I recently attended a conference of bankruptcy lawyers. It's one of those groups where business owners in non-competing geographies get together to share best practices in order to improve their businesses. I attended as the outsourced IT support provider to Indiana bankruptcy attorney Mark Zuckerberg. If any of the good ideas presented had to to with computer network services, my job was to make sure I understood it and how it might impact Mark's network support.

One of the attorneys ignited an interesting discussion about personal communications at work that made me realize that our Indianapolis small business IT outsourcing company spends a lot of time doing things that are intended to keep people from hurting themselves -- babysitting, in other words.

The conversation started with the need to block popular Internet sites like Facebook, Pandora, Amazon, and other social, entertainment, or shopping sites during work hours. It went on to include a debate about whether or not people should be allowed to use their cell phones at work and what can be done about it. I was surprised at how many had already implemented such rules in their workplaces. I guess I shouldn't have been. As more of us turn to the Internet for entertainment and socializing, it will become more difficult to separate our personal and business lives. In the end, nothing that your IT support services company can do will solve this issue.

We can add filtering and monitoring and alerting to the network, but clever people will figure out how to avoid or defeat these measures (I had teenage kids so I know what I'm talking about). In the end, as we agreed at the conference, staff has work to accomplish. As business owners, we may have to look more at quality and quantity of work than at how our people spend their time each day. Good people will do good work. Mine do.

As someone who works in computer consulting, it is part of my responsibility to look to the future for my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers. 2010 is going to be a year full of major change for most people. Microsoft is all but forcing adoption of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. Both of these are vastly different from their predecessors (excluding Vista, which no one used anyway). Google has released phones to compete with the iPhone, Microsoft is releasing a new Windows Mobile OS, and then there’s the iPad, which at least one person in your office wants. Add to that new versions of end-user software like Office 2010 and you’ve got the recipe for a lot of headaches.

So, what can we do as a network consultant to ease the pain? For one, we can access most of the software in beta format and use it for a few months before it's officially released. But, here’s the trick…we need to actually USE the software. I understand installing it on a secondary computer, but your IT consultant needs to use it regularly to be able to really recommend changing (or not changing for that matter). This isn’t practical for all applications, but for things like Office, Browsers, and Operating Systems, it’s essential.

In our Indianapolis-based small business computer consulting company, we try to get at least two people using new software as early as possible. We had 3 people using the release candidate for Windows 7, and all their raving got the rest of us amped up to do the switch as well. We currently have 2 people (including me) using Office 2010, which is in beta release. It’s got some cool features as well, but hasn’t generated near the buzz that Windows 7 did.

So, let’s be proactive instead of reactive and get ourselves ready for our clients’ benefit.

I spent several hours on a plane today, which gave me a chance to catch up on some reading. One of the things I read was a NY Times article from December that claims that American data consumption has grown by 350 percent in the last three decades to a whopping 34 Gb per day. The rate continues to increase by 6 percent per year.

Now I don't know why they did a 30 year comparison, but I do know the amount of data we save is growing far faster. Perhaps it's because, like me, people are saving stuff they hope to get to during their next plane ride and the trips aren't coming often enough. All I know is that the size of the disk space we install in new servers for our Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers gets larger and larger. Still we frequently have to contact our network support clients to let them know that they are nearing the end of their storage capacity and need to purge old information. 

Often, our IT support services clients will ask us to do this for them. By the time we call we've already done all that we can do without having some detailed knowledge of the value of their data. We invoke the "one man's junk is another man's treasure" excuse to avoid causing unhappy results.

If it's been a while since you cleaned up your files, take some time to do it now. There is stuff there that is taking up space that you will eventually have to replace. It's also getting backed up regularly, taking time and resources. And it might be causing some of that low level anxiety you feel when you set out to find a piece of information amid all that stuff.

Years ago the ideal salesman would wear a long button up coat with a hat that often had a feather to the side of it. So what happened to this fashion? I haven't seen anyone wearing a professional hat when traveling to or from our Indianapolis computer consulting clients. Granted, we can't really wear a professional hat with a feather in it when we are doing computer network consulting work but the hat should return again. The hat is what completes the business professional image. Next time you are out shopping for new clothes, consider picking up a business hat.

