Social networking is going to work its way into your organization's routine activities in the next year or two. If you don't think so, remember back when email first appeared and how you thought there was no use for it in your organization. I've been watching the goings-on in the Web 2.0 craze with great interest in how it might prove useful to my Indianapolis computer consulting customers. We're not diving in and having them all Twitter their customers, or build a presence on MySpace or Facebook. We are having some of them create blogs. We've asked all of them to create a LinkedIn account. Many are using Google Apps to collaborate on projects.

There are so many Web 2.0 sites that do similar things. It's too messy right now for those to whom I provide business computer support. So instead I play with these things and bring the ideas I find back to them. If you have a computer outsourcing arrangement in your office, you should start hearing about how some of these online services may help your business. The web isn't just for advertising. There are tools out there now that can make you more efficient.

Not even the most optimistic economist in the country is predicting anything but hard times over the next few months. Small business owners are trying to figure out what to do to survive, if not thrive, during the days ahead. As a small business owner, you should look to all of your advisors for ideas on ways to get by with less. Your accountant can help with tax avoidance or delay ideas. Your banker (yes, he should be helping too) can offer ideas about refinancing lines of credit or other current debt. Your attorney may have ways to help tighten up collecting thru better contract language.

But what should your IT support services provider be doing to help out? All kinds of things. Now is the time to turn to your computer outsourcing company and ask how they can help you succeed. They ought to have a few good answers too. If they are going to really help, they'll start with a few good questions. For instance, are you or your customers harder hit by the recession? Are there markets that you can enter that will do better in these times? Where do you stand relative to your competitors in financial strength?

You see, the answers guide the discussion toward doing things to get more customers like you have, or seeking different customers, or looking for bargain opportunities to acquire competitors, or even preparing yourself to look acquireable. Each of these directions leads to different IT strategies. Those strategies vary from doing as little as possible and just keeping everything in its best running condition to launching some aggressive Internet presence activities to implementing internal system improvements. One thing is for sure: Your business computer support partner should have some ideas to toss on the table as you consider your options. Share your position and plans with him and ask him what ways he sees to help.

We've been trying to add to our technical staff for several weeks now. The task of finding good, qualified people is daunting even with the growing unemployment. The problem is not so much that we can't find people who have the technical skills for computer network consulting. It's that they don't have the skills that are most important to successfully provide business computer support in the Indianapolis area.

Eric Lundquist made this point in a commentary in a recent issue of eWeek. He summarizes the list of skills identified by the Society for Information Management, a decades old organization for technical managers:

1. Ethics and morals 
2. Critical thinking
3. Collaboration
4. Problem solving
5. Oral communication
6. Written communication
7. Interpersonal skills
8. Creativity
9. Managing expectations
10. Decision making
11. Functional area knowledge
12. Project leadership
13. Database
14. System analysis

Most job candidates find it difficult to understand that technical skills don't even make it into the top ten. My list doesn't exactly match this one from SIM, but it's not far from it. Having people who can't string together a sentence on paper or look me in the eye when talking to me is useless in the computer outsourcing business. My customers expect to get more than technical knowledge from us. They want help with their business problems -- especially the computer network ones.

While we haven't officially closed the books on 2008, it's already clear that it will have been a good year for the Pertingo^® computer support business of Port-to-Port Consulting. I often have mixed feelings about our success during tough economic times. While other Indianapolis area businesses are trying to figure out how to cut back in order to survive, we're trying to hire talented and skilled people to join our IT support services team. Our difficulty in hiring is related to our success in tough times.

If you're a small business owner and you're looking at your staff to determine who has to get cut, it doesn't take long for your eyes to fall on the computer support guy. You know how everyone else on the staff makes money (or saves money) for your business, but you aren't quite sure what your computer guy does exactly. Part of this is because business computer support is not a core function of your organization. A bigger part is that your guy has probably grown lazy over the years and he really isn't doing much except keeping the rest of the staff in fear that he can make their lives at work miserable if they don't treat him nicely.

