So, What's Your Plan?

Which plan is that? The one for how all your IT applications work together to help your business succeed. The plan that goes right along with your business plan as one of the important living documents that you read and update every year. The one that details what your business needs to accomplish your mission, whether it's building hotels or building brands through innovative marketing programs. That plan that identifies what IT resources you have, what they do, and how you know they are effective, current, and secure.

If you're mumbling something like, "I know, I'm going to do that one of these days, but I've been busy, and you know how it is." Yes, we do know. After the first rush of getting a business launched, you focus on making it grow. As you need new IT solutions, you buy the software that seems best for the particular task. Only later do you find out that there is no way to export data from one system to another. You upgrade the operating system and then learn that some of your important applications won't run anymore. It happens all the time, and small businesses pay the price in slowed growth and unnecessary cost.

Last week we talked about how small businesses can learn from how large corporations handle their systems. You don't have to have millions of clients and billions of dollars to get the best combination of IT resources; all you need is some solid planning before you start spending. That's what large organizations do; they invest in planning before they spend the first dollar.

A solid IT plan starts with defining all your needs and then identifying the best solutions to meet them. It includes planning for hardware, operating system, and software version upgrades including system security. An important part of planning that is sometimes overlooked is setting the policies that define how the system will be used, and when components will or will not be replaced.

Take for example if you have 10 staff and 5 PCs. Your plan should include a statement regarding how the internet will be controlled, and a policy preventing employees from downloading too much of the wrong thing. Not only could you have a security risk with all those downloads, but you might be blowing your budget on broadband costs, running up $1,000's of unnecessary cost. One method is to remove control of firewall software from the end user and buy a robust router. This centralises control and lets you manage the network. Or consider this: The average total cost of ownership for a PC out of warranty and more than 3 years old is around $600 per year, and even more with lesser known brands. But a new PC with a 3-year warranty is around $1,100. Do the math and you'll find a saving of more than 33% over a 3-year period. It pays to turnover your network hardware when the warranties run out.

Your plan documents all of this so you have a blueprint for growth, doesn't it?. Yes, you can probably do this yourself - if you have the expertise to compare the technical options and understand the complexities of putting together software from different vendors to create the unique package that will serve you best. Or, you can do what larger companies have learned is the easier and more cost-effective way; choose an experienced professional IT implementer to guide you through the maze of possibilities.

So, what's your plan?

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don't sweat - Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

The Handheld Revolution

There you are in a hotel two or three time zones from home, feet up and cool beverage in hand. You've finished your meetings for the day and now it's time to open the laptop, check on email, review your next presentation, and get ready for tomorrow. Except the hotel's Internet connection is down so your laptop isn't talking to anyone, at least for the time being. Not a problem. You have your hand-held, perhaps a BlackBerry or maybe a Treo, and you're still in business.

Mobile computing has improved exponentially in the last few years to the point that, today, you can make phone calls, receive and send emails and instant messages, take pictures, update your calendar, browse the Internet, download and review documents, and play music, all from that one small device. There are models that have WiFi capability, 3G technology, and video recording ability. With some, you can even figure out where you are with GPS capabilities.

With older handheld devices, when you were away from home base and your PDA's synching cradle, you had to depend on email or a phone call to let you know about a schedule change. No more. The newer handhelds have push technology that doesn't wait for you to ask "What's new?" Changes to your calendar, tasks, and email in Outlook take only seconds to automatically synch to your BlackBerry, Windows Mobile or mobile phone calendar.

Sometimes what you need is a quick look at a document or spreadsheet. No problem now for the newer handhelds. With small screen readers much better than they used to be, you can receive Acrobat, Excel and Word documents on your phone and read them easily. This capability becomes even more powerful coupled with the latest version of MOSS (Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server) intranet software. Now, handheld users can see mobile versions of their KPI data, those all-important measures of performance.

Imagine you are at a client's office an hour away from your office. How much would it be worth to know that the prospect you've been trying to get in to see for months can see you today if you can be there in two hours? That's when you can quickly see the value of making a full-featured handheld part of your every day business outfit.

With these new mobile computing options there is no longer any question about whether we can be connected anytime, anywhere . Should we always be connected? Ah, that is a topic for another day.

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don't sweat - Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

Dashboards are Not Just for Cars

Remember the first time you slid behind the steering wheel of a car, gripped the wheel, and saw the instruments on the dashboard? It was exciting to feel that you could be in control of that powerful machine. All the dials and gauges spread out before you told you how fast you were going and how well the car was functioning. You had all the information you needed to go wherever you liked, whenever you wanted.

I can’t promise that thrill each time you look at your business dashboard, but you will find it gives you the same sort of up-to-the-minute readout on how well you are doing on your business journey.