A recent Scientific American article discusses the way in which we make snap judgments about people based on their warmth and competence. In it, the author describes how recent research is showing that people all over the world form their initial impression of you based on warmth and competence. Stereotypes feed these impressions, but they do not account for the whole first impression. The research also shows how a gain in one area leads to a loss in the other. For instance, people who are warm are assumed to be less competent than people who are cold. That must be why so many computer consultants treat their small business computer support customers so poorly. They must believe that appearing cold will also make them appear more competent.

Here at Port-to-Port Consulting, we're willing to take that chance. Our entire IT support services staff is committed to treating our network support customers kindly. We understand that most people are a little anxious or perturbed during most of their interactions with us. They either have a problem that is getting in the way of their work success, or they are trying to make a purchase decision based on limited understanding of the options. We strive first to put our computer network services customers at ease. I guess this research means we risk giving them a first impression of incompetence. So be it.

Our primary goal in providing Information Technology services in Indianapolis is to help our customers get better at what they do. We can't start helping if we aren't approachable.

I attended an event last evening at the home of local entrepreneur and philanthropist Scott Jones. The gathering was to introduce Lemonade Day to Indianapolis. My schedule required me to arrive late and leave early. I did get to see the entire presentation and am still wondering about my involvement in Lemonade Day. However, things went bad when I tried to leave. I was the first person to give my parking ticket to the valets. Several more people came out shortly after me and before long a steady trickle of people were departing.

It didn't strike me as strange when the first car to pull up was not mine. I started to be a bit concerned when the fifth one arrived and still I hadn't seen mine. It became ridiculous when I had been standing in the rain for 30 minutes without getting my car. The valets kept telling me they were getting my car, but it was obvious to everyone that they weren't. Finally, after 45 minutes and several polite requests for information, they told me that they couldn't get my car to start. You can't imagine how furious that made me.

The whole ordeal reminded me of one of the important tenets we hold here at Port-to-Port Consulting. We always tell our small business computer support customers the bad news as soon as we know it. They most likely are going to find out sooner or later, so why not tell them right away. Besides, they might be able to help. In the network support business, there are going to be problems. Companies that outsource their IT support services know that as well. They also know what is most critical and can help prioritize in a pinch.

I walked to my car in disgust, got in, turned the steering wheel a quarter turn, and started my car. I waited 45 minutes to find out that something was wrong that only took 10 seconds to correct. I hope these young men learned something from the experience. I'll get my own car next time.

For now all handheld users have the luxury of downloading any app or program to their phone with complete freedom. They don't have to worry about what files they are adding to their phone's operating system or who the developer even is. All of this will change very soon.

Since we work as an Indianapolis computer consulting company, we need to stay on top of all threats that can manipulate our network support clients' technology; this relates to their desktops, servers, firewalls, and now includes handhelds. Already the iPhone has viruses that makes the device controllable by botnets and there are antivirus apps for several phone systems.

Our days of browsing the web and downloading applications through our handhelds without any tension in security are soon coming to an end. We are beginning a new era where cell phone viruses will become an epidemic.

In the grand scheme of things, the thing that we do at our Indianapolis small business computer support company is to help our customers do whatever they do a little bit better. Often, particularly with new network support customers, that amounts to nothing more than keeping their computer network running without crashes. After we've worked with them for a while, that becomes less exciting to them because they become accustomed to the idea that their business computer system should work without unplanned down time. That's when we have to start working to earn our keep.

Sometimes we do obvious things like informing our computer consulting customers about the status of their IT system. We keep them up to date on the age and status of their equipment and help plan replacements, refreshments, and upgrades as they go about budgeting. At other times, we move a bit out of the normal things considered outsourced computer support to areas like online marketing and social media. Every now and then we really step outside the normal envelope and do research that only touches computer support because it's done online. A recent example was a question posed to me by a customer who received several gift cards from friends and vendors at Christmas. He knew he would never visit many of these stores and wanted to know if there were options other than "re-gifting" these cards.

We took the challenge and, believe it or not, there is another option. We found a website, giftcardrescue.com, that allows you to trade in your gift cards for cash or other cards. Sure, my customer could have spent a few minutes online himself and perhaps found this site. I could have told him that I didn't know of anything other than re-gifting and moved on to my next task. But the reality of our outsourced computer service is that we do what our customers need us to do so that they can be more productive. Besides, now that I've found this option, I can share it with the rest of my Indianapolis computer consulting customers and perhaps help them with a small problem as well.