I know it's true because I've gotten so many phone calls from people who literally whisper in fear that their computer guy might overhear. They want to know if I believe they need to have a full time computer person in their company of 30 or 40 or even 50 people. I generally tell them that depends on how their organization operates: how critical their IT system is the them; and how well it's been designed and maintained. After a bit more discussion, they invite me in to see their system, usually at a time when they're sure their guy will be out of the office. I go, and most often, I find that they don't need a full time guy if they just invest a little in upgrading and re-configuring their system. They are relieved to hear it and set about the task of replacing their guy with Port-to-Port's Pertingo^® service.

Then the other shoe drops. The owner will come to me and say something like, "Joe has been with the company for a long time. Surely you can use a good man like him on your staff." I don't often enjoy this conversation because I have to tell them that if Joe were any good at his job, he would have quit it long ago to seek a real challenge in the industry. My guys do every day the kinds of things that Joe only does once every couple of years. He probably convinces you to hire an outside computer consulting company for that. If Joe was good, he would already have applied for work with us.

Most of my Indianapolis computer consulting prospects take this news in one of two ways. They either get really mad that Joe has been dead weight on their business for so long and can't wait to get rid of him, or they get mad at me for insinuating that Joe was somehow fooling them into believing that his work was more important than it really was. In one case I get a new client. In the other, I apologize and walk away.

The reality is that very few small businesses need to have a full time computer consultant unless their business is directly related to technology. Yes, all of our businesses rely heavily on technology. Having an on-staff Help Desk guy is a false sense of security. No one person can keep up with all of the things that need to be managed on a typical computer network. The time has come to consider how you spend those IT dollars. Computer outsourcing is the norm for larger businesses. It should be the norm for your business too.

Trust is a common theme that comes up when I write about the relationship between a computer network consulting company and its customers. I mention it often because it is the most important element in the success of that relationship. The same is true for other professional relationships we have like doctors, lawyers, accountants, and coaches. A recent malware attack led me to remind of this again.

According to Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham, hackers figured out how to take advantage of the URL redirector function of some popular web sites including Microsoft.com and IRS.gov to send people to malicious sites. These people were looking for downloads to help them protect their systems from just such malicious activity. Port-to-Port Consulting's Pertingo(r) computer consulting clients can avoid these kinds of problems by trusting that we, their IT support services company, have taken care to protect their systems. They also know that because of the fixed fee relationship between us, a mistake in this area will cost us time and money to repair.

When people don't trust that their computer outsourcing company has their best interest at heart, they start searching for good advice from other sources. That search often leads, on the Internet, to bad results. It's like when your kids listen to their misbehaving friends instead of the good advice you give them.

So if you find yourself chasing online solutions to threats and problems instead of seeking your business computer support provider, you should perhaps seek a new provider. Find one you can trust and your life will be better.

Our office telephone service was out for almost an entire week. It first went out on December 22nd. An AT&T technician arrived early on the 23rd to get it working. The next morning it was out again. Another technician came late that afternoon and got it working. It was out again on the day after Christmas. No technician ever showed up to fix it that day. None showed up yesterday either. Finally about midday today, a technician came and got it working again. We've had trouble with our telephone service before. Our old building has an cable that has been in the ground for more than 50 years. It doesn't deal with water very well any more.

It has been kind of embarrassing to have my Indianapolis computer consulting customers ask me why I didn't have a contingency plan for a telephone service outage. My first response was that there really isn't one. Now that I've lived thru a week without service, I realize that there are some contingencies. We've already started the process of establishing the ability to remote call forward our two main numbers so we can have cell phones ring. We're looking into the possibility of phone service from Brighthouse, our cable company. We won't get stuck in this situation again (unless our phone service is down tomorrow morning).
 
Our situation sheds light on one of the most difficult problems computer outsourcing companies have when working with their clients on disaster planning. It's easy to plan for the worst case scenario. The problem is planning for the doesn't-seem-so-bad scenarios that number in the hundreds or thousands. We have procedures in place to deal with an Internet outage. We also have three different Internet providers in our building to avoid an outage. Until this long telephone outage, we worked under the assumption that the phone company would quickly effect repairs if we had a service outage. They always have in the past.

