal records, and bank statements.  Kessler International did a study of hard drives purchased on eBay and found that over 40% of them had confidential data such as corporate financial data.  For some organizations, this is a breach of corporate conduct,  Sarbanes-Oxley regulations and other  state and federal privacy laws.

Don’t worry though, you don’t need to rent a storage shed for all of your old equipment or have a huge backyard bonfire.  There are ways to ensure that your data is safe and that you are protected.  To help, we have compiled this list of 5 things you should consider when disposing of old equipment.  While following these will not guarantee that your data will never fall into the wrong hands, you can at least be assured that you have made a good effort to protect it.

You probably have a handle on how much you rely on your email, internet connection, certainly the data about your clients and financials.  Maybe you even recognize how powerful a tool your website can be.  What else should you be thinking about?  Here are 5 key questions for reflection:

1. Do you rely on an individual person to support your technologies? Whether this is an internal staff member or outside consultant, this is a single point of failure that can hurt you if they become unavailable without warning, or simply don’t have the experience or expertise needed to solve a problem in your environment.
2. Does your idea of support mean calling someone AFTER something breaks? While not every issue can be prevented, many can.  Some basic preventative maintenance of your network and even your website is a best practices that can prevent embarrassing and costly downtime.
3. Are any upcoming projects or changes in the works? Are you planning to move, expand or downsize, replace a server, target a new market, put on a major fundraiser?  While some of these things may not be directly related to technology, change is a perfect time to review what’s in place and make sure it is effectively achieving your goals.
4. Are you leveraging social media marketing to increase traffic to your website and convert the traffic into leads?  Are your competitors? We recently posted a series of articles by guest blogger Thomas Clifford “Social Media Isn’t for Business.  Yeah, Right“.  If you think it can’t help your business, school or nonprofit, this is highly recommended reading.
5. Is there anything you wish you could change about your technology, be it your network, website support (or lack thereof)? Think of this as the old “magic wand” question.  If you could wave it over your technology, what would that look like?  What would the benefits be from these changes?  What is the status quo costing you?

It’s not unusual to realize that you aren’t thrilled with what you have in place, but you’re also not sure what to do about it.  Reputable technology firms offer basic reviews with recommendations that can make a big difference for little or no cost to you as an introduction to their expertise.  Take advantage of them, and this reflection will have been time well spent to help you achieve your goals.

Picture it; sitting pool side with a cool fruity drink.  Your family is with you, the sun is out, and the temperature is 75 degrees.  It’s a beautiful picture, isn’t it?  But let’s look a little closer, as you look around the pool, half of the people are staring at their Blackberrys checking email and clicking away.  What happened to being able to unplug while on vacation!?

I recently took a trip and was able to let it all go, without stressing out that the world was ending back at the office by just doing a couple simple things:

Set proper expectations

Make sure that people understand when you will be out of the office and what types of things that they should contact you for.  It is almost as if we feel like we have to apologize for going on vacation these days, so we tell people to call us if they need anything.  The fact is if we have the right people working with us, the world should be in fine shape without our wisdom for a few days or a week  - so only emergencies should be sent in your direction.  You might even want to define what an emergency is in your organization so it’s not up to interpretation.

Set your out of office on voice mail and email

When you do this, don’t say you will be checking messages or have limited access.  Tell people that you will be unavailable.  It’s OK for you to go away for a few days, you should be able to enjoy it without having to check messages.

Use Outlook rules

Since it is hard for some of us to unplug and not check messages on our iPhones and Blackberrys even when we set good expectations, you can create yourself a rule in Outlook that only high priority emails will be sent to your phone.  Let the other stuff build up in a folder somewhere to be cleaned out when you return.  A friend recently offered a great thought: “Email is like wine, it ages quickly”.  Most of the stuff in the folder will be out of date before you ever see it.  You’ll be able to delete it when you return.  To setup a basic rule to move normal importance mail to a different folder than the inbox, do the following in Outlook 2007:

1. Click on Tool, Rules and Alerts
2. Click on New Rule and the rule wizard appears
3. Select “Check message when they arrive” under the “Start from a Blank Rule” section, Click Next
4. Check “Marked as Importance” and when it appears at the bottom, click the word “Importance” and select “Normal” from the dropdown.  Click Next.
5. Check “move it to a specified folder” and when it appears at the bottom, click on “specified folder”.  Select the folder you want to move mail to or create a new one for this purpose.  Click Next.
6. Continue through the wizard for any other exceptions you want and to name your rule.
7. Remember to turn the rule on when you go on vacation.