I met with a prospective new small business computer network support customer this morning. As we talked about the IT services we provide thru our Pertingo^® Computer Support Service, the application of Dragon Dictate came up. I had to admit that this was an area of Information Technology that had not progressed as quickly as I had expected it to do. I was predicting in the early 1990s that we'd all be talking to our computers like the folks on the Starship Enterprise by the mid-90s. I was wrong by more than a decade so far. While the current version of Dragon Dictate and many of its competitors will do a pretty decent job of allowing you to dictate documents, none of them are particularly good at allowing you to control your PC using your voice.

Imagine my surprise when I get back to the office and discover that researchers at the University of North Florida have moved from voice recognition to thought recognition. That's right. They've connected two epilepsy patients to a computer via electrocorticography (ECoG). The process requires drilling a hole in your skull so it probably won't catch on too quickly. However, the results were nearly 100 percent accurate.

As exciting as this research may be for some, it still doesn't solve the real problem with voice recognition. The English language (and any other popular human language) is too complicated for a computer to learn. It can recognize the words, but it cannot discern meaning from them. That's why dictation is fairly simple and highly accurate but understanding is about zero. Talking to your computer is still a good decade or more away. But I'll keep hoping.

I recently read a blog post titled Excuses are Not a Customer Service Policy. In it, the author describes a bad breakfast experience with friends. The post wasn't as interesting as its title, but it made me think about the way in which most computer network services companies behave toward their customers. It's amazing how most people think that a customer who has been mistreated in some way wants to hear excuses for the abuse. In most instances, the customer wants an apology first and a resolution second. If these two are adequate to save the relationship, then she might want to hear the excuse.

At Port-to-Port Consulting, we recognize this and we try very hard not to make excuses for the mistakes that occur in the process of providing computer support to our Indianapolis area customers. We know that things will often go wrong in IT support services. That's the reason we have a Help Desk in the first place. However, one of our main tenets is to avoid escalating the problem by tossing out lame excuses, or worse, telling our customers what they did wrong. Sometimes the problem is created by a customer who improperly uses his computer, but it doesn't get fixed by us throwing that in his face. So we don't.

Good Information Technology consulting requires a solid working relationship. My network technicians often find themselves taking the blame for something that may not have been our fault. Finding fault doesn't fix problems. The faster we can get past that point, the sooner we can start helping our customers move forward again. Besides, if they hired us to manage their computer network services and they aren't working properly for any reason, isn't that ultimately our fault?

One of the computer network service technicians here at Port-to-Port Consulting just returned from a training class in Tampa, Florida. One of his complaints about spending time in Tampa was that it seemed to him that everything closed around 5:00 PM each day. I explained to him that the majority of people living in Tampa are old (Data bears me out on this one.) and tend to get inside early for the evening. Businesses start closing early because the bulk of their customers go home early.

It struck me that this is an important element in becoming a successful business computer support company. There are things about your target market that are specific to them and quite different from other categories of businesses. This is why we focus ALL of our efforts on Indianapolis small businesses. The difference between the needs of a 30 person law firm and the legal department at Wellpoint is stark. It's nearly impossible to handle the information technology needs of a 40 person real estate company while also worrying about the needs of the City of Carmel.

I'm often asked why we don't go after the network support business of some of our community's larger companies. My answer always revolves around this idea. If I serve large and small customers, whenever there is a conflict between them, the little guy is almost bound to lose. Besides, working with Indianapolis area small businesses allows us to see the impact we have as we help their businesses grow.

My son came home last Friday for Christmas break. He had just been home a couple of weeks earlier for Thanksgiving. I was apprehensive that his return would be stressful on our household. He hadn't lived with us during the summer so the longest he'd been with us in over a year was the four days at Thanksgiving. So far, my concerns have been greatly overblown. He has pitched in and helped out without complaint or even prompting in some cases. He's a different person than he was a year ago.

I find the same to be true with many of my former Indianapolis small business computer consulting customers. At the time that we parted ways, each of us had good reason to end the business relationship. In the cases where they've been willing to try again and we've been willing to try again, we've established a stronger and better relationship than we'd had before. Some of it is because they experienced a different kind of IT support services with the provider who replaced us. Some of it is because they, and we, have grown in the time we spent apart. Most of it is because we recognized that even though we'd had some difficult times, we were good for each other and usually good to each other.

