Computer Tech Support

While our goal in providing outsourced IT services to small businesses in central Indiana is to have computer networks that work all the time, it really doesn't happen that way in small business networks. In fact, it doesn't happen in large, fully redundant networks either. All of the major Internet services have had outages that made the news.

The difficult thing for my small business computer support team is to determine how to react when something goes wrong. I was reminded of this today when I went to check on the status of my car. A little over a week ago, I got into my car and found that I could not turn the key in the ignition. I've since come to learn that this is a common problem in Chrysler Crossfires (but not common enough for a recall). After a week waiting for a part, the shop tells me that they can't install it because they can't get the old part out since the key won't turn. Here's where we get into trouble as professionals. We define the problem too narrowly. These guys were trying to get the ignition lock out so they could replace it.

My problem was that I can't drive my car! When they take me into the shop to show me the situation, I see my entire steering column sitting on a bench. I ask, "Can't you just replace this whole piece?" The room fell silent and I could tell they were restraining the instinct to slap their foreheads. The replacement column is on the way.

The same thing happens when my computer help desk guys dive expertly into solving a problem that can be more easily solved if more broadly defined. "I can't print to that printer" doesn't mean we need to fix that printer. We have to get the person printing, then we can move on to fixing that printer.

Sometimes it pays to look at problems as a novice.

I noted recently that Apple's Mac OSX is considered one of the least secure operating systems on the market. Of course that's not what the Apple juggernaut or the army of Mac bigots tell us. They insist that the Mac OS is virtually virus proof. The dearth of native Mac viruses is driven by two forces unrelated to the actual security of the OS. First, there still aren't enough Macs out there to make it worth a hacker's effort. One would have to infect ALL of them to get the kind of notice that comes from infecting less than one percent of PCs out there.

The bigger reason is that Mac programmers have been trained to be well-behaved in their programming. If software developers followed the exploit avoidance techniques built into Windows, we'd have a lot fewer infections. In my Indianapolis small business computer support business, I don't think I have a single computer network that doesn't include at least one application that either subverts the Microsoft controls or requires the local user to have full administrator rights on the machine. Once that happens, viruses and other malware have only to perform the proper social engineering ("Click here to install the viewer.") to gain access to the computer.

Apple taught its developers to be more cooperative in writing their software, allowing for better control of rogue applications. This doesn't mean that it's not possible to infect a Mac. As soon as the number of Macs hits some critical market share (and it will), you'll start seeing virus attacks launched at them.

Still, whether you sit in front of a PC or a Mac, you have to be vigilent about what you agree to let your machine do or you're going to find yourself, eventually, having to clean off something nasty.

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.

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 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.

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?

Today is National Lucky Penny Day. The Penny has been a very lucky coin, having managed to continue to get minted long after the cost of making one exceeded its value. The same holds true for a lot of the computer technology that some of my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers have in operation. It's difficult sometimes to explain to one of my customers that providing life support to his old Information Technology is actually causing harm to his organization. When the only tray that will feed paper is the bypass tray that will only hold 25 sheets of paper, some highly paid people are spending valuable time jogging over to that printer to put more paper in every time they print. When it takes long enough for an application to open that the person can go into the kitchen and brew a pot of coffee while waiting, they are losing valuable work time (and consuming way too much caffeine).

Don't let your computer network become the same folly that our penny has become. It costs almost 2 cents to make a penny. You can't make that up in volume! Listen to your outsourced IT support provider when she tells you that the equipment is costing you money to keep. Avoid being "Penny wise and Pound foolish." Refresh your computer network before it completely dies. Life support is for people, not pennies or computers.

I was a charter member of the Indiana YEO chapter. The organization gathers young business owners into small groups to work together on improving each other's business. Over the years, a lot of companies have been a part of the organization including several IT support services companies. Of course many have left along the way as well. My entire group defected at once because of some changes in the age restrictions on membership. We still meet independently but have no affiliation with EO (the new name of the international organization).

Recently, one of the original groups organized a reunion of some of the early members. While attending, one of the members came up to me and thanked me for sending him birthday wishes each year. In a decade I had not heard from him that he even received these messages, but I continued to send them because it takes a small effort.

His comment made me realize how important little pieces of information are for the success of many of my Indianapolis small business computer support customers. I also realized that it is the responsibility of computer network services businesses to manage all of that information and help our customers find it when they need it, and even when they don't know they need it. Years may go by without them noticing our efforts, but they have an impact any way.

On Monday, April 5, I received a lot of calls and emails asking if I had gotten an Apple iPad yet. My Indianapolis small business computer support customers know that I'm the gadget king. I always want a chance to play with the latest devices. It's one of the greatest benefits of my job that I get to do that most of the time. Over the years, I've compiled enough equipment to outfit the Smithsonian should they ever open a technology museum. Unfortunately, the newest addition will be my Apple iPad.

Often, new technology comes about without the creator knowing what its ultimate use will be. Once a few of us get our hands on it, we determine a great use for it and then it takes off. Perhaps this is the fate of the iPad. It is a cool device. But it serves no unique need. So, in answer to all those queries on April 5th, I said, "Of course I have one. The UPS guy brought it to my door on Saturday morning."

Then I added, "I wish I had spent the money on a new golf club instead. It would have replaced something I'm already using."

