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By Alan Berkson, April 28, 2010 9:30 am

I was inspired by Francine Hardaway’s recent blog Social Media Analytics for Small Business: Still Missing in Action and ensuing spirited commentary to talk about the impact of enterprise standards in the SMB marketplace. In her blog Francine talks about a report by Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group and John Lovett of Web Analytics Demystified on measuring results in Social Media and questions the value of sophisticated measurement techniques to SMB’s. She writes:

The problem I have is that most of the small businesses I deal with don’t know how much it costs to get a customer, and only measure their marketing with a single business objective:  does this help me get customers?

When we started InfoManage back in 1995 our goal was to bring enterprise level support to the SMB marketplace. Our original marketing material talked about how:

…we make enterprise-level support available to small and mid-size businesses…

We could do this by implementing enterprise standards within our service offerings and then doling out portions of our  service to our SMB customers. By association, our customers were now implementing these same enterprise standards, already “baked in” to the service – similar to what Managed Service Providers and SaaS vendors routinely do today.  As I commented in her blog:

The beauty of the “Web” era is how much it levels the playing field for SMB’s to have access to technology/resources/strategies that were once well beyond reach. This goes for standards as well. Very few small businesses know what ITIL is yet they can leverage ITIL ( as implemented by service providers, SaaS, PaaS, et al) to make their businesses more successful.

What Jeremiah Owyang and John Lovett are doing here is setting a process in motion to create a standard. From there, bright entrepreneurs will figure out a way to product-ize these standards. So, what may seem like rarefied air enterprise speak can and will find its way into the life of the SMB market.

While I’m not sure if I believe in trickle-down economics, I do believe in trickle-down technology. There is tangible value to the SMB marketplace for efforts like Owyang and Lovett’s Social Marketing Analytics report. While Enterprise drives innovation and standards to increase operating efficiency and improve the bottom line, these same innovations and standards eventually find their way into ROI equations for the SMB’s.

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By Alan Berkson, January 28, 2010 12:25 pm

I can’t imagine there’s a high-level executive in any Fortune 1000 company that isn’t walking around with two devices on his or her hip: a Blackberry for business; an iPhone for personal use. And he or she probably keeps asking the same question: When will I be able to use my iPhone for my business?

The short answer is I think we are close. 2010 looks to be the year that RIM’s strangle-hold on enterprise communication may finally be broken and iPhone may be the disruptive technology that drives it. With it’s flexible application development platform iPhone (and now iPad) may finally give enterprise software developers enough incentive to finally target Apple for enterprise products.

For the last decade RIM has created a monopoly for enterprise mobile communications with their Blackberry devices and Blackberry Enterprise Server software. The US government is so dependent on them that they wouldn’t let them be shut down during a pending lawsuit. Even our President carries one. What makes them so special and beloved in the enterprise?

Simply put: control. With the alphabet soup of compliance regulations (SOX, HIPAA, PCI) there is a heightened awareness of digital chain of custody. As enterprise IT managers, we need to maintain control over, and an audit trail of, all data that enters and leaves the enterprise. For most businesses mobile communications represents an unsecured border for data traffic.

A short list of must-have security measures includes:

• Remote Management – Since the mobile device is an extension of the enterprise we need the ability to remotely manage the device from a central system (BES, e.g.) including the ability to apply group policies and remotely wipe it clean;
• Secure Communication – All traffic between the remote device and the enterprise needs to be encrypted;
• Audit – This is the big one. Emails forwarded from the device to 3^rd parties (outside the enterprise) need to be tracked (audit trail).

There are many solutions out there that are close, from mainstream vendors like Sybase to new ventures like Codex Development. Maybe I can finally give in to my iPhone envy. We’ll see.

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By Alan Berkson, December 4, 2009 10:25 am

One of the hardest things to quantify is how investments in IT affect your bottom line. In an interview with the Wall Street Jounal, Dr. Peter Weill, Chairman of the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Information Systems Research says “… IT-savvy companies are 21% more profitable than non-IT-savvy companies.”

He is co-author of “IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go From Pain to Gain” and you can read the interview here.

Has IT made you more profitable? I’d love to hear about it. If not, maybe we need to talk.

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By Alan Berkson, November 25, 2009 1:17 pm

There is a great deal of excitement surrounding mobile devices like the iPhone and the new Android-based phones. One of the most common questions I seem to be getting these days is “Can I connect my iPhone/Droid/Pre/Blackberry to my mail server?” I’m not going to go into the virtues of the various mobile technologies. However, it brings to mind what I see as a common cycle. Technology goes from being laughed at, poked and prodded, grudgingly accepted to, finally, indispensible.

Let’s take email. Twenty short years ago the only people using email were academics and some brave consumers. Remember when CompuServe ruled the world and AOL was an upstart? You had entirely user-friendly email addresses like 12345.12@compuserve.com? Today, there isn’t an enterprise around that doesn’t rely on email to operate on a daily basis.

My pivotal email moment came a few short years ago. When I was out of the office during the day I would usually carry around my laptop so I could keep in touch – check email, instant message my staff. One day I came back to my office after a day of meetings and was confronted by partner:

“Didn’t you get my email??!?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t bring my laptop with me today…”
“You’re getting a Blackberry!”

It was at that moment that, for our business, constant access to email became a business necessity. We went ahead and implemented an email strategy to meet this need. However, we avoided a major technology pitfall. It’s what I like to call technology sprawl.

For many companies this is an all-too-common occurrence: technology is deployed out of necessity (the CEO has to have an iPhone) without regard to standards and supportability. Before you allow expanded access to that nifty application you have running in your test lab you need to stop and consider the greater impact on your environment. Otherwise, before you can say “hard disk failure”, you have a “production” system down, with no redundancy or recovery strategy.

It is true new technology breeds greater productivity but this leads to greater risk when the technology fails. Technology vendors will continue to tempt us with new technology that promises even greater productivity. The lesson for IT managers is to strive to maintain order amid the chaos.

Have an interesting technology sprawl story? I’d love to hear it…