According to spam filtering company MX Logic, spam as a percentage of all Internet email went down in October. This was the first noticeable decline since tracking started. Before you get excited, let me tell you it still accounted for 89.8 percent of all email traffic. Imagine that! If the noise ratio in anything else we do was that bad, we'd probably stop doing it. However, my Indianapolis computer consulting customers list email as the first or second most important service provided by their computer system. Many would rather be without phones than without email.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User generated content is the key defining element of the Web 2.0 movement. Social networking is close behind. This makes sites that allow people to rate the quality of various items or providers seem the logical best step for a killer new web site. If you're thinking you have a great idea for a site where people can rate things, that ship has already sailed.

The problem it has created for my Indianapolis computer consulting clients is that the Internet is now filled with sites that contain information about them. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad. Most of it is inaccurate. Why should you care? Most of these rating sites will appear above your company web site when someone does a search on keywords of interest to you. So most people have a greater chance of finding your listing than finding your site. Take Port-to-Port Consulting as an example. If you search for Computer Outsourcing in Indianapolis on Google, the first hit is a site called GetFave. The first mention of Port-to-Port is this blog (4th place isn't bad). Luckily for us, we're the only listing in GetFave and the information is accurate. Why? Because I edited our entry on GetFave when I saw how well it was doing in searches for Computer Network Consulting and other terms.

Do you have someone who monitors these things for your small business? We've created a new practice area for just that purpose. We call it Online Presence Management. It goes way beyond search engine optimization and website maintenance. It involves finding, correcting, or creating your online image to be what you need it to be to succeed. 

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

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

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

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

A recent study conducted at DePaul, Lehigh, and Rutgers Universities found that people are more prone to lie in email than they are in written communication. When subjects were asked to share an amount of money with another person, they lied about the total amount 64 percent of the time when telling their partner in writing, but the rate of lying went to an amazing 92 percent of the time when the communication happened via email. Email is one of the most critical of my Indianapolis computer consulting customers' IT support services. It's number one or two on their lists of capabilities needed to recover first after a disaster. Imagine what it means to know that the likelihood that your correspondent is lying to you goes up when the method of communication changes.

The researchers who conducted the study believe the difference is because the accepted social rules of email have not yet been established. Although, it is clear that email is much less formal than other written forms of communication. Apparently, that lack of formality leads to a reduction in veracity as well.

Even more interesting is the impact that this can have in future litigation. Now that email has become the favored source of damning information thru the legal discovery process, how will knowledge that people tend to lie more in email than other forms play into the introduction of this material in court?

Technology moves extremely fast. Things are constantly changing. We're all becoming ADD. Our poor caveman brains are having a hard time adapting to all the new stuff. Perhaps we should all slow down just a bit. One things for sure, when the information you seek is important to you, you should start asking people to "put it in writing."

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

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

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

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

I attended the Dealmaker Media Under the Radar conference yesterday. This is a speed dating style conference where companies that are doing new things in Information Technology get six minutes to pitch their company before a room full of potential investors and business partners. Chip Heath, co-author of "Made to Stick," did a brief presentation on the secret to pitching in a short time. It's amazing how much one can present in only a minute. Unfortunately, one cannot pitch everything in one minute. Heath's advice: Pitch the single most important thing and leave the audience with questions that will lead to future conversations.

In thinking about that advice, I considered what is the single most important thing that a good business computer support company should do for its customers. My conclusion surprised me. Your computer network consulting company should make you more money by increasing your revenue. I can list a dozen things that your IT support service provider should do, but the single defining element is that we, like all of your other employees, should work to make your business more profitable. If we aren't doing that, then we aren't working hard enough.

Given that as the main objective changes the way that my Indianapolis computer consulting company views its relationship with customers. Clearly keeping the computer network running is important, but it doesn't begin to impact profitability. The place where we add value is by taking our knowledge of technology and combining it with your understanding of your business and finding the sweet spot where they fit together. That's why we're always asking questions that don't seem to directly apply to the activities of your computer system. We're looking for those places of most potential. Share your goals and objectives with us so we can do our part to make you more successful.

As a species, we don’t care much for change. Even in an ever-changing industry like computer network consulting, I’m often amazed at how resistant to change my peers are. It even sneaks into the thinking of our company from time to time. I overheard a couple of my staff members in a discussion recently. One said to the other, “If you don’t like change, you picked the wrong place to work.”