As we put new contingency plans in place for our office, we'll use this experience to work with our business computer support customers to identify the scenarios that may have been overlooked or under-emphasized when we built their disaster recovery plans. There are always contingencies. The problem is identifying where you need them.

Cloud computing is one of the hot topics in computer network consulting these days. Many of our Indianapolis computer consulting customers have asked us to explain what it's all about. In a sense, cloud computing is just another form of client/server computing. The difference is that the server is not in your office. It's somewhere out there in the Internet cloud.

Business computing constantly seeks to find the delicate balance between freedom for the staff and control for the management. On top of that, most internal IT support departments start to think it's all about them after a while. This conflict creates a pendulum effect that swings from centralized computing like the mainframe and dumb terminals of old, and individualized computing like the free standing desktop PCs of the late 80s. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Cloud computing is the latest incarnation of the mainframe approach to computing. Most of the processing happens on the server and all of the data is kept there.

Most business computer support companies are steering their clients away from cloud computing with scare tactics about the data security risk and availability problems. The reality is that cloud computing has the possibility of taking money out of their pockets because there will be less equipment installed in the clients office to fix and maintain. As soon as they find a way to bill for it, they'll start talking about how great cloud computing can be for their clients.

Port-to-Port Consulting is already talking about how great it is because our Pertingo(r) service focuses our energy more tightly on our customer's success. We believe there are some great advantages to cloud computing for many small businesses, including our own. Ask your computer consulting provider about cloud computing. His answer may say a lot about where his focus lies.

When Bob Beaty and I started doing business computer support in 1991, among the first things we purchased were electronic planners (before PDA had been coined). We loved the idea of having a device that let us take notes in a meeting then transfer them into our computers for safe long-term keeping. One of the difficulties we encountered in using these devices was that they tended to attract attention away from the meeting to the devices themselves. Times have certainly changed. Look around during the next meeting you attend with more than a half dozen people. You'll find at least one who is working a device in his lap, obviously not involved in the meeting.

The discrete lap typer has existed for a while. He's prevalent at computer outsourcing conferences and familiar to anyone who has been in a large audience (meetings, sporting events, concerts, parties). I recently attended a conference where I saw what I hope is not the future of social ettiquette. In a room of about 200 people, there were, at any given point, about 50 who were blatantly disregarding the goings on of the meeting in favor of whatever was on their personal devices (laptops, smartphones, and PDAs). In fact, during some pauses in the presentation, I could hear a cacophony of clickety clicks as folks pounded away on their toys.

I was embarrassed for being a part of such a rude audience. I was embarrassed that our work in IT support services had created the ability for people to behave just like this at conferences all over the country. Being one who presents often at conferences, I was also amazed at how little the presenters seemed to be bothered that a quarter of their audience ignoring them in favor of someone far away. I work hard preparing material for my presentations that is relevant and timely for my audiences. I take cues from my audience as to whether my material is hitting the mark. If I lost a quarter of them, I'd feel I had failed.

As I left this conference, I took away two important things: First, it is still rude beyond description to conduct electronic business when you're supposed to be the audience of an important presentation; and second, if you're the presenter, you'd better make your stuff good because your audience can change the channel without leaving their seat.

I met basketball legend Hallie Bryant a couple of weeks ago. He was Indiana's Mr. Basketball in 1953 and after starring at IU, went on to a career with the Harlem Globetrotters that lasted nearly three decades. Hallie and his lovely wife have settled in Indianapolis. He does motivational speaking and has written a book filled with his insights about life.

During our conversation, Hallie mentioned some trouble that he was having with his computer. He told me that he knew that his little old computer wasn't of interest to my Indianapolis computer consulting but asked if I could give him some tips for the guy who works on his system. I looked at it and jotted down some notes for his guy. I even spoke with one of Hallie's IT support providers on the phone and he seemed to understand my thoughts.

