Get tech before you get big

Most business owners and companies like to wait to make technology investments until they absolutely have to. With many investments in your business this type of approach will work, but with technology this is not the case, your technology must grow with your business.

If you wait until you are having productivity losses to make decisions about your technology you will have further productivity losses that will be more costly to resolve. For example instead of upgrading workstations on a regular schedule you run them into the ground you will inevitably have system and hard drive failures that will result in more downtime for employees than they would have had if you had upgraded the computer proactively. This is not to mention that potentially critical data could have gone up in smoke with the dead system.

Another good example of proactive tech spending is on a phone system. By purchasing a phone system when you have a handfull of employees versus when you have  many employees will allow you to spread the typically high cost of the phone system across the time it takes you to grow your business. There is one caveat here though, ensure the systems that you are putting can scale up to your projected growth, if you intend to have the systems around at that time. Otherwise you are not spending wisely.

Finally, by spending as you grow you will not be forced to make huge tech investments all at one time.

What makes a startup company?

I have been searching for the last few days for the definition of what a Startup Company is, or what makes one? The best one I found thus far uses a quote from Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart regarding pornography to define it, “It is hard to define, but I know it when I see it.”

In all seriousness is a startup defined by the time in business, how much finding they have and form whom, number of employees, profitability, actually having a saleable product, etc. Or a combination of some of the above?

As someone who likes to work with startup companies in furthering their businesses and technologies I am finding it difficult to locate startups these days in Arizona and some other markets. When I started asking around to some of my peers about what new startup companies they have come across locally, they challenged me with the question of “what makes a startup company?”. I know what a startup company is, or at least what I perceive one to be, but I could not do anything but name characteristics of other startups.

iPhone to gain Exchange support, does it matter?

Note: I have posted a followup to this post here.

Over at Apple Insider there is an article stating that Apple is going to announce better Microsoft Exchange support on the iPhone next week. It has been 8 months since the launch of the iPhone and sales have slowed since then and most IT departments that have chosen to or been forced into supporting the iPhone have figured out how to get it working with their Exchange server and syncing with Outlook or Entourage. So does it matter that they are releasing this now?

Are all of those IT departments that just spent all of this time changing network settings and desktop security settings to allow this device to work properly with their systems going to now go back and reconfigure all of these now stable devices? Chances are in the short-term, no they will not. They will probably catch this one on the next wave when Apple releases the second (hopefully 3G) version of the iPhone and there is a rush of new iPhones to be supported. Unless Apple does what they should have done all along, pay Microsoft to license ActiveSync, which would make setting up and supporting these devices a no brainer.

There is always the possibility that this is simply a rumor and is not going to happen next week, and this argument is just and exercise in futility. We will just have to wait and see.

Making the most of your IT staff

I recently read a great article over at bMighty.com entitled 10 Ways to Leverage Information Technology. This article, aimed at small and medium sized companies provides some great insight. It outlines some key ways for companies to maximize their IT spending to reduce risk and enhance productivity.

One of the keys they list is Find Great Staff. This is the greatest thing you can ever do for your business. In addition to finding intelligent, dedicated staff you need to take care of them. They also totally hit it on the head when they advise treating your IT staff like kings, by providing them great pay, acknowledgment, self management, responsibility, and flexible schedule, and professional growth.

I have worked at many companies that do some of these things, none of these things, and some that try, but don’t do any of it well. Depending on the organization and the resources that the organization has available to them, you may be able to skimp on some of these items, but be careful. If you cut back on them to much you will likely end up with a miserable, undedicated staff that will not be in it for the long haul.

I would also add a couple more items to the list of things to provide your IT staff, funding and capacity. What I mean by funding is ensure that your IT staff has the proper budget to perform their jobs and work on the projects assigned to them. Far too often companies, especially smaller ones, have lofty goals and expectations for their IT resources, but they do not want to pay for them, or forget to. When this happens your IT staff will find themselves begging for resources, missing deadlines, and in the end being less productive, which will ultimately result in a loss of productivity for non-IT staff.

The second item I would add is capacity. This means do expect your IT staff to ever be at 100% capacity unless there is an IT emergency. This is important because if you staff your people at 100% all of the time when there is an emergency all of your planned projects will slip. This can have ripple effects across the organization.

The rest of the article outlines some other great points which I will probably touch on over the upcoming weeks.