I had a sales call recently that was scheduled, at the prospective customer's request, at lunch time. When I arrived, they sneaked me into a conference room away from the main lobby. I was told that their guy was dating the receptionist and both were out at lunch so we had to hurry. Can you imagine being that afraid of one of your employees? Maybe you can. This isn't a new occurence for me. I often find that Indianapolis small businesses looking for outsourced IT support services are in a situation where they are afraid to tell their current provider that they're unhappy. This is even the case when their current provider is not an employee, but an outsourced computer support provider.

The number of humorous references made to the frightening help desk technician must mean there is some truth to the idea that people in companies have a fear that their computer network services provider can wield almost magical power over them. I suppose it's possible, but that's no way to run a railroad. If you keep your guy only because you're afraid of the damage he might do if you tried to fire him, then you should fire him right away. He's already done more damage than he should by creating that fear factor in your organization. He's empowering others to try bullying you in their respective areas as well.

All you need is a good, ethical business computer support company. They will be able to help you extricate this evil network support tech from your midst. Once you have accomplished the task, make sure that you don't end up in that situation again by requiring that everything about your system be documented in a manner that will be easy for you (or your next IT guy) to understand.

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.

A recent 1to1 Media story discusses two websites that were setup to allow you to remove yourself from Web 2.0 in a single step. The process is termed "Internet suicide." In the sixties it would have been called "checking out." Many people are becoming fed up with the ever increasing pace of our lives and the always-on nature of life in these days of portable communications gadgetry. How far are you from a communications device right now?

Those who know me realize that I'm the king of computer gadgets. I like playing with the newest things. They also know that I don't tend to promote a new IT gadget just for it's cool factor. I abandon them as fast as I acquire them. I'm already just about done trying to find a use for the iPad. I have told many of my Indianapolis small business computer support customers that they can't do it all. But I tell them all that they need to do some of it. Regardless of the inevitable backlash against Web 2.0, it's not going to go away. Email was met with the same backlash, and I imagine the fax machine was too.

The interesting thing about the suicide sites is that they have been shut down as a result of legal action against them from the likes of Facebook. Apparently, helping you to delete your account information is a violation of your privacy.

I called the office of Mark Zuckerberg, one of my Indianapolis small business computer support customers the other day. Mark was out so I got his voicemail. In his greeting, he said to please leave a message and he will call me back "the same day." I remembered the last time I had made that promise in my voicemail greeting. It was a long time ago. I felt bad when I reached the point that I could no longer return all of my calls on the same day. And I know that Mark only manages it by staying late every evening.

The reality is that the world has sped up too much for most of us to keep up with everthing that hits us every day. Between email and phone calls I could occupy my entire business day. All of the new IT gadgets that help to keep us in touch only makes the overload worse. They are supposed to make it better. It doesn't because we are weak when it comes to skipping things. We'd hate to miss something important!

You have the ability to use your IT services to help. Here are some simple things:

1. Turn off notifications. You ignore them anyway, but they tunnel into your subconcious.
2. Establish telephone time. You don't have to answer it right now. Use that Do Not Disturb button.
3. Don't preview email. It's easier to delete that e-newsletter you don't need to read if the tempting headline isn't already shown to you.
4. Leave your cell phone in the car. Enough said.
5. Prioritize. However you manage your time, don't overlook the prioritization step.

The amount of information that you encounter each day will continue to increase at a rate that makes it impossible for you to do anything with it. As Herb Simon said, "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." You've got to start paying more attention.

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.

My youngest son had some societal difficulties in his teenage years. As a result, our family got introduced to the juvenile justice system, in particular, the juvenile facility at 25th and Keystone in Indianapolis. As the owner of an Indianapolis Information Technology company, I've been accused of carrying more than my fair share of gadgets, but the most basic of portable electronics is my smartphone (currently an iPhone, but I'm always looking). Inside the Indianapolis facility is the juvenile court, probation office, clerk, and the jail. All visitors to the building enter through the same doors. At the door, we're told that we cannot enter with any cell phone that contains a camera. Have you tried to purchase a cell phone without a camera lately?

Inevitably, at some point during the visit, it becomes necessary to schedule a future visit, but anyone who uses modern technology to track his calendar is at a loss because he had to leave his phone outside the building because it included a camera. Now the courts are extending a similar set of Luddite-like rules to jurors. According to a recent article from WTHR, jurors will have to surrender their phones in order to prevent them from communicating with the outside world while deliberating.

While I understand (even though this post doesn't seem like I do) the need to manage how information gets disseminated during sensitive court proceedings, this doesn't seem to be the best approach. Nonetheless, I have been asked by more than one of my Indianapolis small business computer support customers what can be done to rein in staff use of electronics at work. I've even heard from my peers that some of their clients collect cell phones at the front door from their employees and using one during work hours is grounds for termination.

The rapid pace of technology and its impact on our daily lives make it hard for a small business to stay abreast of rules and policies and their impact on the business. A good outsourced IT department should work with these owners and their staff to craft policies that keep the business functioning well without destroying staff morale. For instance, we have a client who is installing a new phone system that will include a "personal emergency hotline" for his staff to give to anyone who might need to reach them at work. Once it's in place and operational, he will require his staff to turn off their cell phones while in the office. It removes the distraction of constant texting, while maintaining the assurance that people can be reached during an emergency.

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.