A couple of weeks later, Hallie called to congratulate me on winning the Fast Company/Brother Best Business Idea contest. He mentions that his computer is still acting up even after his computer guy spent about three hours working on it. I nearly popped a gasket! I told Hallie that it's time for him to get new computer tech support. He tried to take the blame for having given bad direction to his guy. I acknowledged that he probably did because he had done that when I looked at his computer, but a business computer support person should have to meet some minimum level of competency.

Unfortunately, there are no governing bodies in the computer consulting services industry. Everything is voluntary. Most of the certifications are granted by the same companies that sell the hardware and software, which seems self serving to me. Why wouldn't Microsoft or Cisco or whoever want me to have one of their certificates? If they certify me, I'm more likely to recommend them over competing products. This leads to the problem that Hallie has. His guys seem nice enough and he's in no position to determine if they know what they are talking about.

I didn't retrieve yesterday's mail from the box until this morning. I was appalled to find THREE letters from personal injury attorneys wanting to make sure that I'm aware of my rights in this accident that "was serious enough to make the public record." I thought about the business computer support providers who use scare tactics to generate new business by feeding their prospects a bunch of stuff that is obvious to anyone in the computer network consulting business but seems incredibly important to someone outside. Like the fact that my accident made the public record. Well, of course it did. Thanks to my Indianapolis computer consulting clients in the legal industry, I know that every police report is a part of the public record. It's not as impressive if you know that.

The two things that many computer outsourcing "experts" are touting these days are security and Online Presence Management. Security is always a good way to scare up some business. Small business owners are overly concerned with the security of their networks as I've written about in a previous post. Combine that with a few stories about the total ruin of a similar business, and you've got a ripe mark.  Even better though is the  promise to raise more money for the struggling business owner. We all know it takes more than a good website or accounts on some social networking sites, but we don't really know how much more. Or how to do it.

The truth is that in both of these areas, the fix is not a one-time deal. Any expert who comes in and promises to make your network completely secure by conducting an audit and selling you additional hardware and software to fix what he finds is providing security at a single point in time. You will not be secure the next day when there are new threat vectors that he didn't take into account. The same is true on the Internet marketing side. Lots of people can present you with a screen image that shows you on page one of a Google search for a particular search phrase of interest to you. They don't tell you that you won't be there by the time your prospect conducts the same search.

The only way your small business can take successful advantage of outsourced business computer support is to have a long term relationship with your provider. That's why we abandoned all forms of network support except our Pertingo^® Computer Suport Services.

One of the many things I love about my job as an Indianapolis computer consultant is that it provides me with ample opportunities to let out the geek in me. In most instances, I'm not extremely enamored with how cool a new item is. I'm more interested in how it can help me or my small business computer support customers do our jobs better. Every now and then, especially in the portable device market, I will buy something that I know won't do what I need it to do just as a way of casting my vote for the innovative idea.

The original iPhone was one of those purchases. I was fairly confident that it wouldn't work well enough for me to use it or recommend it to my customers. However, I was sure that it was an attempt at something completely different than other smart phone manufacturers were doing. It turns out I was right on both counts. My assumption was that the traditional cell phone manufacturers would look at the iPhone and say, "Why didn't we think of that!" They did. Look at the number of phones on the market now that are iPhone impersonators. Then Apple came along with their new version, the iPhone 3G, and knocked the imposters out of the way.

In 15 months, Apple has sold ten million iPhones. They sold more last quarter than industry leader RIM sold Blackberrys. I'm telling my computer consulting customers to consider the iPhone for their mobile device. Now let the recommendation lead you to believe I'm a Mac zealot or a Windows basher. The best thing Apple did with the new iPhone was to license the Microsoft activesync software so it can talk to Exchange servers. I have a list of things that would make the phone better that has reached 10 items, but that's far shorter than the list I have for every other smart phone I've tried.

Web 2.0. What things came to your mind when you read that phrase? Did you think of Facebook? MySpace? Twitter? Cloud Computing? Crowdsourcing? Second Life maybe?

