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.

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.

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

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.