I'm launching a campaign next year to reach out to many of those former computer network services customers and invite them to try the relationship again. I know we've changed and I imagine they have too. Our history together should help to make us better for each other.

Over the years engineers have put tons of time into making the smartphone more powerful and efficient. These phones have evolved into pocket sized computers that can do nearly everything a standard desktop can do. There is one aspect of these phones that still needs major improvement: the virtual keyboard.

I have an android phone with a virtual keyboard and that means I will have to suffer through pain of typing texts and replying to emails from my Indianapolis computer consulting customers through miniature sized keys displayed on the screen. On physical keyboards you have a feel for what key you are on and can develop muscle memory to increase the typing speed on the phone; on a virtual keyboard you have to look at every key that you press and since the keyboard is on a smooth surface, there is no way to develop muscle memory.

There are several plans to increase the smartphone both for better performance and software support. Hopefully the engineers behind these ideas have a good plan to make the virtual keyboard easier to use and less irritating.

Twitter. Surely by now you've heard of it even if you're not sure what it is. Don't feel bad about it. "What is Twitter?" was one of the most asked questions at Ask.com in the past year. It seems as if you'd better find an answer soon though. While I've been a Twitter user for more than a year now, I still search for a good reason to tell my Indianapolis computer consulting customers that they should use it.

According to a recent survey conducted by cScape, almost 44 percent of companies plan to increase their spending on Twitter activities in 2010. It seems they believe this is the best online medium for engaging customers. I say "they" because I'm still a skeptic about the successful use of Twitter. While estimates of the number of users range as high as 80 million, more than half of all users never come back after the first 30 days -- many never return after initially creating their account. In addition, the company doesn't yet know how it will generate revenue from its user base. If someone doesn't figure out a killer business use for Twitter soon, the whole thing may come tumbling down.

Nonetheless, I keep up with my account and tweet every couple of days to my 60 or so followers. Some of my computer network services customers have created accounts, but they keep asking me what they should do with them. And I just can't give them a good answer. So, if nearly half of all businesses invest in Twitter activities in 2010, the other half may have an advantage in marketing. 

My Indianapolis small business computer consulting customers still make fun of me for my prediction in the mid-nineties that we were only a couple of years from being able to talk to our computers just like Spock and Kirk did on Star Trek. At the time there were several major companies investing big dollars in voice recogmition. It seemed like a safe prediction. So you can imagine that those same computer outsourcing customers take my predecitions with a grain of salt. Heck, so do I, most of the time. Nonetheless, I've been right more often than that talking computer proclamation would indicate.

The latest advice I gave to my computer services customers was to get involved in social media in 2009. I told them it was transforming from a fringe thing into a mainstream tool for business as well as personal activities online. As the year comes to an end, the statistics are proving me correct. Let's just look at Facebook:

• 350 million users worldwide with 35 years and older representing the fastest growing group
• 10 million people daily becoming fans of one of the 1.6 million fan pages daily
• 6 billion minutes spent there each day - twice as much as Google and 55 minutes per person
• 55 million updates, 14 million videos, 2.5 billion photos added daily
• 45 million active groups with the average user belonging to 12

Sure, it's possible to waste a lot of time in the social media space, but it's time to invest a little in figuring out what it's all about. Remember wishing you'd started doing email sooner? Our communications world is changing again, and it's going to have as big an impact as email eventually.

There are a few days left in 2009. Sign up somewhere and start learning about these new communication tools.

Becky Hardwick was telling us about her four year old daughter's ability to add small numbers. The interesting thing was that her daughter couldn't add two numbers, like 2 plus 3, but she could quickly calculate the answer to, "If I have 2 apples and you have 3 apples, how many apples to we have?"

This points out an interesting thing that our brains tend to do. We compartmentalize our knowledge like Becky's daughter. You've probably seen it. A person can remember all of the stats for a major league pitcher's entire career but he can't remember a phone number long enough to cross the room. This phenomenon must have something to do with the way we're wired together. It becomes a problem when working on the networks of our Indianapolis small business computer consulting customers. That's why we use a collaborative approach to designing and managing our provision of computer network services.

Many of my computer outsourcing peers tend to assign a single network technician to each of their customers, ostensibly for consistency and uniformity. In reality, they are guaranteeing these knowledge compartmentalization problems will sneak into every computer network they support. My IT consulting company makes sure that everybody gets to see and experience all of the computer networks we support. You never know when someone needs to count apples instead of numbers.

