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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, 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…

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By Alan Berkson, October 19, 2009 10:37 pm

Consider these questions:

• What are the annual  IT support costs for your organization?
• What staffing levels do you need?
• What skill sets should they have?

One of the biggest challenges I have selling support services is getting organizations to come to terms with their support costs. In most cases they don’t even know what they are. So when I give them a price, they have no frame of reference to judge my proposals. Is the price high? Low? They just don’t know.

In a typical IT organization everyone wears many hats: the application developer also does support and helps out with implementations; the LAN Administrator installs and maintains servers but fills in for the Help Desk. Even IT Directors end up doing desktop support for the CEO or some other VIP. Then, at the end of the day, everyone wonders why the staff is overworked and they still missed all their project deadlines.

Support isn’t “sexy” and it doesn’t have an obvious impact on a company’s bottom line, but when it doesn’t happen or it’s done poorly, people  notice. We can talk about the impact and cost of downtime to an organization. We can talk about how many servers or desktops one technician can support. Whether that number is 150 or 400, it’s still tangible. There’s still an FTE cost associated with support. The bottom line is…knowing how much you are spending on support and, more important, how much you should be spending on support  will affect your bottom line!

So here are my Top Two Tips Tor Improving Your IT Support:

1. Track Time – Simple, yet oh so difficult. If you don’t have one, get yourself a ticket system. You can shell out cash for a FrontRange Solutions  or a CA Service Desk Manager. Go open source with an OTRS . Or just use an Excel spreadsheet. Whatever way you go, you need to find a way to track the Who, What, Where, When and Why…but most important…the How Long?
2. See Item 1 – That’s not a joke. Tracking time spent doing support is important enough for two spots on any list.

That’s it. Track your time. It’s not fun. It requires additional overhead. It requires a great deal of discipline. But the return far outweighs the effort.  Try it for a few months. When you look back on the data you’ve gathered you will gain valuable insights into what it really takes to support your organization. You’d actually be able to answer those questions I asked at the top.

Need help getting started? Give me a call…