At the end of the day it all comes down to expectations.  If you set the expectation that you are available, people will treat you that way.  With these quick tips, you can also control your urge to check messages every time you see the number of “new” ones increase.

The bottom-line with LinkedIn is that people would much rather work with people who their friends and colleagues know and trust. To truly realize a return on the investment of time required by LinkedIn you need to increase your number of viable connections and thus increase your chances of getting more business. In order to make your profile more appealing you need to nurture it by being committed to completing at least one or two LinkedIn tasks every single day. Make a connection, join a group, or just enhance your profile. Be sure to track the traffic to your website and what percentage of it comes from LinkedIn.

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

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.

I started my business in 1997 with the same basic mantra we use today; provide technology solutions to support business goals.  While the technology has changed, the attitude hasn’t.  Do what we need to do to satisfy the customer and bill them for an honest amount of time to do it.  Well as we have grown that has become more difficult.  More staff, more clients and more personalities has caused us to have to put more procedures in place to make sure that everyone is treated fairly and we still have the possibility of making a (small) profit in the end.

Now in comes the Massachusetts data security law and we have another entire set of issues for not only us but all of our clients.  We have checklists for them to follow so they are not liable for potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.  Plus we need to have an acceptable use policy (AUP) , a written information security policy (WISP) and now they are talking about PCI compliance because we come in the vicinity of credit cards numbers!  What ever happened to “my word is my bond”?  I would so rather spend time helping people figure out what makes an effective website, how to handle their technology planning and budgeting, or how to determine the ROI of installing a network server.

No question that running a business in today’s high tech/high risk environment is different than pre-Y2K but I never thought I’d spend more time reviewing internal policies than getting out and helping clients with their businesses.  At least we get the opportunity to help our clients create some of these policies too!

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?

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional online network with more than 45 million users representing 150 industries, and in case you’re wondering, the company itself is valued around $1 billion. Since September 2008, when the economic crisis hit, it has seen a 25% increase in the rate of sign-ups as concerned professionals look to keep their contacts up to date. That equates to approximately 1 million new users every two weeks. In terms of activity by those users, in the last two months there has been a 15% increase in the issuing of invitations to get people to join business networking circles and there has also been a 14% increase in the amount of recommendations made by users endorsing another member of LinkedIn.

The explosion of LinkedIn usage brings to mind the age old question of Quantity versus Quality.   Would you prefer to have 500 good contacts, or would you rather have 50 great contacts? The former may inflate your network statistics, but the latter may inflate your sales statistics. We can’t all be like Ron Bates, but do we want to be?

Who is Ron Bates you ask? With 44,000 direct contacts on LinkedIn, Ron has been referred to as “the most connected man on Earth.” In fact, I just tried to connect with Ron last night. I haven’t been accepted yet, but I did it for fun and I don’t expect any business to come from it. To effectively use LinkedIn to promote and grow your business you don’t need a ton of contacts, you just need a handful of great contacts that are in need of the services that your company offers and are interested in working with you or know others who would be.

If you’re hoping 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.

The bottom-line with LinkedIn is that people would much rather work with people who their friends and colleagues know and trust. To truly realize a return on the investment of time required by LinkedIn you need to increase your number of viable connections and thus increase your chances of getting more business. In order to make your profile more appealing you need to nurture it by being committed to completing at least one or two LinkedIn tasks every single day. Make a connection, join a group, or just enhance your profile. Be sure to track the traffic to your website and what percentage of it comes from LinkedIn.

There are many ways to establish sustainable relationships through LinkedIn.  Find out how to put the power of LinkedIn to work for your business by downloading part one 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