February 9, 2010 by Susan Ellsworth
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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Tags: "customer service", customer experience, technology, front-end planning, analysis, Return on Investment
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January 1, 2010 by Susan Ellsworth
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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Tags: activism, analysis, commercial world, creativity, customer experience, member experience, Truth to Power
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December 23, 2009 by Susan Ellsworth
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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Tags: Contacts, front-end planning, GMPE Rock-bottom Prices, GoldMine, GoldMine Premium Edition, Return on Investment, software, special prices, technology
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December 9, 2009 by Susan Ellsworth
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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Tags: analysis, BROKDLEG, Compaq, hardware, Hewlett-Packard, Managed Services
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December 1, 2009 by Susan Ellsworth
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.
Tags: "customer service", analysis, customer experience, front-end planning, hardware, Managed Services, Return on Investment
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November 7, 2009 by Susan Ellsworth
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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Tags: customer experience, GMPE Rock-bottom Prices, GoldMine, GoldMine Premium Edition, Return on Investment, technology
Posted in CRM, Campaigns, Customer Relationship Management, FrontRange, FrontRange Solutions, GMPE, GoldMine, GoldMine Premium Edition, Opportunities | Comments Off
October 13, 2009 by Susan Ellsworth

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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Tags: "customer service", customer experience, front-end planning, hardware, Managed Services, Return on Investment, software, systems, technology
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September 8, 2009 by Susan Ellsworth
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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Tags: "customer service", customer experience, front-end planning, hardware, Managed Services, Return on Investment, software
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