Out of the Box IT
Osama M. Faris brings out of the box thinking about information technology into focus.
Posts Tagged ‘Clickfar’
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!
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.
It's easier when you travel down the Right Path
Monday, March 9th, 2009If you’ve had a chance to visit our corporate web site previously, I decided to try our hand at a little video work, to bring some dimension (and a little fun) to our web site. The front page had a video ad with some testimonials from customers, and the about page had a little video intro to some of our staff. My thought was, hey, how hard could it be? Let’s get a camera, script out some ideas, and bingo – we’re into the video production business.
Well, I can tell you, it’s a lot harder than I thought. While I posted the results, I was not completely happy with the end result. Something was missing. It just wasn’t polished and I had no idea how to make it better. Something was definitely missing.
The lack of polish didn’t seem to stop positive comments coming from customers. They loved the videos and felt it brought an element of reality to what FAR does. I started to get requests to create videos as part of our web design services. Now I started to fret. It’s one thing to fool around with a camera for your own web site. It’s a whole other thing to do it for a customer. I panicked and started to sift through my LinkedIn contacts. Wayne from BartMart Audio triggered my memory and I connected up with Lisa Virtue, his spouse, who runs Right Path Pictures. After a few phone calls and a meeting with Lisa, I quickly realized that I was way out of my league. This is serious business and it takes a lot of effort, skill and technical knowledge to produce the good stuff. So I decided to re-shoot both videos and one additional one and see how different they would be. Check them out and judge for yourself! Kudos to Lisa for teaching me that 1) it might look easy, but video production is a serious business that needs not just talent, but technical skill and 2) using a professional firm can be fun, while still making a huge impact on the quality of the final product.
The (Microsoft) Word on the Street
Monday, January 12th, 2009Ok, so call me a father behind the times…I haven’t been exactly enthusiastic about the kids working on the computer. Don’t get me wrong, I have a computer at home for general use purposes (although I must admit it is 6 years old and overdue to be put out to pasture) but I haven’t really been encouraging the kids to use it. Call me old school (and strange to be coming from an IT professional) but my theory is that it is important for kids these days to start by learning how to do things the “manual” way, and as they grow appreciate automation through that learning experience. Take math as a simple example – do they give kids calculators in Grade 1 to do their math homework with? That’s how I was brought up – I don’t rush to my Blackberry to calculate the tip on a $40.00 lunch bill.
Last year, when my eldest was in Grade 3, he came home from school with a book report project. He needed to read a book and then prepare a written report as well a Bristol board presentation with text and pictures to present to the class. The teacher provided a grading matrix which clearly defined how the project would be marked and encouraged parents to assist their children in completing the project. I got called in to assist, and I eagerly jumped in with all fours. Here was a perfect opportunity to do things the “manual” way and teach my son the art of preparing a book report and presentation.
First things first – we both headed out to Staples and bought some Bristol board, coloured paper, glue and a stencil for tracing letters. Supplies in hand, I waited for my son to read the book he wanted to write about and then we sat down together and planned out the content of the book report. He wrote up his rough copy on lined paper while I started to spec out how we were going to present it on the Bristol board. Soon enough, we were tracing letters with the stencils and then colouring them in. Additional text was written on white paper with a colour paper background and then pasted onto the Bristol board. All told, it took us a good 6 hours to trace all the words, colour everything in, and get it all spic and span. Next came practicing the verbal presentation so that he did not need to use notes (eye contact was an important point in the grading matrix). Boy, this was a lot of work!
So off to school he went – everyday I would ask him, “did you get your mark back for your presentation?” “Nope”. I was starting the fret. Finally the grade came through – a B+! I was shocked! B+? I quickly scanned the marking matrix to find where he got a low grade. Lo and behold, the Bristol board presentation was the weakest link. All that effort for naught? I whipped out a piece of paper and wrote a letter to the teacher asking her politely if she could provide more details as it pertains to why the Bristol board failed to make the grade. Her response was, in this day and age, your son should have used a computer to generate the content of the Bristol board….and oh by the way, next time you write a note Mr. Faris, could you please type it? I’m having a hard time reading your cursive handwriting….
Just a few weeks ago, I noticed my son was spending quite a significant time on the computer. Curiosity got the better of me, so I took a peek while he sat in front of the computer. Open on the screen was Microsoft Word, with a centered title, fully justified paragraphs and him plugging away, entering in content. “Who taught you how to use Microsoft Word?” “Nobody”, he responded. So much for doing things the “manual” way – an important lesson for me as a parent and IT professional that technology is ubiquitous, easy to learn and inevitable.