It’s all about Perspective

 There’s a small television set in my kitchen. On a shelf above the TV, there is a cluttered shelf where, among other things, a small pill-cutter generally lives. Two weeks ago, just when I wanted to cut a pill to give to my cat, it seemed that the pill-cutter had disappeared. We looked high, low and in the middle. No pill-cutter did we see. We gave up, based on my late mother’s philosophy that we would find anything after we had stopped looking for it and based on my cousin’s observation that anything you look for will magically show up immediately after you have bought its replacement.

This morning, while looking for something else, I happened to glance behind the back of the TV. Voilá! There was the pill-cutter, blending with the scenery of cables, clutter and dust. It was all about perspective. What a pleasant surprise!

Here in snow-bound Maryland, you sure can tell the perspective of the folks who have planned well ahead.  One local county school system has announced that classes will be closed for the remainder of the week, and that the President’s holiday will be a regularly-scheduled classday.  Others keep announcing only one day at a time. Some people bought groceries for a week ahead, while others are out there scrambling a day at a time.

We’ve been providing technical services for a number of organizations over the years. We sure can recognize those who plan well ahead for unforeseeable contingencies and those who do not. The ones that plan well ahead and act on their managed services reports  get the pleasant surprises. Those who do not pay a heavy premium when they buy when they simply needed managed services to look where they had not. 

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Scott Adams has it right. Technology is no Place for Wimps

Today I’m wearing my Dilbert “TECHNOLOGY: No place for wimps” sweatshirt. Scott Adams has it right. Technology is no place for wimps.

Frankly, I do not want an Internet search tool that advertises itself as my decision engine, or that tells me what is “Popular now” on its home page, or that suggests in its Preferences page that I should identify my location with city and state or postal code to get search results that might be relevant to my area.  As an intelligent adult who has been using search engines for many years, I prefer a genuine search tool that finds web pages with (or without) specific words and possibly some exact wording or phrase. At my choice.

As for an electronic portal discussed by Martha Stewart during her morning talk show as a way to get myself organized, please! I can organize myself in ways that make sense to me but would leave Martha in knots. Martha, please stick to food, entertaining and crafts—your core expertise.
Then there are the folks who allow a major enterprise application shape the way they think about their business than find a way to work the other way around…configure the application to fit their needs. It’s because the people who might very well have been told that the application can be configured to meet their needs have been trained to accept only the “defaults.”

How many times have you received a phone call from someone in a call center who has asked you for (among other things) your fax number? How many people do you know who say “You do not need this information to process a request for your online newsletter, since you will not be sending it to me by fax?” The call center person is simply in automatic mode, trying to fill out all the blanks in a data sheet. Those who simply hand over their fax number for no reason at all are simply responding to that.  And then later wondering why they receive so many blatently misleading faxes advertising vacations in Florida.

Lest you think I’m simply being a grouch on the first day of the year, consider the extent to which your thinking has already been shaped in ways you might not have realized. How often have you flipped from one major television news program to another (NBC, ABC, FOX and CBS) only to find that most of the news coverage–except for the “soft news”–is pretty much identical? Where do you go to find actual news (not commentary) carried? PBS? CNN? Would you believe Russia Today or Al Jazeera, which are not on Comcast or Verizon’s FIOS TV Central?

We have our very thought patterns shaped by what someone else offers us, not by what we ourselves necessarily want or need. Under those circumstances, technology—especially that which seeks to shape our thinking the way its manufacturer—and/or the technology experts—present it to us thinks about any given business process or service—is no place for wimps.

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Got GoldMine? Bad Old News, Good News and the “Catches” —- Part 2

Back on November 7, I announced that “Until December 18th 2009, GoldMine Standard  Edition users can upgrade to GoldMine Premium Edition at $355 per seat.  Additional seats for the same price are available if the additional seats are included on the same order.”

Obviously, December 18 is gone.

If you place your order after December 18 but by January 29th 2010 you can upgrade from GoldMine Standard Edition to GoldMine Premium Edition for $405. That’s still a savings over the standard price for GoldMine Premium Edition.

The Catches remain the same:  You must order a minumum of five (5) GMPE licenses with maintenance required on all seats. Orders—which go through a GoldMine partner such as Pequod Systems—must be received by the FrontRange GoldMine partner in time to reach FrontRange by the deadline.

We have a few client tasks to complete over the holiday but are looking forward to spending time with family and friends.  I’m taking some time out to catch up and rest up to be ready for 2010.  Be warm, be safe and remember not to put your cell phone in one hand and your steering wheel in the other as you’re tooling down an InterState at 60 MPH.

Happy Holidays, all!

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Managed IT Services in Plain English: Are you Kidding Me?

Our last blog talked about hardware, and most specifically, hard drives.  Sometimes some really strange, improbable and not quite verifiable stories come to light after a full inventory of computer hardware is made. Consider the case of BROKDLEG.

My office workstation is a modest Hewlett-Packard box with nothing unusual about it…or so I thought until recently.