I’ll bet you didn’t think, “New avenues for marketing.” That’s what people in the online marketing world want you to think. In the small business market where we provide business computer support, these are not generally good ideas for marketing dollars. While you certainly should have a website that is dynamic to some degree by now, you aren’t ready to dump significant dollars into creating your own social network for your customers, even if they are the hip, twenty-somethings that hang out on Facebook and Twitter. They don’t hang out in these online joints to hear about your latest special.

Millions of dollars have been spent creating spaces in Second Life. Thousands have been spent creating sophisticated pages in MySpace? Hundreds have been spent establishing Twitter feeds. Almost all of it has been wasted because people aren’t going online so you can market to them. We’re all content for the free services we use on the Internet to pay the way by tacking an advertisement or two (or twelve) on the pages that we see. We’d clearly rather that than pay for these indispensable services, right? However, we draw the line at the intrusion of advertisers into our activity. In fact, new services are quite often created when a popular service starts pandering to advertisers instead of keeping its user base in mind.

If you’re ready to increase your online advertising budget, start with these:

1. Update your web site.
1. Add some interaction.
2. Create changing content.
3. Add links to other sites.
4. Ask other sites to link to you.
2. Start blogging. Regular blog posts about your business will enhance your search success.
3. Create personal accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networking sites.
4. Create an electronic newsletter using a professional broadcast email company.
5. Update your web site again. You can never do this enough.

The title of that old Teddy Pendergrass song is "When Somebody Loves You Back." That's the essence of a good computer consulting relationship. Love isn't often used in business relationships, but I think it should be. The difference is that these relationships must be 50/50 loves. It isn't enough that you appreciate the effort of your IT support services. They (we) have to appreciate the opportunity you give us to work with you and your staff toward achieving your goals...your dreams for your organization.

My Indianapolis computer consulting company recognizes the incredible trust our customers place in us when they let us manage their critical network support. We know that we have to return the trust and demonstrate our love for them if we hope to be successful in doing what we do. And we have bad days too. That’s why it needs to be a 50/50 love. On occasion you will be the fifth or fiftieth person to ask the same question of us. We have to care enough to realize that it’s the first time you’ve asked it that day.

All of us take tremendous pride in the successes of our customers, personally and professionally. We cheer when we hear that M.D. Wessler is one of the 15 best places to work. We celebrate when we hear that Rebecca Baer has been recognized as a distinguished Graduate of the Last Decade at Ball State. We love being a part of the incredibly diverse group of organizations who allow us to participate in their daily operations through their business computer support.
We do love our customers, and we believe that they love us too.

I recently had a meeting with a customer in which we agreed to part ways after a short relationship. It was a lot like breaking off a new relationship of any kind: Regrets for not having made it work; Sadness that it didn’t work; Guilt for not having tried harder. In the end, we parted because, as the old Teddy Pendergrass song says, we didn’t have a fifty-fifty love.

One of the most difficult things for outsourced computer support people is to be so mistreated by our customers. We understand that technology inherently brings with it some confusion and frustration. We get that most of the emotion isn’t about us even though it is often directed at us. But a good customer will treat us with the same respect and decorum that he gives to his staff and co-workers. After all, we’re a part of the staff. I have customers for whom I have worked longer than anyone else on their staff.

Your small business computer support provider may be one of the hardest working members of your staff because she’s only at work when there is work for her to do. The problem is often that the only time your computer help desk staff comes to mind is when you have a computer support issue. You begin to associate their appearance with trouble even though they are actually there to fix it.

Make yourself more conscious of the way you treat the people who keep your computer network running. Try to have a fifty-fifty love.

There are professions where creativity is not usually considered an asset. Accounting is one of the first to come to mind. I want an accountant who understands the intricacies of tax law. I want him to be versed in the debit and credit practices required to keep track of my meager fortune. I don’t particularly want him coming up with creative ways to keep my books. Creative accountants bring to mind companies like Enron.

