Computer Consulting

A recent Nielsen study indicates that the number of telephone calls we make has been dropping since its peak in 2007. In addition, their duration has gone down by half. The replacement: text messaging. It's an amazing thing for me to grapple with. I've been on several windmill tilting campaigns (See my post about the lowly penny). I've advocated for the elimination of the fax machine for two decades (yet we installed two new ones for a couple of our Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers in the last month). Never would I have thought I'd be trying to save a piece of century old technology, but here I am, begging you to use your telephone a little more. I've admitted to fighting a losing battle against texting. I even bought a plan for my phone last month.

I even recognize how interrupting a phone call can be. People of my generation were trained that a ringing phone has to be answered, regardless of what we're doing when it rings. I still have to turn off the ringer when I want to avoid telephone interruptions. I'll also admit that I spend the first hour or so with a new phone doing everything but making a telephone call.

But there's something about live conversation that contributes to our humanity. If we start doing all (or most) of our communication by text or email, a huge piece of the conversation is going to get lost forever. As the good people who run our computer help desk can tell you, talking to a person goes a long way to understanding their needs. The message is carried in more than the words.

We believe in voice communication so much at Port-to-Port Consulting that we have "Talk to Them Tuesday" every week. Each Tuesday, we commit to starting all of our new communications via the telephone or in person. I hope we don't reach the point where something like this has to become a national holiday.

You've heard the old proverb that, "A man man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client." The corrolary that, "You only need to have a lawyer because the other guy has one," is heard almost as often. Both statements contain an element of truth, and they show the difficulty of providing good consulting services to small businesses. Everybody thinks what professionals do is easy. Afterall, Denny Crane, and Matlock before him, and Perry Mason before him, showed how easy it is to be a courtroom attorney.

The IT support services industry has it even worse. Imagine how simple network support must be when 8 year old girls like Lex Murphy from Jurassic Park sits down at a screen and shouts, "It's a UNIX system, I know this!" Or when beautiful Angela Montenegro taps a few keys and creates a perfect 3D rendition of the victim's internal organs at the request of her boss, "Bones". Not to mention the incredibly easy way in which Garcia mines information from disparate databases on "Criminal Minds". It's no wonder that Indianapolis small business owners think computer network support should be simple and quick.

No we have the real-life 15 year old kid who disguises an iPhone app that allows the phone to be used as a data modem and gets it past all the screeners at the Apple Store. Surely the whole of business computer support must be simple in comparison! These examples don't just create misunderstanding among business leaders. Many people with very modest computer skills draw the same conclusion about how easy it must be to provide IT outsourcing services. They start selling their "skills" at below-market rates and before you know it some unfortunate small business is dead in the water because of incompetence.

The truth is that providing quality computer network consulting services requires a lot of skill and practice, along with an ongoing effort to stay educated about changes in the industry. Solving complex problems often takes time, even if the TV and movie stars make it look otherwise.

One of the scariest things I've seen in nearly 20 years providing IT support services to small businesses in Indianapolis, Carmel, Greenwood, Fishers, and other central Indiana communities has been the explosion of "Us vs Them" divisions of people. The Internet makes it possible for a person to hear only one viewpoint on a topic so that it gets reinforced and solidified in his mind. One of these splits that impacts computer network services is the Mac vs PC division. You're all familiar with the "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" commercials that Apple used successfully recently. They played on a separation that was really meaningful a decade ago. The truth is that there is little difference between PC capabilities and those of the Mac any more.

And for those of you who say, "Yes but Macs don't get viruses," check out the latest research from security company Secunia. They found that in the first half of 2010, the Mac OS and the programs that run on it were the least secure, followed by Oracle and then Microsoft. The reason Macs don't get viruses is simply because there aren't enough Macs out there, relative to the number of PCs. One writes a virus to get widespread distribution. That's not possible if there aren't very many target systems to begin with.

When my Indianapolis small business computer consulting customers ask me about Mac vs PC, I tell them the decision is more one of aesthetics and cost than functionality. They don't believe me either.

