I know, I know, the technology world is rife with slang, jargon and acronyms.   In fact we’re famous for being almost impossible for the layman to understand – I’ve been using words with no vowels for longer than I care to admit.  That said, some of these terms are important for a business owner to understand – if for no other reason than to make sure their business has what it needs.

So let’s get started!

1. Backup and recovery – the verb phrase “to back up” means that you make a copy of your data so that if you lose it you can replace it.  The noun “backup” is the copy you made and the act of replacing it is “recovery”.  You can back up your data on any sort of schedule – monthly, weekly, daily, hourly or even more frequently.  I usually recommend making a backup at least daily.  There are a lot of ways to back up your data – to a USB drive or other external hard drive, to a CD or DVD or to the cloud.  Services like Mozy and Carbonite are a business owner’s best friend.  Here are a couple other thoughts on backup and recovery:  First, make sure you are backing up everything you should be.  I had an outage about a year ago and realized I was backing up everything except my email.  Ouch!  Next, test your recovery.  If I had done that I would have realized I was taking incomplete backups BEFORE I got bitten.
2. Redundancy – redundancy essentially means duplication.  A system is redundant if services are split in two or more pieces so that if one fails you have something to fall back on.  It is important to think about your technology and to determine where and when you need redundancy.  If you are a small business owner with only a single pc your redundancy plan might be to go to Office Depot and buy a new pc.  Then you could use the backup from number 1 to be back in business in a few hours.  If you are a larger business or are looking to push technology services to the cloud you may have deeper needs.  When you talk to service providers ask them about their redundancy and look for two things:  first is hardware redundancy which means that they have split your services over multiple machines so that if they lose one you are still good to go.  Also ask about location redundancy – what if oh, for example, Hurricane Irene slammed into their data center?  Do they have services in another, preferably far away, location that can keep your business up and running?
3. Archiving – to archive means to save off old data that you want to keep around but don’t need ready access to.  Archiving is closely related to back up and recovery but with a subtle twist.  When you are archive you may choose to copy your data to a medium that isn’t as easy or fast to recover from and that is separate from your current data.  An example of this would be where you back up your current data to the cloud for fast and simple recovery but you put your really old stuff on a DVD and store it offsite.  It is important to consider what needs to be archived – you may not want to pay to back up and store all that old data every night and you certainly won’t want to add time to recover it in the event something bad happens.
4. Disaster recovery – Wikipedia says “ is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster”.  Your disaster recover plan will include your backup, recovery, redundancy and archiving plans.  It is the technology portion of your overall business continuity plan.

What does all this mean?

  by  Roger Smith

  by  edgeplot

Back in the day, I wrote a lot of custom software.  First of all, that is what I DID and second, finding good software that met the business needs in a flexible way was hard.  Ok, I know I am showing my age now!

As time has passed and technology has advanced we have more and more technology options to support our business and these options have great functional capabilities.  At the same time, access to these technologies has become easier, especially for smaller businesses.  I find it remarkable that I can have, at my fingertips, the same business capabilities of a large corporation.  Gotta love the cloud!

With so much to choose from I would find it hard today to ever recommend “build it for yourself” to a client unless they had a very specific, niche need – a need that was their competitive advantage, something that set them apart.  You can get inexpensive development resources today but you still have fundamental issues with “roll your own” applications:

• you may be using developers inexperienced with building bullet-proof  applications
• you may be building with a technology that it is hard to find developers for
• you will have to do your own maintenance and changes
• you may be using a technology that won’t be supported long term.

  by  Yury Cortés

In the past few years there has been a proliferation of specialized business applications for every kind of business. Lawyers, accountants, spa owners, music teachers, golf courses – all these businesses have a variety of niche software applications built just for them.  Have a camel farm?  I bet someone somewhere has built “camel farm technology in a box” just for you.  This is a great development – if you are starting a new business there are specialized tools just for you and most of them are cloud-based and inexpensive.  These days, if you can think of it, someone has built it.  Just for you.

