Out of the Box IT
Osama M. Faris brings out of the box thinking about information technology into focus.
Posts Tagged ‘busines process’
Maturity: Better Late than Never
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010Recently I’ve noticed some things repeating. Business (and the economy more generally) often goes in cycles. FAR is going through a lot of growth. That happened before during the .com rush. Like a lot of other people, I thought the economic upswing was indestructible and I hate to say it, but I made a lot decisions that I paid for dearly.
Reminiscing gave me some pause to think about how I’ve changed as a business person over the years. I’ve changed. I’ve learned. While I’m still an entrepreneur that chases opportunity in pursuit of excellence, here are the top 5 things I’m doing differently today:
- Surrounding myself with happy people. You’d be surprised how important this is. Who would you rather have supporting your network? Someone who was competent, gruff and unhappy or someone who was competent, friendly and happy? The latter. Who wouldn’t? In fact, the only person on staff who is not overflowing with happiness is my Chief Marketing Officer. Free espresso. Free San Pellegrino. Corner office with a huge window. Still, he acts like I pooped in his cereal. What can I say? I did witness Vince smiling once; it was over our new business cards. But seriously, every business also needs serious employees. People who are serious can be happy, too.
- Putting my existing clients ahead of chasing new business. FAR customers definitely appreciate this, and many businesses make the mistake of trying to chase every dollar that floats their way. At FAR, we focus on serving a small number of customers really, really well. We say ‘no’ to business if it compromises moral principle. I prefer to make “heavenue”: heavenly work that produces revenue.
- Festina lente! It’s Latin. Yeah, I went there. It translates to: make haste, slowly. At FAR, we’ve thrown the phrase “as soon as possible” almost completely out of our corporate vocabulary. Today, at FAR we do “what is correct — quickly and cost-effectively”. Mistakes made in haste can be very expensive. So, we focus on being responsive, but in a way that avoids the panic that stems from everything being treated with equal rush priority. When you panic, you make mistakes. That’s why paramedics never run to get to an injured person. When you make basic mistakes, you might as well send your customer a singing telegram about why their money is not well-spent with you.
- The money is in a trust account. What customers are really looking for these days is a trusted advisor for IT. Not a “partner”, an “expert”, or a “computer geek”. Yesterday I was in the elevator at one of my largest customers and one of the employees in the elevator said “do you work here?” I said yes and no. She said: “I see you here all the time meeting the Boss”. Hard to explain to her in 30 seconds that I’m there all the time “meeting with the boss” due to the trusted advisor status FAR has with a multi-million dollar global enterprise.
- I don’t wait for the phone to ring. I’m proactive. It’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason. Support is often a thankless job. So, I seek out the compliments. I’m not shy about it. Just yesterday I walked into Vince’s office and said: what do you think of my new guayabera? I didn’t wait for him to answer: I said, yes, yes, it is awesome, isn’t it. I don’t wait for someone to say thank you. I call them and ask them how they’re doing.
FAR launches new hip hop video for April 1
Monday, April 5th, 2010By the time you read read this quick break from my more serious articles, I’ll be in Egypt on business. But I hope you all had a chance to check out FAR’s April Fool’s Day video and press release last week highlighting FAR’s decision to diversify it’s IT services portfolio by introducing rap music recording and production. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching for my cameo scene alone!
Be sure to read the press release and check out the Studi-O website for more details!
The Far Cloud: Giving Clients One Back to Pat
Friday, January 15th, 2010In my last blog, I mentioned “The FAR Cloud” and I talked a bit about what that means to FAR’s customers. In this blog, I’m going to address the concept in greater detail by explaining what FAR does as an IT managed service provider.
What does “IT managed services” mean?
One of the most common questions I’m asked is: what does FAR do? Most people already know that FAR does something IT related, but information technology is an extremely wide field. There are multiple layers and lots of niches. Historically, most IT firms have specialized in one of a handful of things.
Some IT firms focus on “consulting”, which typically means improving desktop and organization productivity. Some IT firms focus on technical support, and some on custom programming. Still others focus on rolling out and maintaining networks and core infrastructure systems. These are just broad categories, with lots of specific niches (for example, some IT companies focus entirely on setting up, maintaining and troubleshooting their clients’ connections to the Internet).
In contrast, IT managed services firms take a different, more end-to-end approach. IT managed services often includes everything from high-level consulting to very brass tacks technical support and monitoring. As my Chief Marketing Officer says, IT managed services firms provide customers with one back to pat. That’s really what FAR does and part of what sets us apart: we provide small and medium-sized businesses with one back to pat for all of their information technology needs, whether it’s a security audit and analysis, a network implementation, business analysis consulting, or a new laptop.
So, what’s the FAR Cloud?
In my last blog, I discussed the value and hype of cloud computing. I’ll be discussing what to host and what to put in The Cloud in a string of articles over the next few weeks. Cloud computing takes the information technology complexity out of the business premises and moves it to the Internet; FAR takes all of the IT complexities off of our clients’ shoulders, regardless of where the information technology actually sits.