Two recent events have me once again thinking about the role of a smart phone in the IT network of my central Indiana small business computer support customers. The first event was a stolen laptop. One of my IT support customers had her laptop taken from her house. She was able to use her iPhone to notify us that it had happened, which allowed us to secure her data. She was then able to continue to work, albeit in a limited fashion, until she can get back to the office and get a replacement. That was a great use of the technology.

The second event was when another of my Indianapolis computer consulting customers called to say he wants to replace his Palm Treo (That's right, he still carries a Treo). In his case, he didn't need anything more than his Treo had been providing. But he had to upgrade and he found the choices overwhelming.

These two experiences made me ponder the role of the smart phone. They show the spread of usefulness to some degree. For many, their phone is still a way to talk to others and to keep up with email and calendars. For others, it is a portable device for computing. The idea of placing a call with it is so low on the list of requirements that it doesn't play in the decision set (unless calls begin to drop, iPhone 4).

On Friday night, some of the Port-to-Port Consulting staff and several of our computer outsourcing customers attended the Indiana Fever game against the Atlanta Dream. It was the first event in our year long celebration of our 20th anniversary in business. We've created the Pertingo Perks program to invite our customers to participate in activities throughout the central Indiana community. Most of the events are things that people from outside central Indiana would put on their list to see while here, yet most of us keep saying, "We ought to do that some time."

Next month, we'll attend another local event with our Indianapolis small business computer support customers. We'll keep doing it until our big 20th anniversary celebration next July. It's a small way to thank the people who have helped to keep us in business for all these years. The PC industry is only about 30 years old. we've been a part of it for nearly 20. Time flies!

I met with a prospective new customer yesterday. This man is in charge of a good sized institution. They have not escaped the economic downturn of recent months and his board is pressuring him to squeeze as much out of the budget as he can without damaging the institution. He wanted to talk to me because he wasn't sure his internal guys were giving him the information he needed to make informed decisions about his computer network. He said, "They seem to be doing what it takes to keep their jobs."

This is something that I hear my Indianapolis small business computer support customers say all the time. They want us to give them the information they need to make informed decisions about their organization and its computer network services. Most of my competitors think about the Information Technology as if it were a separate entity from the rest of the organization. In fact, IT is nothing but a tool of the rest of the organization. If your comuter consulting company doesn't understand that, you should get rid of them right away.

When I talk with my customers, a very small part of the conversation is about computers. It's mostly about the business. What is happening that effects it? Where is it going in the future? Who can make things happen for it? When will critical decision points come along?

In the end, my IT support services customer has to make a business decision. My input is to provide a solid understanding of the business impact of the technology decision. Rarely does she have to make a "technology" decision. My technical input allows her to make an informed business decision.

I write about smart phones a lot. Part of that is because I love these little devices and covet the chance to play with a new one. Amazingly, placing a call is way down on the list of things to do when one first gets to use a new phone. I got to spend 10 minutes with an HTC EVO 4 the other day. It never dawned on me to place a call during that time.

The bigger reason that I write about smart phones so much is that they are one of the fastest changing areas of technology. I consider my phone to be a one year device because in a year there will be so many new phones on the market that do more (or better) than the phone I've chosen to carry. And while I'm carrying the iPhone 4 now, I keep my eyes open for the latest Android phones (especially from HTC). I can't wait to see what Microsoft does with Windows Phone 7. This is their last chance to play in this market and they know it. I expect something spectacular.

The pain of smart phones for my IT support services company is that they change so frequently. My Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing clients want (expect) me to tell them which phones to choose from. Unlike the more settled aspects of the technology industry, there are lots of choices available. The world may or may not be divided into Mac and PC people, but it is definitely not divided nicely among the phone players. Palm, who arguably invented the smart phone, is now a division of HP and will likely disappear entirely by year end. 

The other pain of smart phones is that they are so truly personal. Two people with the same phone will want to do different things with them. My Indianapolis computer consulting company doesn't charge for support of smart phones, but my Help Desk spends a lot of time working with our customers and their phones.