What is the downside?  First, they try to be all things to your niche market.  You may end up with functionality you don’t need and when you get stuff you don’t want it can make using the rest difficult or at least confusing.  Second, because you using capabilities that everyone else in your business is using, you are just “keeping up”, not using technology to give you a competitive edge.  Third, to some extent you are buying into a certain business model, one that may not be what you had in mind.

And then there is the ugly – some things these applications do very very well but some are just awful.  Areas where I see consistent poor functionality are CRM, websites, integration and reporting.  For example, I belong to two clubs that use “club” software – applications are are expressly built to support membership clubs.  They use different vendors but they both have the same problems:

• They both keep member databases but they are rigid and clunky and don’t have features a lot of clubs would find in a simple CRM tool like tagging, keeping track of correspondence and notes or social integration.
• The both allow the clubs to create websites but they are confusing, hard to use and frankly create butt ugly websites.
• There is no integration or easy way to get your data out. For example, you can’t easily integrate your member list with something like MailChimp.
• The reporting is canned – as long as you want to ask the question they have a report for you are in good shape.  If not…well, just don’t ask that question.

  by  gordonramsaysubmissions

A last month I wrote a post explaining about the different types of CRM.  A recent client project made me realize that I had left a few “flavors” off the menu.

This client is a marketing firm that wanted to implement a system that kept track of customer/prospect interactions and  client projects – customer relationship management (CRM) with project management (PM).  This was a new flavor.  They want to track contacts thru the sales cycle to proposal and then when a proposal was won, track the activities required to complete the proposed project.  What businesses would need this functionality?  Any business that performs multi-task activities for a customer – marketing and design firms, architecture and engineering, builders and remodelers, attorneys and CPAs.  The list is quite large and definitely includes technology consultants like myself!  So I updated the graphic from that last post:

Which tools support this kind of functionality?  Definitely the big names do – Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  There are specialty niche products like Clients and Profits which is geared towards marketing agencies.  Then there are applications with broad functionality that can appeal to wide range of small businesses.  These include WorkEtc, Solve360, ZohoCRM and Zoho Project along with a host of others.

What came out of the evaluation I did for this client?  First, we choose Solve360 for their business and we’re implementing it now.  I also now have my eye on WorkEtc. for my next CRM, for when I outgrow Batchbook (which I love).

The price points and functionality vary and the list of companies here is far from exhaustive- it is worth getting some help evaluating these tools to determine which is right for your business.  In this article I talk about some of the success factors.  Get with your technical advisor to find out more.

Earlier this week there was an article on SmallBizTechnology.com about how the biggest problem small businesses have in using technology is lack of education.  I absolutely agree with the sentiment – who has time to learn about technology when they have a business to run?  In the article Ramon Ray recommended spending an hour or two a week learning about technology.  From there, however, he talked a lot about technology that boosts a businesses online presence – Facebook, blogging, Twitter and local search.  These are all important but there is so much more!

So what else should a small business owner educate themselves about?  There are so many topics that it can seem like a maze but if you take a look at this list you can concentrate on a few topics at a time:

• How can you make things easier for your customer?  (easy online access to content and services)
• How can you make things easier for your staff? (remote access, simple processes, collaboration tools)
• How can you touch more prospects, close more sales and increase revenue? (CRM, email newsletters)
• How can you streamline your internal processes and maybe save money? (better integration, fewer but more powerful systems, remote hosting, cloud services)
• How can you get a better handle on your business? (reporting, analytics)

So here is a short round-up of good sources for technology information – these are examples but they should give you somewhere to start:

• online technology magazines and blogs like smallbiztechnology.com and smallbusinesscomputing.com.  I also like Laurie McCabe’s blog.
• industry specific online sources like the Law Technology News section of Law.com or Techtips on TheProgressiveAccountant.com
• online communities like American Express Open and Biznik.com
• local blogs like atlantasmall.biz

What technology topics would you like to know more about?  Where do you go to get your technical education?