I just read that a new iPhone has been detected in the wild. A public Internet provider in San Francisco found a device in its access logs that identified itself as "iPhone 3.1". That's a version above the 3GS, which identifies itself as "iPhone 2.1" or the "iPhone 1.2" that is the 3G. Combine that with the recent release of new Android phones from Motorola and HTC and it creates a conundrum for this Indianapolis small business computer consultant. One of the most difficult questions for us to answer for our computer outsourcing customers is, "Which smartphone should I buy?"

The answer depends on so many things, not the least of which being personal preference. With each generation of phone, the ability to synchronize to email, calendar, and contacts gets easier (Blackberry is an exception, but it at least doesn't get harder). At that point, my network technicians are content with any choice. Not me. I want to put the closest thing to the perfect device that is available into my computer services customer's hands. I want to know when they'll use it, where they'll use it, how they'll use it, and how they intend to treat it. Will it be a prized possession kept safe from all dangers, or will it be treated no better than a 19 cent Write Brothers pen?

Understandably I obsess about this particular choice more than most IT services decisions. This is the area in which the geek in me expresses itself most. However, it is indicative of the way in which we go about recommending any element of our customers' computer network services. We want the best answer we can find, given the business constraints and availability.

I met with a couple of guys this morning who are about to launch a new business. My computer tech support business is going to help set them up. As we talked, I found it interesting that they didn't initially expect me to add to the conversation. They had a list of questions that they wanted answered by an IT consultant so they could make decisions about next steps. As I started asking clarifying questions of them they began to see the real value of a good computer outsourcing company.

The trick isn't in knowing how to set up a computer network. It's in knowing what the small business is going to do with the network. Most IT services providers forget this fact after they've been in business for a few years. It's forgetting this that puts so many of my Indianapolis IT outsourcing peers out of business. The number one job of an Information Technology provider is to make the small business owner's job easier to do.

At the end of the meeting this morning, these two guys shook my hand and turned their attention away from technology needs to the innumerable other things that have to be done in order to launch their new enterprise. I'm excited to be a part of it all.

I am convinced, and now tell my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers that social media is making a permanent change to the way in which we collect and disseminate information. Blogs are a primary source of news for a growing percentage of the US population. Keeping in touch with an ever-increasing number of acquaintances - people you would like to keep in your life, but who would otherwise not warrant the effort - is made simple by social media. You can find endless lists of good reasons to dip your toes into the social media world so I'll summarize with this: You can't avoid it forever. You might as well get started. Here are some things to remember:

1. The marketers will follow you there and so will the spammers.

2. The hackers won't be far behind.

3. Social Media will become an important element in every organization's marketing.

4. It's not the end of the world as you know it.

5. Your privacy ends if you put it online.

6. Rules and protocols will develop.

7. Something else will come along to supplant it.

Go ahead. Give it a shot. If you're reading this, you've already started. An easy next step is to leave a comment.

With the frequent announcement of security breaches at large and small companies that barrage us each day, one would think that no computer network is secure. As I've frequently argued, that is likely true. However, we hear about more and more breaches because there are more and more Information Systems to be breached. Even with all of the global super-hacker geeks, the vast majority of security breaches still happen thru inadvertent leaks on the part of people who have authorized access or disclosure of passwords that allow unauthorized people into secure data.

I tell my Indianapolis small business computer consulting customers that we can take all of the precautions that are considered reasonable and then monitor suspicious behavior. It doesn't guarantee that a breach won't happen, but it's the most we can do. Lately, a bigger concern for me has been the change in attitude toward personal information security. The generation that is growing up on Web 2.0 has a completely different view of privacy than those of us who are a part of the baby boom. We get suspicious of people who want to know too much information about us without giving us good reason. They get suspicious of people who aren't willing to share every intimate detail of their lives with anyone who casually asks. When they are in charge, we'll be asked what we're trying to hide when we ask for privacy.

I spoke at a memberhip meeting of the Indiana Construction Association a couple of weeks ago. The topic was social media marketing, but we expanded it to include other aspects of online marketing. At the end, one of the attendees came up to me to say that his network support staff discouraged them from using social media sites and he was glad. He said he wasn't sure he could trust himself not to expose corporate secrets "in the heat of the moment" online. If more people thought like him about managing themselves with respect to private data, much of our fear of privacy loss would go away.