I can't wait until the other players introduce their competitors for the iPad.

We're pretty proud of our 19 year history at Port-to-Port Consulting. We've worked with hundreds of central Indiana small businesses and their Information Technology. In that time, even though we focus on small businesses, we've been a small part of 4 IPOs. In a state that has averaged less than 2 per year, it's notable. The other notable thing is that these companies outgrew our outsourced IT services before reaching their IPO decision. We really are a small business IT support services company.

With each of these companies, and many more, we've had to handle the transition to us from their previous network support provider. The handoff is critical to short term success. In most instances, we get thru it smoothly. On occasion, we get too comfortable with our success and find, like our men's and women's 4X100 relay teams in Beijing, that this little piece of the process can determine success or failure, no matter how fast the team is.

We were reminded of this a couple of time recently when customers told us that we didn't seem to be interested in solving a nagging problem for them, but instead were pointing them to another vendor. We thanked them for reminding us of our lapse, and got right to work bringing together all of the players needed to solve the problem.

Everyday, we deal with some kind of handoff between us and another service provider. Sometimes we forget that a bad handoff means we all lose. Thankfully, we have clients who remind us.

In the world of sports, it's common for competitors to prepare for a contest by studying video of their opponents previous performances. Peyton Manning is famous for reviewing game photos during the game. My favorite boxer of all time, Thomas "Hitman" Hearns used to find weaknesses in his opponents thru film, then test for those weaknesses early in a bout. He became the first fighter ever to win titles in four different weight divisions.

At Port-to-Port Consulting, we obsess with review of our performance. We know that we can only get better if we identify what needs to improve. We survey each of our customers after they have an interaction with our computer help desk to see what they think. We ask the Indianapolis small business owners who've hired us to tell us what they hear from their staffs about us during our frequent business reviews. We constantly debate about whether we're taking the best approach to the routine network support activities that we perform. All in the name of improvment. We understand that big improvements are made of little ones. Thomas Hearns once described the way in which an opponent "signaled" that he was about to throw a jab. He confirmed the signal was true, then proceeded to knock out his opponent the next time he threw that jab.

While we don't have the benefit of video, we do all we can to review and improve. When we find little signals that things aren't going as well as we think, we pay attention... before someone else does.

I have been interviewing candidates for my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing company for nearly 19 years now. I have spent most of this year seeking new team members as more business owners come to understand the strategic value of a good IT support services company. In all those years, we've tried every kind of recruiting and selection process ever known. We've done personality profiling, and role playing, and short term gigs, and team interviews, and on and on. None of it seemed to reliably predict whether a person would become a strong member of our business computer support team.

Recently, I had a computer consulting customer suggest that we check out candidates online. Surely people in the Information Technology field are findable online. I had used LinkedIn to view a few candidates, but nothing more than that unless they directed me to it. Just as I was about to start, I came across a study that showed that hiring managers made better choices when they had only resumes to screen than when social media (Facebook profiles in this case) were added.

Another case where more information leads to poorer decisions.

A recent story on SFGate, the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle, tells of Google eliminating Microsoft Windows from all of the company's PCs. The headline says that Google blames security holes in Windows for a recently successful hack in China. Now I'm not going to try to tell you that Windows is a safe and secure operating system, but it seems to me that Google may be hiding their (perhaps a little bit evil) reason for dumping Windows behind a convenient scapegoat.

You see, Google wants to be the Microsoft of the 22nd century. So far, they are doing a pretty good job of it by creating or buying anything that might have a chance of capturing our fleeting attention. Among those new things are an up-and-coming web browser, Chrome; a rapidly rising mobile OS, Android; a steadily improving online office suite, Google Apps; and a soon-to-be-released operating system, Chrome OS. Now, if your company made a product that it hoped would compete with the Microsoft juggernaut products, wouldn't you want your employees to use it? Well, Google does too. What better way to get them to break free than to tell them how terrifyingly dangerous the product is.