For the first time I’m going to do a book review. I read a lot of books and articles but usually don’t do reviews – someone out there has usually already said what I have to say so I don’t bother. Not this time. And not because I’m the first to say anything – I am not by a long shot. No, I’m writing an book review because if I could I would buy this book for every business owner I’ve met in the past few years, regardless of the size of the company.  Writing this review is my second best choice.

About The New Small

The book is The New Small by Phil Simon. Phil has managed to articulate in a small, easily digestible book, what I have been trying to tell folks, as a technology consultant myself, for years. In today’s world technology can allow a company of any size to operate like a large company. In the first section he talks about the “what” of business technology – what the major technology trends are and which are the current technology enablers. He also starts to address why there is so much technology available that most small business users aren’t using:

“It seems to me that many small business owners are awash in a sea of technology they aren’t using. Most haven’t explored mobility, cloud computing, social technologies, and so on. They aren’t keeping up with many of the changes that could significantly help them on so many levels. I began to wonder about why so many small business owners seem to be unaware of the profound technological changes currently taking place.

Reasons include:

• Some are just overwhelmed by the rate of change.
• Some just don’t care–they don’t plan to change anything if they can avoid it.
• Some are probably intimidated by these new technologies.
• Some just aren’t aware. Their attention is elsewhere.
• Some subscribe to the view “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

I suppose that this would make sense if these emerging technologies offered only marginal improvements to John Q. Business Owner. But that’s just not the case. These days, many small companies ignore technologies that, at a minimum, can help them significantly:
• Grow their businesses
• Attract talented employees
• Improve access to key information
• Increase employee communication and collaboration
• Reduce costs of recruiting, IT, and marketing
• Compete with larger companies

Some small businesses are using emerging technologies in creative and interesting ways to achieve these benefits. These are the New Small.”

In the second part he discusses the several examples of  the New Small . I consider this the “why” portion of the book – exciting, compelling examples should give any small business a reason to look at new technologies.  There are a lot of examples in this section and I found it helpful to pick and choose the examples I was interested in – but by all means read them all if you can.

My favorite part  is the third part where he talks about the “how” – how a company can become part of The New Small by not only applying technology but by making sure their organization has the right culture, people and mindset to do it successfully. Here is the crux of the discussion and where things get hard or easy – as he says in the book “We see how New Small companies carefully and intelligently select the tools, people and partners that make sense – and quickly get away from those that no longer fit the bill. They don’t immediately and unilaterally embrace very technology that comes along. What’s more, they balance immediate short-term needs with long-term prospects for growth.”  Wow.  Wish I had said that.

Bottom line on The New Small

Like I said, if I could reasonably do so I’d give this book to every business owner I’ve met.  In addition to the book, Phil is coming out with a new mobile app that provides, to business owners and others interested in new technology, exclusive tips and advice to help clear up concepts and discuss new technology trends.  You can find out more about the app here.

As Phil says at the end, none of this is magic and it may be that you need help figuring out how to integrate the technologies that make sense for your business.  As always, find a technology advisor you trust to help you put together a reasonable road map and your business will be on its way to being on of the New Small.

I have spent a number of hours over the past few weeks, bringing air and light to the far recesses of my son’s bedroom and removing a winter’s supply of mud, bugs, dust and pollen from my screen porch.  So that makes it time for my second annual post about spring cleaning your technology.

The Current Clean Up List

To get us started I’ll refer you to my previous posts on the topic – every year you should look at your website to see if needs to be refreshed (and it probably does!).  There are more great tips for cleaning up your website in this post from Moreover Technologies. You should also clean out your old emails or at least archive them out of your mailbox.  Finally, I’ll add here my continued plea to put your fax machine of its misery.

Read more »

by  RossW

I have written other posts about cloud computing and I am sure you see articles and blog posts about it all the time.  Today I want to narrow in on how cloud computing can improve how you run your office without buying hardware.