As a managed service provider, FAR provides a cloud of its own so to speak. As far as our customers are concerned, whether a server sits in their server room or is virtualized somewhere on the Internet, FAR makes sure that it works as expected, that it is monitored 24/7 and that it is continuously improved. To use the industry jargon, FAR does the operations, the administration, the management, the provisioning and the troubleshooting (the OAMPT for short) for most of our clients’ IT systems, end-to-end.
Some of our clients have internal IT resources, but most do not. I would say that many of FAR’s clients don’t have an IT team, but that’s not true: that’s the service that FAR provides to them. FAR is their IT team. The FAR Cloud simply refers to the carefully planned, executed and monitored package of information technology software, hardware and software that FARs plans, put into place and then monitors in order to help our clients meet their business challenges.
The FAR Cloud includes doing everything from fixing mice and sound cards when they break, to making sure that servers don’t melt, to network rollouts, to unified communications and voice over IP systems, to making sure the network is secure, and more. “One back to pat” means that if our customers have a business process or information technology challenge, we help them to solve it in a way that’s transparent, but also doesn’t require them to master a lot of technical details. That’s the FAR Cloud.
What’s in it for customers? It’s all about values
The value that IT managed services firms provide to customers it that they (should) take all of that complexity off the customer’s plate, create a solution, put it in place, monitor it, make it work and improve it over time. That’s what the FAR Cloud provides to customers: all of the benefits of an enterprise-level IT solution at a reasonable cost with none of the complexity: peace of mind, the best possible value in terms of meeting their business requirements, and the strongest possible footing for continued growth. If you’re working with an IT vendor who’s not providing that to you, FAR definitely can!
But I’m not just going to say it and hope for the best. Over the next several articles, I’m going to be sharing many of FAR’s insights into what to host and what to keep on premise in terms of your business systems. I’m going to be blogging about how to work with your customers more securely, how to keep your costs low for your email systems, how you can get the most value from a VoIP phone system, how to make unified communications an integral part of your business and a lot more. Be sure to watch this space regularly!
What “The Cloud” means to us earthlings
Monday, January 11th, 2010
First, what is The Cloud?
The Cloud simply refers to information technologies that are externally hosted or otherwise “virtualized”. For example, your Web site is probably hosted through an Internet service provider. It’s in The Cloud. If you’re using Gmail for email, your email is in The Cloud. If you have “hosted VoIP” or “hosted Microsoft Exchange”, then that means your most business critical tools are in The Cloud. If you use SalesForce.com, Autotask or other software as a service (SaaS) offerings, you’re using The Cloud.
For IT pros, The Cloud is just a new way to refer to a general trend in computing (usually referred to as cloud computing) over the last 20 years to move computing resources and applications off-premise. For businesses, using The Cloud means that they don’t have to worry as directly about administering, managing and provisioning the hardware and underlying software for those applications (along with some up-front savings). There’s nothing especially new about The Cloud (except for the recent round of hype).
Is The Cloud really gaining momentum? Reality bites.
I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but The Cloud is still a fair amount of unrealized potential and, analysts and vendors aside, a source of confusion for us earthlings. That doesn’t mean The Cloud isn’t useful for some applications. It is. It’s just that small and medium business owners need to be careful to set their expectations accordingly and that IT professionals need to do a better job of educating customers about what the benefits and pitfalls of The Cloud are.
It’s always difficult to predict when a way of managing information technology is going to gain critical mass. Sun declared that the network was the computer in the 1990s. If you read the press at the time, we were all going to have thin-clients on our desks. Corel was converting Word Perfect to JAVA in anticipation of a swing in the market. Things didn’t turn out exactly as expected, did they?
That’s not unusual. Lots of good technologies and good ideas never transform the market. But that doesn’t mean The Cloud isn’t gathering momentum this time around. There are good reasons to believe that there is some truth to the hype about The Cloud. Security, bandwidth, decreasing costs for computing resources and other factors are looking very good for The Cloud, but there are rarely any guarantees with information technology. For now, The Cloud is still on the horizon, and FAR is advising clients to take a wait and see approach unless they have very compelling business reasons to switch to The Cloud.
What should small and medium businesses put in The Cloud and what should they keep on premise?
This is always the most difficult question to answer. It depends on the business. It depends on their costs and business model. It may even depend on the types of customers they service (their verticals). At FAR, we work with customers to put the right solutions in place for their needs. More and more, small and medium businesses, even if they have IT teams in place, need that kind of help from a company like FAR. What is important is using the right tool to meet the right challenge, and using the tools at your disposal (whether they’re in The Cloud or in your server room) in ways that work for your business.
But really, what should and shouldn’t small and medium businesses put in The Cloud?
Most companies can divide their information technology into two key groups: user productivity and related business systems (e.g,. their customer relationship management applications, their project management applications, and so on), and their core infrastructure applications (e.g., Microsoft Exchange, their VoIP phone system, their network and so on). These are general categories and some products straddle both.
The Cloud is sometimes a good way to address the needs of the first group. For example, FAR uses Autotask to manage its professional services automation. We love it. I love it. FAR also hosts a lot of our clients’ Web sites through a virtual Web server provided by an ISP. So, these are both in The Cloud.