Fear has always been a great motivator. Many Indianapolis Information Technology providers use it to capture and retain business. My view is that life is pretty scary, but living it is what it's all about. When people try to scare you into doing something, think more about their motivation than the fear they want to use to motivate you.

As a provider of outsourced IT services to Indianapolis area small business owners, I'm often asked for my opinion of one technology gadget or another. For the most part, I try to keep an open mind toward new things. (Heck, I spent a year tweeting before I declared it to be a media created hype.) One of the things I've found in 19 years providing business computer support is that most of my peers don't keep an open mind for more than a clock cycle or two.

The IT industry is still in its infancy. The founders are just starting to be eligible to be called "greyheads." Afterall, the PC was introduced only 30 years ago. Throughout the PC era, the pace of change in PC and network services has been tremendous and ever-increasing. In order to keep up, those of us who provide IT support services have to be able to discern quickly whether a new technology has a hope of impacting our clients and customers. While we often make it sound like we've done extensive research on a topic, the extent of the investigation is often no more than reading a few posts on Digg or our preferred site for technobabble.

Again, I try to be more open than that. I tend not to share an opinion on a product that I haven't at least held in my hand, or tried out online. Once I get my hands on it though, it has a very small opportunity to amaze me before I'm ready to play with the next shiny object. I have enough technology junk to fill a small museum.

I say all of this to caution you when you seek computer network consulting. The expert giving you his opinion may not know any more than you about the subject at hand. See if you can get him to say he doesn't know about something, because he surely can't know about everything. Can he?

Earlier this month, the NPD Group, a market research company, released a study that shows the Blackberry is still the dominant smartphone in the marketplace with a (shrinking) market share of 36 percent. Surprising in this report is that we have a new number two: Google's Android OS surpassed the iPhone OS at 28% to 21%. This is the beginning of a very heated battle that will be determined in great measure by Apple's ability to extract the iPhone from its AT&T exclusivity.

In reality, these devices (now going by the monicker "app-phones") become more attractive as more applications become available. Programmers go where they have the largest audience and easy access to them. Apple's App Store still looks much better than the offerings from RIM or Android. Also, the new iPhone OS 4 will likely be released late next month, along with a new version of the iPhone itself. What else does Jobs have to talk about at the World Wide Developer's Conference that starts on June 7th?

In order to inform my Indianapolis small business computer consulting customers about the ups and downs, I follow these developments closely. It's important to understand that IT means more than desktops and laptops. It inlcudes all of the electronic gadgets that allow my client companies to do what they do better.

Many people have become so accustomed to sharing private data online thru social networking sites and the like that service providers are starting to take for granted that we are willing to share information that we really aren't. As the outsourced IT department for dozens of Indianapolis area small businesses, we sometimes have to stop and think about these same privacy issues with respect to the computer network services we provide. For example, my network support staff often needs to access a person's account. Many people think that we know (or have a way of viewing) their passwords so they are put off when we ask them to type it in. They think we're just  being lazy and not looking it up. In reality, your password is the last thing we want to know. It's your ensurance of privacy on your network.

Sure, we can change your password, but you'll notice that we did. We can also get access to much of your data using our administrative privleges. Nonetheless, we want to respect your privacy at every turn. We don't want to make a gaff like the launch of Google Buzz earlier this year. Google innocently pulled peoples' contact lists into Buzz in order to pre-populate it for them. They never stopped to think that people might not want to "Buzz" with those same people -- certainly not with all of them.

Data privacy is getting more difficult to define and manage, but good computer network consulting providers need to be extra mindfull of their practices.

Port-to-Port Consulting has been providing outsourced IT support to Indianapolis area small businesses for almost 19 years. A lot has changed about computer services in that time, but one thing has remained constant: Your Information Technology is a primary source of chaos in your organization. You can't look away from your computer system without having it become a little obsolete. You have to spend time thinking about how obsolete you can let it get before you have to do something about it. That's what we do for our outsourced IT services customers. We help them survive thru the chaos.