Reducing Software Costs

Most of us use the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite – it is great but it can be expensive.  Some companies have found they can get close to the same functionality but for free with other office suites such as Zoho, Google Docs, and OpenOffice.

File Sharing and Collaboration

Not too long ago if you wanted to share files with your co-workers or employees you had 2 choices.  You could install a network your office or you could employee “sneaker net” – trading files on (used to be) floppy drives or (today) flash drives.  Now there are a lot of choices for online file sharing and collaboration – from simple tools like Box, Dropbox, Google Docs, Zoho or Egnyte, to setting up an intranet via a hosted version of Microsoft SharePoint.  Depending on your needs and which tool you choose, you can not only share files, you have instant access to capabilities like controlling access, tagging, keeping multiple versions of a document or searching across documents.  Even if you have highly sensitive documents, there is a cloud vendor that can  help you.

Providing Remote Access Regardless of Device (almost)

A cool thing about the file sharing and collaboration tools listed above is that most of them support file access and viewing via any browser and have special purpose iPhone or iPad apps.  It is great to be able to refer to documents and share them while you are out of the office.  The only problem is that you can’t EDIT the documents.  Unless, of course, you purchase a special purpose app, of which there are several.

Beyond the file sharing and collaboration tools, another more recent addition to the cloud parade are cloud-based desktops – in this case instead of having your software installed on a specific machine where you can only use when you are ON that machine, you can can have a virtual desktop that you can access from any device with a browser.  Since it acts just like your desktop (because it is) you can run any application that is on your desktop.  How cool is that.  Vendors in this space include Desktone, OnTheNetOffice and tuCloud.

Making Software Upgrades Simple

Virtual desktops bring another simplifying factor to your office – what if you could do away with installing software on each individual machine and keeping up with releases and patches on a one off basis?  Virtual desktop functionality allows you to create a “master” desktop with all the software your company needs and to replicate it across your users.  Time to upgrade or apply a patch?  Do it once and everyone gets it!  You can even create one-off masters if there is specialized software only a few folks need.  Of course, you still have to pay for the software licenses for each user.  I know, always a bummer to find out there isn’t a magic pill to rid you of software costs!

I hope this helps you think about concrete ways cloud technology can help you simplify your office, expand your capabilities and maybe even save you some money.  If you have used tools like these and have a story to share I’d love to hear them!

by  Search Engine People Blog

Quick, can you tell me which is your most profitable customer?

Or as the headline points out, pick the dimension or view of your company and tell me what, who, which is most profitable?  Or least profitable?  And can you tell me why?

There are typically three answers to this question:

Companies in the first group answer with a resounding “No way!”.  Why?   Likely the information they need to analyze these points is all over the place – in different systems that don’t talk to each other or worse not in any system at all.  Maybe some in an accounting application and the rest is in a spreadsheet somewhere.  Or maybe on a napkin in your sales managers pocket.  You know what I am talking about.

Companies in the second group answer with “of course”.   This sounds pretty good until you ask the next question which is something more complicated like “who are your top 5 most profitable customers by product line?”.  What I find at this point is these companies have some decent rudimentary analytics, likely manually extracted from various systems and housed in a spreadsheet.  This is not altogether bad – they know what metrics are important to their company and have a process for producing those metrics.  The problem is that this isn’t scalable – as soon as you want to change the question, even slightly, you’ll find the metrics are created in an inflexible way.  Someone has to go back and manually change the spreadsheet, maybe making another version, maybe disconnecting it from the base data.  The thing about analytics is that as soon as you know one thing you want to know something else about that thing – it never ends!    This means static spreadsheets, while  good for getting your feet wet, won’t last long.

Companies in the third group can answer with “of course” and then proceed to further analyze their business for key insights and trends.  In this case they have integrated their data from various systems and sources into a source for analytics and reporting using business intelligence tools.  These tools allow them to more easily change their questions without re-doing  bunch of spreadsheets.  Some of you have probably heard about business intelligence and business intelligence tools and dismiss them for use by small and medium sized businesses.  It is time to think again!