A business dashboard presents visual displays of data pulled from different business systems, and tells you at a glance how things are going. A dashboard can provide real-time intelligence that includes your key performance indicators (KPIs), and can generate ad hoc reports to support decision-making. The display might include red-yellow-green lights, graphics such as bar charts and gauges, summaries, and drill-downs, all to provide consolidated information.

A well-designed dashboard is customizable and usually role-driven, so that the dashboard displayed on the company president’s screen will be different from that of the CFO or the middle manager. The good news is that the source data for a dashboard is probably already sitting in your system right now. With a bit of planning and design work, the information living down in your digital records can be given visible form and made to work for you in new ways.

Employees benefit from having the information they need to do their job right at their fingertips, and dashboards generally allow for customization to the individual’s likes and interests. For the CFO, accounts receivable aging status can be displayed in a bar chart, but the same data could appear as a pie chart for the CEO. The Sales Manager can see the comparison of monthly goals to actual performance, and then drill down to each salesperson’s individual performance. And for the Project Manager who has customized his desktop with widgets for weather and surf conditions, it’s a simple matter to add KPI information to tell him which tasks are on, ahead, or behind schedule and which are running over budget.

In your car you have spread before you all the vital information to get from where you are to where you are going. Fuel remaining, speed, distance traveled, engine function, warning lights, perhaps even compass direction as well as time and distance to destination. On your computer screen, the digital dashboard does the same for your business.

Gentlemen, start your engines!

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don't sweat - Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

Wouldn't it be nice to know you know what you know?

If your head is spinning from that title, here's another way of saying the same thing. Your business has accumulated a vast amount of data that can be of value to you now and as your business grows. But if all that data is not in a form that you can easily retrieve and analyse, it is of little use. You may actually be sitting on a treasure trove of information that could improve your customer service and your profit, but how to get hold of the treasure?

Knowledge Management can bring order to this chaos and help you find the nuggets buried in your data stores. Many small businesses simply do not realise that they have been building an unstructured collection of valuable data. Applying knowledge management tools can organize and mine this storehouse, and also make it possible for the information to be shared across the organization.

Too often, customer billing information is in one file, purchasing history is in another and client contact information in another. Project information including the skills needed, who worked on what, how long they took, and how much it cost compared to the revenue, all that is somewhere else. Imagine how valuable it would be to look down into your data stores and discover connections and relationships you might not have noticed before. What could that mean to building and enhancing customer relationships? To your company's strategic planning? What might you change if you discovered patterns of buying that you had not seen before?

In many ways, knowledge management is a living thing. As humans, we are constantly renewing ourselves. We recognise changing conditions, draw on our memories of what has served us well in the past to deal with change, visualise alternative outcomes, and make decisions about how we will proceed. We carry our database on our shoulders and make connections and see relationships that change continually as we gather new data from our experiences. That's very much like what a knowledge management system can do for a business.

In today's increasingly high-speed, competitive environment, businesses cannot afford to waste resources or miss opportunities. I've found that a frequent benefit of knowledge management is an increase in internal collaboration and sharing of best practices. As a company, you already know more than you think you know. And now you know that knowing is not enough; you have to be able to share knowledge and eliminate duplication.

Know what I mean?

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don't sweat - Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

Project Management Headaches? Here's How to Get Relief

Have you ever tried to manage a number of projects, keeping track of resources, budgets, and milestones, and communicating essential information to everyone involved? It can make you feel like the juggler spinning plates, dashing from one to the next, trying to keep them all going at the same time. Inevitably, a plate comes crashing down.

As a small business, the project management tools available to you have been either hard to use or non-existent. Microsoft Project can be used for general planning, but unless you have a full-time expert on staff, MS Project is just too difficult to use. Large companies may make the investment to establish and maintain a project management office; it is simply not practical for most small to medium sized businesses.

That leaves spreadsheets for planning and tracking, and the challenge of rolling multiple spreadsheets into one summary to give management a useful overview of progress. For a one-time view it can work, but updating and maintaining data integrity of all the individual project spreadsheets creates more headaches than it solves.

So what is a growing, successful small business to do? You need a dashboard view for high level oversight, but you also need to be able to drill down and see up-to-date information on what is happening with each individual project. You need to communicate quickly, accurately, and completely with everyone involved, and be sure that they have information they need. Staying within time and budget limits requires the ability to manage change orders to avoid "scope creep". You need to view and distribute reports. And when a project is complete, you need to collect and analyze the all-important best practices that result.

All that functionality does not have to translate into higher system cost. In my experience, many tools over complicate the process. Adding complex features to software does not always translate into benefits, so don't assume that high-end will mean high quality results for your business. The ease of use is at least as important a factor in choosing your project management software as is the price. An expensive, complex program will only work as well as the people who have to use it every day. I've found that products such as BrightWork and CopperProject are wonderful at adhering to the KISS principle.

When you are ready to choose a project management solution, be sure you consider the less complex and lower cost options as part of your selection process. You and your budget may be pleasantly surprised!

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don't sweat - Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.