Many in the computer consulting business thing that small business owners don't care about IT. I think just the opposite is true. They care about it too much. It's an area of their business that is critical to their success yet there is no way they can know enough to make an intelligent decision about it. This technical ignorance causes them to freeze like deer in the headlights and do nothing until they have no other choice.

Those of us who serve the network support needs of these businesses need to do all we can to make our customers IT-smart without them having to become IT experts. We can start by talking in business terms rather than IT terms. Even when our customers start the technical jargon, we've got to know it's the chaos that's making them do it. We have to help them navigate back to a place where they are more comfortable. From there, we must run the gauntlet to bring back a useful technology recommendation.

I got into the business computer support industry because the chaos attracts me. My customers have their own chaos to deal with. Together, we make successful business and IT decisions.

It's a common error for people to take an action with a specific result in mind only to discover that the action had unexpected, and unintended, consequences. Our newly acquired obsession with all things green is creating many situations like this. Only a few of my Indianapolis small business computer support customers have asked me directly for more green IT support initiatives, but my vendors are constantly bombarding me with marketing ideas around being green.

A recent study by the Dutch company Printer.com concludes that you can save money by changing your default font. It turns out some fonts use more ink than others, so using a more ink-less font saves printer and toner cartridges. What a green thing to do. However, it turns out the most ink efficient font is Century Gothic, which is wider than the more common and moe ink intensive Arial font. As a result, the printer may use as much as 30 percent less ink, but put it on more pages of paper. A one page Arial document will likely stretch into a second page when converted to Century Gothic. Now, is the ecological impact of those extra sheets of paper worse than the additional ink? It might take a rocket scientist to figure it out.

Trade offs like this pop up everywhere in our attempts to help our customers with business computer support. As a result, we reduce the conversation to costs and let our customers decide whether they consider it green or not. In the case of printers, you should switch to the Century Gothic font. It will make your documents take up more paper, but ink is by far the biggest cost in printing. The switch will save money and the jury is out on whether it's more or less planet friendly. You can even help with that by switching back to Arial or Calibri when you have a document that is just going over into that second page.

Our local business paper has a regular columnist who writes about small business technology. (They lock all of their content behind a subscriber login so you can't see what I mean.) I used to think he was an idiot because he was forever writing about Indianapolis Information Technology topics on which he seemed to know very little. The truth is that there is simply too much to know for one man to provide IT support services to even the smallest of businesses. When we started Port-to-Port Consulting in 1991 to provide small business computer support to organizations in Indianapolis, Carmel, Fishers, Greenwood, and Noblesville, my partner Bob and I were willing to make the claim that between the two of us we knew everything there was to know about running a small business computer network. We may even have been right.

Today, every single person at Port-to-Port learns something new and pertinent to providing good outsourced IT support that no one else in the company knew. We share, formally and informally, with one another all the time yet we still find new things every day. The thought makes me realize that Tim Altom is not an idiot. He is a new representation of what Bob and I used to call the "page ahead" guys. These were the computer consultants who would promise to come over tomorrow and do whatever it was that you asked of them. Then they'd go home tonight and read up on it so that when they showed up tomorrow, they seemed to know what they were talking about. In reality, they were only one page ahead of you in the manual.

Port-to-Port has been publishing this blog for almost 2 years. If you've read many of the posts, you've noticed that most are written by me. The rest of my organization gets a good idea every now and then. A few (Chris Sudler often, Becky Hardwick sometimes, and Tony Retz rarely) actually write interesting posts about life in an Indianapolis outsourced IT department. One of the biggest complaints I get from those who don't write, or don't write often, is that they feel as if they have to manipulate the words in order to optimize for search.

This is true. In normal conversation, I wouldn't refer to Port-to-Port Consulting as an Indianapolis small business computer support company.  I might try something like it as part of an elevator pitch, but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Nonetheless, I squeeze a few awkward phrases into these posts because they are the phrases that you may be typing into Google (or your search engine of choice) to find a company like mine that can provide computer consulting to your small business in Carmel, Fishers, Noblesville, Greenwood, or Indianapolis.