The Cloud is often a bad (bad as in costly and potentially dicey) way to manage the second group (core infrastructure products). E-mail, phone services and unified communications, for example, are typically so critical to many businesses and so expensive to host over even a 2 year period that putting them in The Cloud doesn’t make much sense for many small and medium businesses. FAR hosts its Exchange and VoIP phone system on-premise for this reason, as do the majority of our clients.
What key factors should businesses consider?
The Cloud and on-premise solutions are not mutually exclusive ways to solve business problems. They are two different but increasingly related tools to solve the challenges many businesses face. There may be overlap between the two in the same business process.
For example, when I wrote this blog, I wrote it using Microsoft Word on my desktop computer. Then I uploaded it as an attachment to an Autotask project for the proofreader (into The Cloud). So, even though I didn’t write the document in The Cloud, we used The Cloud during the process; now that I am publishing it to this blog, the content is officially in The Cloud again.
Even though we could have used Google Docs to write the blog (and so, used The Cloud from beginning to end), we won’t be switching to Google Docs any time soon. Why not? Microsoft Office provides us with the right cost/benefit ratio and the features that we need. That’s really the best way to make a decision about what to put in The Cloud and what not to put in The Cloud: does it make financial and business process sense?
Beyond that, there are a number of factors to account, but the big questions are usually: What are the costs? How important is this information technology to our business? What level of service does this application require? In some cases, cost-wise, it may make sense to rent an application (in The Cloud), and in some cases, it makes sense to own (on-premise). In some cases, the business system is simply too critical or too complicated to put in The Cloud and an on-premise solution makes the most sense. In other cases, the level of service provided by an external service provider can’t match your business expectations or requirements. The answers to the questions will vary from business to business and from application to application.
The FAR Cloud
As a managed service provider, FAR provides its own “cloud” to our customers (The FAR Cloud, so to speak). We take the business challenges our customers face and put in place a seamless solution that combines on-premise and virtualized products and services with our boutique level of planning, execution, support and monitoring to meet their business requirements and to provide continuous improvement. We make sure that everything just works together.
That’s really the value that good information technology planning and execution provides (whether it’s in The Cloud, on-premise or a combination): reasonable peace of mind at reasonable cost. What FAR provides customers is that peace of mind extended to the whole of their information technology requirements. Over the next several blog entries, I will be giving you some of FARs most common answers to these questions and how The Cloud can be an effective part of your business.
Why I love Autotask: It’s the process, baby!
Monday, January 4th, 2010Behind every great business practice, there’s a great tool and someone who knows how to use it. One of the many tools FAR uses to keep our employees productive and our customers happy is Autotask.
Every business has key productivity tools and one of the most critical to FAR is Autotask. Autotask is delivered as a “software as a service” (SaaS) or what is now commonly referred to as “The Cloud”. That means that Autotask hosts the application centrally, and FAR’s employees can login from anywhere.
The same is true for all of our customers. Autotask provides us with strong project management tools to organize our internal communications and workflow, but equally important, with ways to make that process and its status transparent to our clients. The Client Portal allows clients to login and track their tickets, issues and project status any time they like 24 hours a day,7 days a week.
What makes Autotask important to FAR?
We currently have 10 employees with a plan in place to grow to 15 in Q1 2010. A 50% increase in headcount is no small task by itself. Keeping everything smooth requires regular and expected process, but also the ability to improvise in real time to meet customer expectations when necessary. Autotask helps FAR do both.
A competitor enters
No business practice, no process, no tool, and no employee’s performance is ever entirely perfect. I was recently approached by a key competitor to Autotask. I’m mostly agnostic about technology: best tool for the job is the mantra at FAR, and like any business, FAR is always looking to reduce our costs, serve our clients more efficiently — or both!
When I asked this competitor why I should switch from Autotask, the response was surprisingly anemic. For FAR to switch out Autotask for this alternative solution would have provided us with less functionality, fewer benefits at greater cost. It was a no-brainer for us to stick with Autotask.
The moral of this story: if it ain’t broke, plan to continuously improve it.
To stay ahead of competitors, your business needs to improve continuously, and that means your business processes and information technology need to keep up. Human resources, business processes and information technology all require continuous improvement.
What’s important for a small and medium enterprise is to plan and execute that improvement over time — otherwise, you end up with an inflexible business process and an aging tool set that no longer helps your employees get the job done (or, just as likely, makes their jobs more difficult and less productive). In that situation, you go from continuous improvement for low, planned costs, to rip and replace for high and unpredictable costs. Having a plan for your business processes and how they should integrate and make use of your information technology is a simple way to save money and time for your business over time.
Also, businesses should be prepared to use the best tool for the job. Sometimes that means using the “The Cloud” and SaaS, but just as often, it means in-sourcing key components of your network (like your phone system, your Exchange deployment and other business critical tools). Watch this space for the next few weeks as I plan to be writing about The Cloud, and what small and medium enterprises should (or shouldn’t) host.