First, some background. As a contractor on a number of large Federal and commercial projects, I develped a healthy respect for consistent conventions for naming all manner of objects on a network.  Furthermore, you don’t name a product or a version with a name that is disrespectful or spiteful—unless, of course, you want to have your career suddenly cut short.  So imagine my surprise to discover that the model name my workstation was sporting suggested a broken leg! Was there a setting somewhere that could be changed? How did my computer get a model name like that in the first place? There were a number of articles on the Internet that included the model name BROKDLEG. But not one that questioned the model name.  It seemed a very odd model name for HP, for which a far more typical name is Z400.

So we called HP and heard an amazing story that left me scratching my head. It seems that back when HP was merging with Compaq, a disgruntled technician named a number of workstations of a particular model as BROKDLEG. And no, it could not be changed. Whether that technician was already slated for an exit is an open question. We were simply told that the technician was fired when that particular stunt was discovered.

So now the inventory of our network includes an entry for an HP workstation with the model as shown here.

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Managed IT Services in Plain English: II

A while back, I promised that the next blog would talk about inventory of computer hardware, the use of hardware vendor-supplied information about your hardware and what this information can do for you. Today hardware inventory is gathered automatically and remotely with a small piece of well-configured software that simply reads what the hardware is.

In addition to its usefulness for insurance purposes, a complete automated inventory of computer hardware does many things for business.  It’s a great place to begin assessing overall network efficiency and capacity for software upgrades.

Consider the executive faced with a choice of upgrading an old but mission-critical application no longer supported by a manufacturer. (Yes, it does happen!) That’s when  an inventory showing where hard drives with a required amount of space for that mission-critical software can make the difference between an upgrade on pre-existing hardware or purchase of an entire new server.   For the technical support team that assembled this information, providing that information can either be slow, painful and expensive or it can be immediate, easy and offer great return on customer investment.

In the example below,  we see a server that still has 81% of its capacity on a particular drive available to be used for an application. Further information collected by that same, small and remote piece of software about  that server can determine that server’s suitability for upgrade of a mission-critical piece of sofware.

Managed IT Services. Not sexy, but definitely a service with great return on investment.

Got GoldMine? Bad Old News, Good News and the “Catches”

If you are still using GoldMine Standard Edition, this blog definitely is for you.

Front Range, the manufacturer of all  GoldMine in its various versions, stopped distributing GoldMine Standard Edition some years back.  Users of GoldMine Standard Edition cannot receive technical support for that version directly from FrontRange.

It’s not the GoldMine you started out with on your laptop years ago.  The only officially-supported GoldMine now lives on a corporate server.  Sorry, a local workstation does not count as a GoldMine server.

That’s the bad old—very old—news.

Now the good news—and the catches.

Until December 18th 2009, GoldMine Standard  Edition users can upgrade to GoldMine Premium Edition at $355 per seat.  Additional seats for the same price are available if the additional seats are included on the same order.

If you place your order after December 18 but by January 29th 2010 you can upgrade from GoldMine Standard Edition to GoldMine Premium Edition for $405.

Longtime loyalists from Standard Edition days, GoldMine Premium Edition has a very different “look and feel” from what you are accustomed to working with.  And there are many more new features.  I recommend going to the test drive to check it out.  The Pequod Systems order desk is at 301.445-6206.

The Catches: You must order a minumum of five (5) GMPE licenses with maintenance required on all seats. Orders—which go through a GoldMine partner such as Pequod Systems—must be received by the FrontRange GoldMine partner in time to reach FrontRange by the deadline.

P.S. Not sure which version of GoldMine you are using right now? Launch GoldMine and look at the splash screen. It’s written right there.  If you are already in GoldMine, click on HELP. Then click on ABOUT.

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“If It Ain’t Broke, don’t Fix It.” Here’s a BETTER idea for Business IT

Unless yours is a one or two person business and you conduct most—if not all—business on a personally-owned laptop and/or your cell phone, managed IT services should be a standard part of your present and future business plans. Why? What’s wrong with “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?

On average, companies lose thousands of dollars a year to network downtime—in the incremental minutes and hours of lost productivity and lost opportunities as people wait for problems to be resolved. Furthermore, on average, 70% of IT management budgets are spent on systems maintenance, leaving only 30% to invest in new technologies

Consider  IT support that significantly reduces your downtime by identifying and solving issues before you and your staff have identifiable problems—and solving the problems took minutes instead of hours to resolve the remaining issues that were not anticipated.

Now consider  shifting funding from administrative tasks to more strategic infrastructure investments that would keep your network more secure and save money in the long run.