The awkward prose is to help you, my reader, find us on the web. That's the first step in our goal to establish a relationship with you. If we do the rest well, you'll come back to learn things that will help you grow your business thru technology. I try to practice the advice of my ghost blogger friend Rhoda Israelov and put the Big Four of Blogging into each post. I apologize for the stinted phrases, but I hope the content makes that forgivable, or at least allows you to overlook it.

When I started my Indianapolis Information Technology consulting business in 1991, we referred to our customers as "clients." Today, I think of the people that I work for as customers and the companies as clients. I believe that we treat customers better than anything else we choose to call them (patients, clients, constituents, visitors, etc.). This distinction between the small business entity to which we provide IT support services and the people who own and work in those organizations gets interesting from time to time.

The latest challenge comes in the form of private information in the age of social media. My clients, the Indianapolis, Greenwood, Carmel, Fishers, and Noblesville small businesses, want us to ensure the safety and security of their data and intellectual property. To do that we install systems to monitor and manage both incoming and outgoing electronic information. In many cases, we have the ability to see every word, image, and sound that moves in or out of our clients' offices via the Internet. We know where it came from and where it is going. We can essentially reconstruct what happened online days ago, kind of like an Internet Tivo. This ability is not generally monitored at that level by my network support staff. But we can in some cases if asked to do so.

With the emergence of Web 2.0 services, this seemingly simple process for managing the online presence of our client companies takes on a Big Brother feeling pretty quickly. Social Media has almost completely removed the line between you as an employee of a company and you as a human being living in Indiana. Services like Facebook and LinkedIn expect (in fact require) you to have a single account with your real name. If you use your LinkedIn account to keep track of your customers, prospects, and vendors while at the same time leaving yourself open to inquiries about job opportunities, then are you cheating on your current employer or enhancing his ability to succeed?

More importantly, what happens when you leave? The account was setup using your work email address, perhaps even at the request of your employer. But the network built in that account seems to belong to you more than the company. Who gets it? What is my role as the business computer support professional in facilitating that? Do I serve my client or my customer?

So far, these questions have come up mostly as hypothetical situations, but we have already dealt with a few real ones. Going forward there will be lots more. Given the strange way that Indiana courts interpret the laws, we think Indiana small business owners should start crafting agreements that define the rules of separation before they find themselves dealing with a private data issue between them and a departing employee.

This comic strip explains the difficulty small business owners have in finding a competent outsourced IT department. In the central Indiana communities of Carmel, Greenwood, Fishers, and Noblesville, my Indianapolis computer consulting company often runs into people like Henry. For whatever reason, they've decided that being a computer network services provider is much easier than their current occupations. Without delay, they run down to the local Kinko's and have a thousand business cards printed and start handing them out to friends.

Usually, the new Information Technology expert will find a problem or two that he can solve, which bolsters his confidence and makes him chase after more and more difficult challenges until, eventually, he really screws one up. At that point, he stalls until he can find a job in his previous career and gets out of the computer support business by throwing away the 950 leftover business cards.

Unfortunately he leaves behind a burned small business owner. He hired Henry because he was a nice guy he met at some Chamber function. Henry sounded like he knew what he was talking about when it comes to computers. He used a lot of technical jargon in the conversation. The business owner knew that his IT system had outgrown his internal ability to keep it running, much less to use it for strategic advantage. Since there's no industry regulation, he could only choose based on fuzzy factors or price. Henry fit the bill.

What's bad for that business owner, and for those of us who run professional outsourced IT departments, is that he will never again allow an outsider to work on his computer network if he can help it. When I meet owners who have had a "Henry experience," I try to console them for the bad experience. I don't try to win their business. Henry will have turned them into bad customers because they will never be able to trust another IT consultant. The "Henry experience" puts them at a permanent disadvantage. All I do is wish them well.