One of the more frequent activities of our computer help desk is to change passwords on various accounts. My network technicians often have to refuse to set passwords to specific things because they are far too simple to be meaningful. I’m not just talking about people who want to set their password to their birthdate, or anniversary, or home address, or even the names of their children or pets. At least a hacker would have to know something about the person, albeit information they can probably pick up on their Facebook page. No I’m talking about really simple stuff. And we’re not alone. An analysis of a recent data breach at web company RockYou revealed that a lot of people are unconcerned about security. Here are the top 10 passwords found in these accounts:

123456
12345
123456789
Password
iloveyou
princess
rockyou (the name of the site, remember)
1234567
12345678
Daniel

The other side of that is when my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers decide to make password requirements hard, or have frequent changes. This leads to post-it notes on everyone's desk with their latest passwords on them. As biometric technology gets better, we may be able to move away from the password. I relish the day.

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.

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 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.

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. 

According to new media marketing firm Penn Olson, these are the top 10 questions posed to Ask.com in 2009:

1. How much should I weigh?
2. How do I get out of debt fast?
3. How do I get pregnant?
4. What is Miley Cyrus’ phone number?
5. What is Twitter?
6. What is the meaning of life?
7. When will the world end?
8. How long does marijuana stay in your system?
9. What are symptoms of Swine Flu?
10. What time is it?

Most of those questions indicate something bad about the confidence many of us place in the power of the Internet. The list did make me think about the kinds of questions that get asked at our computer help desk. Rather than list the top 10, I'm offering up the 10 I hope we never hear again:
 

1. I didn't do what you told me, but can you fix it now that it's broken?
2. If I didn't put in my backup tape, can you still restore my files?
3. Can I keep using my computer after the power goes out?
4. Should I have called you before I clicked OK on that popup?
5. The salesman said it would be easy. Why can't you make it work?
6. I just sent out an email to a couple thousand people and now I'm getting bouncebacks. Can you look at it?
7. So I wasn’t supposed to open that Hallmark e-card?
8. What do you mean I’m not supposed to work out of my deleted items folder?
9. Is this trojan message good or bad?
10. I didn't do anything. Why isn't it working?

Our Indianapolis IT outsourcing company fields dozens of calls every day at the Help Desk. We know that each caller us a customer with an issue that is unique to them, and we do all we can to help them. There are times when we wish we could have gotten to them sooner, but we understand that they use our IT services because this stuff is a bit foreign to them. If all of these questions stopped being asked, we'd have another 10 that we wish we didn't hear. Our favorite thing to hear is, "Thank you for fixing my problem."

 

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.

While Apple has managed to maintain an image of being virus-impervious, most of us in the computer outsourcing business have always contended that the reason there weren't many native Mac viruses was because there just weren't enough Macs to make it worthwhile for evil hackers to bother with it when there were far more Windows PCs out there to attack. In fact, as the Mac continues to becomes more popular on the Intel platform, I imagine computer help desks all over the country will start to see more infected ones. The popularity of the iPhone (30 million sold and counting) has already attracted some attention. A young man in Australia has written a worm that infects the iPhone while pretending to be a Rick Astley screen saver. I have to admit that I didn't know who Astley was, but this is sure to raise his popularity briefly.

One of the most frequent questions from my Indianapolis small business computer consulting customers is, "What can I do to ensure that my network is safe from hackers?" I always answer the same way: "Disconnect your machines from the Internet."

That's the only way to be sure, and even then you may have a mole in your own organization who ferrets out data on a flash drive. (How about that, two rodents in the same sentence?) Data security is an important element of any good network design. We do all we can to keep our computer network services customers' data safe. The best analogy I can use is your home security. You lock the doors when you leave to keep bad people out. If you feel you're at a higher risk, you turn on an alarm as well. These measures will keep out most burglars or thieves. They'll just move on to the next house in search of one without an alarm or with an unlocked door. However, if the burglar is looking to get something from you in particular, your locks and alarms become a nuisance to him. He'll have to plan better and it will take longer, but if he's committed, he'll get around your reasonable precautions. The same holds true for your network. Practice safe computing and avoid upsetting anyone who might have crazy tech skills.

If those infected iPhone users had practiced safe computing, they wouldn't have jailbroken their phones, and the worm wouldn't have gotten in.

As the customer service rep for our Indianapolis small business computer customers, I listen carfeully to anything they have to say.  I listen to the praise as well as the complaints.  As much as we love the praises, we analyze every complaint or concern from our customers.  One of the issues that we experienced lately relates to our computer help desk.  The service the clients were receiving was fine. The problem was when they received it.  For example, when someone at their office comes in early and finds there is a problem, they would call into the helpdesk.  The helpdesk does not open until 8:00 so the person is not able to get assistance until the helpdesk would call them back about 8:15-8:30.  Port-to-Port has listened and we're changing our hours to start the helpdesk at 7 am. 