Managed IT services generally include

• Remote support for rapid problem resolution
• Detailed site inventories of hardware and software
• 24 x 7 x 365 proactive network and security monitoring
• Scheduled maintenance and upgrades in consultation with the customer

Those who offer these services successfully generally

• hold  standard industry certifications
• are experienced partners of major,  leading hardware and/or software solutions
• are experienced partners of major hardware and software vendors
• regularly receive product updates and notices about special offers from those vendors

Transparency Tip #2 Hardware today comes with internal code that identifies its manufacturer, its version number, and its serial number. Reading that information and knowing how long that hardware has been in service and paying attention to special offers not advertised to end users can give the managed services provider some insights as to cost-savings for upgrades.

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Managed IT Services in Plain English

One of our Pequod Systems core values is to speak the language of business. No geek speak here. Since an offer of managed IT Services will soon be one of our offerings,  it’s time to talk about what “managed IT services” means in plain business English.

What I have said before is worth repeating: IT managed services allows a non-IT business with serious investments in computer technology to get on with its own efforts without worrying about backups or cash flow unpredictability due to a sudden hardware breakdown or unplanned, software incompatibility as a result of an inappropriate upgrade.

While some people have no interest in knowing how the technology behind managed services works, we believe that offering some simple, easy-to-understand basics is an important factor in developing successful working relationships. Transparency works for us.

The next blog will talk in detail about inventory of computer hardware, the use of hardware vendor-supplied information about your hardware and what this information can do for you. You will read about how a system can read your hardware serial numbers and what good that does for you. After that, look for some detail about printers and, possibly, other devices on your network. Next will be a blog about software. After that, some notes about customer meetings on the subject of preventive maintenance based not on our recommendations, but on manufacturer recommendations.

Transparency Tip #1 We work with your favorite IT support person to make that support person even more efficient and effective than you might have experienced before.

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Your CRM: Return on Investment at the Speed of Trust

The more I read Stephen M.R. Covey’s The Speed of Trust, the more I am convinced that a major contributor to failure of Customer Relationship Management implementations is a lack of trust within the company that invested in the CRM.

When Pequod first entered the CRM business, one of the major anxieties we frequently heard was “You mean that anyone in this company could read my eMail?  Do they have to?” The look on the speaker’s face was usually one of anxiety and fear.

eMail is  territory that many employees  still regard as personal, despite the fact that it is sent using corporate computers and corporate software.  Courts rulings in favor of the employer rather than the employee have the effect of creating anxiety, fear and serious corporate headaches among all of us who may have sent eMail  while using corporate resources.  I recently heard of an eMail policy that actually includes chastising any innocent recipient of eMail deemed inappropriate for the workplace. What happens?  Even more anxiety and fear. Not exactly an environment for trust.

All of this fear and anxiety can lead naturally to messaging outside the CRM.  Texting, Tweeting and messaging in other social networks may help one employee build one social relationships with one potential customer while creating the illusion that one’s employer cannot see those messages. However, even if these messages seem to the employee to be totally harmless, using alternative message channels contributes nothing to help others in the same company to learn appropriate, business-building strategies from each other.

In some cases, alternative messaging reflects a desire for acceptance among friends and potential customers who mostly use these messages as chat—not necessarily the messaging that would help others in the same corporate setting. In others, it’s a sometimes futile attempt to avoid being monitored by one’s boss—or one’s employees. And in still others, it’s an effort to avoid a law suit, such as that brought by an employee’s union against an employer that enforced its policy about the use of eMail inconsistently, as in Guard Publishing Co. v. National Labor Relations Board.

In any case, failure to incorporate appropriate business-related messaging as part of a CRM effort reduces the effectiveness and return on investment made in the CRM. So what is an employer to do?

Develop a company-wide culture of genuine trust in sending, receiving and recording business-related messaging in your CRM. That will help companies recapture return on investment in CRM at the speed of trust.

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The Social Networking Experts’ Marketing

There is something truly strange in the land of Social Networking. Have you noticed the rapidly-increasing numbers of social networking experts who want to tell you all about how to make best use of social networking in your business? How to make social networking profitable? Their numbers seem to increase as our economy struggles to get back on its feet.

What’s really strange is not that these experts are suddenly coming out of the walls. Or even that a mathematical statistician friend at the U.S. Census Bureau attended a professional conference of the American Statistical Association where social networking was the focus of one of the meetings. (Evidently some rather interesting statistical conclusions are being drawn based in part on preferences one selects in FaceBook and other social networking sites. But I digress..)

What’s really strange is that these social networking experts are NOT using social networking to get my attention—and, they hope, my business. What ARE they using to get my attention? Would you believe plain old-fashioned eMail? Virtually every single piece of promotion I have received to attend this or that free  webinar has arrived in my spam-defended eMail stack. Talk about mixed messages.

So why aren’t these social networking experts using social networking to connect with me, instead of adding unto my already overflowing eMail stack? If I just spent a little more of my already overspent time in FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo or the other S/N applications, would I find myself befriending or being followed by someone who ultimately wants me to buy his or her paid seminars on social networking? Is there something about Return On Investment missing here? If I raise that issue, will I be shouted down by the Social Networkers because I am asking a suddenly social marketing incorrect question?

It beats me.

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