What has changed in BI tools?

Traditionally large enterprises have been able to leverage BI tools and data warehouses to gain tremendous insight into their businesses.  They can do things like predict what products you might like to buy after an initial purchase or tell a store how to most effectively position products on their shelves.  They can analyze service routes and call center performance.  There really is no end to what CAN be done – it just takes money.  A boatload of money.  Money on software and hardware and lots and lots of money for people (either employees or consultants) install, configure and make sure all the pieces work together.  In recent years this has started to change.  There are tools that run as a service (SaaS, in the cloud) that provide many of the capabilities that the large BI tools can.  These smaller, nimbler tools can pull data from your existing systems (even files and spreadsheets) and organize it in a way to be easily accessible for analytics and reporting.  Usually your expenses will be a monthly subscription for these tools and probably some initial consulting help to get you started (some of the vendors purport that you don’t need that but I’m dubious – at the risk of venturing into the realm of self-promotion I think that some consulting help at the beginning to define goals and metrics and help choose a vendor would save most businesses money in the long run.  But I digress.).

In short, what do these BI tools do?

They can  help you measure and manage your business, enabling what-if analysis and the easy ability to change the questions you are asking.  They make pulling the data together from diverse sources easier and less painful.   They create “one version of the truth”.  Some even package up solutions for function-specific analysis – pipeline analysis (sales), financial analysis (finance), cost analysis (operations) , or supply chain analysis (supply chain).

How do I get started?

There are a number of good vendors in this space.  They include (but are not limited to) Birst, Pivotlink, Gooddata, Easy Insight, Jaspersoft, and Zoho Reports.  Each of these has different features and integrates data in different ways.  If you have someone experienced with analytics and reporting on your staff you are in luck.  Otherwise your next step is to talk with your technology advisor to determine what your needs are and which product suits them the best.  Then you can put together a plan that lays out initial steps and associated costs.  Start with a plan, start slow and measure your progress (use metrics to measure your analytics!) and soon you’ll have greater insight into your business.

It has been almost a year since I wrote my last blog post on cloud computing and tons has been written about it since – and yet I think the recent article on CMSWire.com that claims that small and medium sized businesses are still confused is right on the money.  So in honor of the one year anniversary of my last post I’ll take another run on the subject.

The simplest definition is still this:  if you use technology in your business without buying software and installing on your own hardware you are using cloud computing.    But what does that mean to a small or medium sized business?

More Technology is Available for Your Business

Think about all the technology you use or could use in your business – email, calendars, accounting and CRM software.  Once upon a time only large companies could afford applications like these.  If you wanted this functionality you had to buy the software, buy the hardware and maintain both, at considerable expense.  Today any size company can utilize these applications for a monthly subscription (or sometimes it is even free!).  This allows small and medium sized businesses to be more nimble and more strategic than ever before.

You Can Save Money

Not only can your business take advantage of the technology the big guys use, you can do it for a lot less money.  Since you are essentially sharing the application with others your cost is much lower.  Even better though is you don’t have to buy or support the hardware infrastructure these applications often require.  In fact, businesses that have already invested in servers and have to pay employees or service providers to support them can often reduce those costs or eliminate them altogether by moving to cloud applications.  Maybe your business requires some specialized software that isn’t available in the cloud – you may still be able to reduce your over all technology costs by running that application on servers in the cloud.  Amazon, Rackspace and others provide on-demand computing services and bandwidth which means you don’t need your own servers.  Companies like these are staffed by experienced folks dedicated to keeping the machines up, running and secure.

It Isn’t Magic

Cloud computing opens up a wealth of opportunities for today’s businesses.  Like anything else though, it is not a magic bullet.  There are costs involved and every business needs to look at their needs and make decisions to “go to the cloud” on a case by case basis.  There are access and security risks to consider and data integration challenges to address.  Talk to an experienced technology advisor about the opportunities for YOUR business.