I have a second grade child that has been excelling at her private christian school.  She has been at this school for the last four years. Before Kindergarten and first grade, I compared what she was being taught in the private school to the public school curriculum. For the first two years the standards were higher at the private school so, I didn't evaluate against the public school for second grade. Boy was I wrong in not doing that!  The private school's standards fell below the public school.  When I approached the school to see why and what needed to be done to challenge my daughter, I was informed that it was too hard and I would need to do all the challenging at home. I challenge my child at home but it does need to be reinforced by the education system. Well the public school has increased what they require the children to know. If I had kept my daughter in the private school she would have been behind and potentionally not able to catch up.

What does this story have to do with computers, consulting, etc.?  It is never bad to evaluate who you are using against other people and services.  If you have a good network support group or computer outsourcing company, they will want to know where they are behind and will want to improve.  If the school had said, "Let's try these things to get back to that higher standard," we would have stayed. We liked the school, we liked the people. As I am sure you are with the people that support your computer network. If you don't like the company that supports you or you don't like the people that support you, maybe you need to evaluate why you use them. If you've talked to them and gotten answers like my private school gave me, you should see what other options are available. My small busines computer support company takes feedback from our customers extremely seriously. We don't take a squeaky wheel approach to it either. We assume that if one company is telling us they have a problem, many are feeling the same pain and we need to make changes quickly.

Don't allow your computer network services company to take your business for granted. Make them work to continue to earn your business. We know that's what our customers expect, and we do all we can to deliver. Every IT consultant in the nation should do the same.

I have been working for an Indianapolis small business computer support firm for a while and it seems that we are only the heroes whenever your computer is broken and we are there to fix it. Even then, we are the enemy until we are able to get it fixed. There is a lot more going on behind the scenes when everything is running smooth and the typical computer network services technician is not just hanging out playing games until your computer breaks.

There are several things that can bring your network to its knees if they go unattended. Consider your email for instance; all the email in your inbox along with all the other employees who want to keep a huge folder full of the daily joke emails can take up a lot of disk space on your server. If the server gets full of space then everything will stop working. The business computer support technicians will have to ask you to clean out all your emails so there is enough space on the server for everything to operate. Fortunately, however, at my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing office we are monitoring and managing the disk space on the servers so this problem is addressed even before the company knows it.  Without network technicians your server would fill up on disk space and your network would be down for good.

The IT support technicians are always on top of things and when the network is down they are always there to get it back up and running as fast as possible. When it seems things are quiet on your network the technicians are not hiding out playing games on the computer; they are busy keeping your network functional for all the users. The IT technician is not just some computer geek; they are an unsung hero.

There have been a lot of advances in technology over the past decade; computers can act as phones, phones can act as computers and they are starting to use the same operating systems. This has started a progressive movement into what is called unified communications.

Unified communications is giving everyone the ability to stay connected no matter where they are in the world. A user could be out of the office but still have a connection with everyone at the office by using chat software, VoIP phone calls, checking their voicemail and email as well as checking the company websites. This is enabling faster communication between businesses which in turn produces increased productivity.

Being in the Indianapolis small business computer support industry, this is something that we have to watch very closely since it ties into a computer network services role. Unified communications is still young but is rapidly expanding and the capabilities will go beyond our current expectations. With unified communications our Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing office have excelled our internal communication even with employees who are out of the office most of the day. This is the technology that will keep every employee connected to the office.

I often meet with prospective Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers who have internal IT staff. Usually it's just one person and that person came to the organization to do a different job and then morphed into the IT support person by virtue of their interest in computers. By the time I meet them, considerable time has passed since this arrangement got formalized and the business owner is wondering whether or not his internal person knows as much as everyone once believed. In truth, the wondering stopped a long time ago, probably when the owner heard a peer talking about a computer network capability that she uses routinely. The owner inquires about the mountains of time and money it must have taken to get that capability only to be told by nearly everyone else that the capability is commonplace in today's computer services.

When the owner got back to the office and asked his tech support person about it, he again hears how he's better off forgetting about that capability because it will take lots of time and money to implement it and then it won't work like he expects. That's when I get a call to discuss matters. Sure enough, the conversation gets around to that specific capability and, after I assure the owner that it is very possible, he screams, "I knew it!"

The next part of the conversation is difficult. I have to gently remind this prospective IT support services customer that he created the situation he's in by giving his network to a person who is unqualified to perform the job. I try to sugarcoat it with a monologue on the rapid rate at which technology changes and the great difficulty any one person must have trying to keep up with new features. And that's true. Not one of my computer systems consultants will pretend to know everything necessary to keep any but the smallest of computer networks running at peak efficiency. We rely on one another to make sure that happens. What the inside network support person has done is to limit the changes in the network so that he can continue to use the knowledge he gained in putting the network together for as long as possible.