What about IT support companies? Should you expect your computer outsourcing provider to be creative? Certainly your computer consulting services company should be more creative than your accountant. I argue that your business computer support company should be the most creative partners of your business with the possible exception of your marketing firm. While many small business owners want to believe they can buy computers from the pimple-faced kid at Best Buy and keep them for a decade without concern, you all know the reality is that technology changes more rapidly than congressmen. A creative computer network consulting company will be able to see how new technology can impact your business and make you more money. In the end, my Indianapolis computer consulting company is useless if we don’t have a positive impact on our customers’ revenue during the year. I’m not talking about cost savings. I mean real new money coming in the door. The best way to do that is for us to leverage new (and existing) technology in creative ways to benefit our clients’ operations.

How could you have known a decade ago how Electronic Mail (that’s how it was written then) was going to impact your business? How are you expected to know what impact blogging, social networking, smart phones, micro-PCs, Windows Vista, Google Chrome, WiMax, and all the other emerging technologies are going to change your business? Your creative computer tech support company should already have some ideas. I do!

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore postulated that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit will double approximately every two years. The impact of that for most of us comes in two areas: size and speed. As the number of transistors increases, the size of the devices gets smaller. Think about the cell phones transition from mounted to bagged to clip-on to pocket. The bigger impact though, is speed. Everything runs faster because of the impact of Moore's Law.

Many people said that at some point, the fact that we can go faster doesn't mean we need to go faster. This kind of thinking misses the point. Sure, your computer is just sitting there waiting on you to do something as you read this post. However, clever people have found things for it to do. While I'm typing this, my computer is also performing a continuous backup of my data. It's doing a continuous defrag of my hard drive (usually the element that makes your machine slow). It's scanning for viruses. It's listening for my wife's computer to request data or send it a print job. And it's doing a dozen other things that I'd have to stop typing and wait while it did them if I didn't have the speed.

So, if things are doubling in speed about every two years, how fast is your computer consulting services company? How fast should it be? We believe that the best small business computer support we can provide to our Indianapolis customers comes from being as fast as Moore's Law. Our goal is to bring the power of computer services to our clients in a way that allows them to move at that same speed.

Where do you see your IT support company's speed? It's not in how fast they respond to a crisis. It's in how fast they bring new ideas to your business. How often do they introduce technology to your business that impacts the way you do business? Are they giving you the opportunity to be ahead of your peers and competitors, or do you find yourself asking them about something that you saw a competitor using successfully?

I took a design class in college. One day, the professor walks in and asks us all, "What's the best response time?" We started scribbling equations to try to calculate some generic formula, but he stopped us. He said, "The best response time is anything that is better than you've ever had." A good computer outsourcing company must always compete with its best response time.

I previously wrote about the importance of having styles that fit with your small business computer support provider. I mentioned then that you aren't looking for a perfect fit, but one that will allow you to trust the information your consultant brings to you without feeling you have to independently confirm it. I keep coming back to the element of trust because it is the heart and soul of a good computer outsourcing relationship. Just as no two families fit perfectly together, no two companies will either, particularly when they are from different industries. So you're going to have discomfort with even the best fitting computer outsourcing company. When that discomfort rises up, you'll need to be able to trust that your consultant has your best interest in mind as he makes recommendations.

It helps when you know that your IT support services provider will have to be there to make his recommendations work according to your description of the business need being tackled. I have much less trouble making recommendations that someone else will have to live with. Of course, the fact that my Indianapolis computer services company has to implement the solution and keep it working means that some of the elements in my recommendation take my concerns into consideration as well. I always point out those elements as I make the recommendation. Full disclosure is the only way to ensure that trust continues to grow between me and my clients.

This is the same kind of trust you have to have in the other professionals who help It's different from the level of trust you need to have in your mechanic or your you with your business and your life: doctors, lawyers, accountants, and the like. plumber. Remember that it's important to the success of the relationship that your technology advisor be near the center of your circle of trust, so he can stay beside you if the circle starts to shrink.

I met with a prospective client the other day to discuss their computer network consulting needs. Like most of my Indianapolis computer consulting clients, this was a small organization looking to upgrade some very old computer equipment. As soon as we sat down, she started right into her list of things she wanted us to quote for her: new server, several workstations, wireless keyboard, etc. etc.

When she took a breath, I asked her to start over and talk to us about her organization. What is their mission? Where are they having trouble? How has their computer system been helping them deal with those troubles? She sat back and stared at me for a moment before asking why I needed to know that information.

I explained that under our Pertingo(r) IT support services, we believe that our job is to add value to her organization's overall reason-for-being. She reluctantly started to explain what they do. I listened and asked question to clarify. After a few minutes, she had given us a good overview of the way her organization functions and I was able to sense that she had a big problem. You see, this was a Not-For-Profit organization that generated much of its funding from its member base. She needed to make sure that her existing members continued to renew, and, more importantly, that her total membership grows in the future.

When I told her that I believe we can do things that will help make that happen, she looked in disbelief. We talked a while longer and I made suggestions that might reduce the amount of equipment she needed to purchase to move forward. I then pointed out that she could probably afford to pay for our business computer support with the money we had saved her during this brief conversation. I told her that even if that savings wasn't enough, I was confident that we could help her increase her membership enough to cover anything that was left.

I hope she decides to take a chance on it. This is where we most effectively show our value. It's not about the tecnology in the end. It's about the successful accomplishment of the organization's mission. I'll update you on this if it goes any farther.

When I have conversations with my business computer support customers about the level of service they receive from Port-to-Port Consulting, one topic is always on the top of the list. Whether they feel that our IT support services are good or bad seems to be based on a single element, and it's not whether their network is running well.

The number one element in my customer's feeling of satisfaction is how well we keep them informed of what's going on. That's it. Across the board, people who feel like they are being kept informed feel better about their customer service and people who fell like they've been left in the dark are unhappy with the level of support. I had noticed that my unhappy customers mentioned a lack of information, but I hadn't noticed that my happy customers were mentioning the availability of information until I came across a passage in the recent book "Sway" by the brothers Brafman. In one section, they discuss the impression that convicted felons had about the judicial process. Regardless of the outcome of the case, those whose attorneys spent time with them explaining the process felt the system was fairer than those whose attorney did not.

The answer seems simple then. I'm off to find out.

I had a meeting this morning with Larry Welke. He's something of a legend among Indianapolis computer consulting and other technology people. Larry was selling computer hardware and software before most people knew what they were. In his latest endeavor, Larry is using video to engage inner city youth. During the conversation, he mentioned the six audiences with which every organization must interact: prospects, customers, employees, shareholders, competitors, and suppliers. That made me think about the impact that our computer network consulting has on each of those audiences.

Prospects
Our business computer support makes it easier for our customers to collect and sort information about their prospects. This is accomplished thru a compendium of IT support services, including CRM and other databases, website, Internet searches, email, and broadcast email.

Customers
Many of the same tools used for prospects can be used for customers as well. Different information goes into these systems, and other tools like accounting software and specialized software for your primary product or service are used to interact with your customers.

Employees
A lot of organizations forget about communicating with (marketing to) employees. These are the secret weapons for most organizations. Our Help computer Desk is the most obvious way in which we help with this audience.

Shareholders
In most of our small business and not-for-profit customers, the shareholders are also connected to the organization as one of the other six audiences as well. There are times when their needs are different however. These often come when helping with budgeting for technology – the tug between must have and nice-to-have.

Competitors
Most small businesses spend very little time worrying about what their competitors are doing. Because our Indianapolis computer consulting business is involved in many organizations, we're able to cross-pollinate our customers with ideas from related industries, as well as keep them informed of what their competitors who work with our other clients are doing.

Suppliers
In many instances, as a result of the outsourcing relationship, we become the direct contact for our customers' suppliers. We frequently deal with ISPs, telephone equipment and service providers, copier companies, construction companies, and the host of computer hardware and software vendors on behalf of our clients.

We work to make it easier for our client companies to deal with all six of their audiences. In some cases, we spend more time with some audiences than our clients' staff members. That's the relationship that makes Pertingo® work.