That approach stiffles creativity. It throws water on any new idea for moving the business forward thru technology. It's a cost that doesn't get weighed when small business owners consider their computer network services options. You see, while most of my customers are in a relatively steady state with respect to their network, many of them are going thru a significant change. Because of this, it is rare that any one of our customers has to suffer thru being the first to have a particular new technical capability installed in their office. Where the inside guy gets only one chance to get it right, and fears the pressure involved, our network technicians get to do it all the time, and look forward to finding ways to do it better the next time.

Several years ago my children introduced me to the movie Good Burger. It is a silly Nickelodeon movie about a local burger joint that is about to be put out of business by the mega chain Mondo Burger...until one day Dexter gets a taste of Ed's secret sauce and they start putting it on the Good Burgers.

I believe that most good small businesses exist against their Mondo competition because of a secret sauce of some sort or other. In the Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing arena, our secret sauce is customer service. We understand that most of our customers don't care a bit about what the technical competence of our help desk or our network
technicians. Of course, they'd care if we were incompetent, but once we know just a tiny bit more than they do, our competence becomes a given. After that, we have to work to keep them happy so they will continue to use us for their tech support.


At our Indianapolis computer services company, we are constantly adjusting our internal processes and procedures. There are two, sometimes competing goals behind the changes. First, we want to be as efficient as we can be in performing the routine computer network services. Second, we want to make the things we do as invisible as possible to our customers. Often these two ideals conflict. When they do, we choose in favor of our customers' convenience. My technical support team often moans about the choice, but they recognize that, in the end, it is the right way to provide IT support.

 My Indianapolis small business computer consulting company has sponsored a golf league for more than a decade now. We call it the Port-to-Port & Friends League. Every Wednesday night from May until September, 30 to 40 golfers hit the links for nine holes of fun. I started this league because many of my IT support services customers would talk about their desire to play more golf. Over and over the conversation would end with, "I just can't find the time."

One of the things I pride myself on is that our company focuses everything we do on making our customers better at everything they do. The solution to this problem seemed simple enough: Create a way for my customers to play golf more regularly. In order to demonstrate that computer consulting is a part of nearly all that we do, I found a piece of software that would handle the management of league stats.

I give this as an example of the kinds of things that are unexpected of a computer services vendor. We don't view ourselves as the vendor. We think of ourselves as a part of each and every one of our client businesses. It's why we started offering our bundle of computer network services that we call Pertingo^®.

I tend to be a reader of the genre I call "Pop Business." I trace its roots to Tom Peters and In Search of Excellence, but it probably goes back to Machiavelli or thereabouts. Generally, these books tell about a good idea upon which the author has stumbled. After describing the Earth-shattering impact of this usually obvious idea, the author goes on to provide examples of his idea in action, usually quelled from other pop business books. I only deride this genre because it can cause damage to a good company if the leader decides to swallow the idea whole without applying a little common sense and knowledge of her own situation to it. From each of these books, I learn something that I believe can be applied to improve the way in which we provide computer network consulting in central Indiana.

One always needs an exception to prove the rule. Here it is. Hisashi Sakamaki, the CEO of Canon has written a book in which he proposes that you not allow your employees to sit down. That's right! He's taken away all the chairs. If that could be overlooked as an idiosyncrasy, how about the sensors in the hallways that alert workers if they walk too slow? Even better is the sign on the floor that tells employees: "Lets rush - if we don't then the company and world will perish."

Currently, Sakamaki's book is only available in Japanese. I can only imagine that it will get published in English at some point. The computer help desk technicians on my staff don't have to worry about me trying to pick up good management tips from that book.

I recently read an interview with JJ Abrams, the director of the new Star Trek movie (highly recommended by the Port-to-Port Consulting crew). In the interview, he talks about how the Internet has created an Age of Immediacy. He discusses how we no longer feel compelled to get good at anything that takes skill or effort. Shortly after reading this article, someone sent me a link to a video of Louis CK on Late Night with Conan O'Brien where he make a similar point, albeit a bit more humorously. Both of these gentlemen bring up an issue that seems to be coming to a tipping point as our economy becomes more volatile. People cannot stand to wait for even the smallest amount of time to get gratified.

In our dealings with the Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers that use Pertingo, this immediacy manifests itself in our quest to determine the severity of the issue at hand when they call our computer help desk. We know that in a perfect world, most of these calls would never take place. We also know that on many days we live in a far from perfect world. It's on those days that we try to do a bit more triage to determine where best to focus our resources in our attempt to keep all of our computer support customers working productively. In recent times, our customers took that into consideration and helped with our effort to prioritize their concerns. Today, we are always told that, "This is an urgent problem and it is having an enormously detrimental effect on our ability to work."

Now we understand that we are all living in stressful times, and we don't expect that our computer network services customers are going to call us with truly trivial issues. Perhaps it's too much to ask that everyone remember back to the days when everything didn't seem to happen immediately.