 

I found that to be refreshing. One of the most important ways in which we add value to our Indianapolis computer services customers is to stay aware of changes that might impact their businesses. Most of the changes that occur in computer outsourcing won’t be important to any individual business, but every change makes a difference to some business. We are responsible for bringing those pertinent changes to the attention of our computer network consulting clients so they can decide how to respond to the change. A significant side effect of this is that our organization is constantly in a state of flux. As Stephen Haeckel said, “Innovation is disruptive and a natural enemy of efficiency, stability, and predictability.” Port-to-Port Consulting is an interesting place to work.

 

In another conversation on which I eavesdropped, I heard this statement: “We have to get it together before the next guy gets here.” I laughed out loud in response. The truth is, we have it together. It doesn’t often look like it because we’re constantly changing, which means it doesn’t stay together very long before something changes. This constant churn is most obvious at the interface between our Help Desk and our computer outsourcing customers. As we make changes to keep up with technology and best practices, our customers are sometimes confronted with a different way of doing things. We work to make a smooth transition if we can. We redirect the bulk of the change to us internally. Still, we know that the best fit customers for Port-to-Port are the ones who can adjust to change.

One of the things my Indianapolis computer services company tries to do with our small business customers is to help them maximize the benefits of having us provide their IT support services. We started out being called computer consultants, then we were called Information Technology consultants, then Network Services consultants. None of the old monickers goes away as new ones appear so now we're called all kinds of things. The one that didn't stick was the one I thought was most descriptive: Information Management consultants.
It makes me think of the old adage: "A man doesn't buy a shovel to get a tool. He buys a shovel to get hole." Likewise, you don't buy a computer to own a device. You buy a computer to manage your information.

In his book, On Dialogue, Robert Grudin divides information into two sections: forms of information that people consciously desire, and forms of information that are vital whether people desire them or not. We bring both to the attention of our computer network consulting customers.

Consciously Desired

• We want to know what will bring us advantage and, conversely, what holds danger for us;
• We want access to sources of pleasure and excitement;
• We want genuine, heart-to-heart communication, with confidentiality, and the ability to form networks with the likeminded or similarly distressed;
• We want to learn and to empower ourselves.

Undesired But Necessary

• We need to know when we are making mistakes or maintaining self-destructive attitudes or misguiding our young;
• We need to know about emergent forces in history that may necessitate our making some investment or sacrifice;
• We need to know about ourselves and the cultural and psychological forces that influence us;
• We need to review and sometimes to amend the very arts by which we analyze and communicate.

A story about United Airlines’ 2002 bankruptcy emerged on the Internet on September 8, 2008, looking like a new story. UAL’s stock dropped 76 percent that day before trading was temporarily halted. Three days later, the stock had climbed back to $10.50. This demonstrates the amazing power of the Internet on real things in the world, and the incredible amount of influence an Internet posting can have.

What happened was that a Google search bot found mention of the bankruptcy on a Florida Sun-Sentinel page that had a date of September 7, 2008. The story was listed in a summary called “Popular Stories: Business.” If you or I had come across that page, we would immediately have known that it referenced the 2002 bankruptcy, but Google’s bot isn’t as smart as you or me. It dutifully summarized the story with the date it found on the page. Next, the story ran on the Google News service, where it was picked up by Income Security Advisors and posted to the Bloomberg service. From there, more people searching for details made the story more popular, which moved it higher in search results which led to more people seeing it. And UAL lost 76 percent of its value.

Lots of little things went wrong to make this happen. Any one of them could have been prevented by having a human involved. Unfortunately, there is too much information that we deem important, but usually not critical, to be able to afford a human watch it. Processes get automated and computers sometimes make mistakes because they have no judgment. Similar errors happen every day in the routine monitoring of a small business’s computer system.

At our Indianapolis computer consulting company, we use automated tools to monitor many routine functions of our small business customers’ computer networks. We rely on these tools to be “smart” enough to alert us when we need to turn some human attention to something. It doesn’t always happen the way we plan, so sometimes we miss something. We can usually resolve the problem without causing a 76 percent loss in value. When one of our automated processes goes awry, we tighten up that process to avoid that happening again. We have plenty of new mistakes available to us. Why repeat an old one?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rate of change of small business technology is still incredible. Imagine what you thought of the idea of email when you first heard of it. I don't imagine you thought it would be as integral to your daily operations as it is after only a little over a decade. Today about 60 percent of your business's important information is sitting in someone's email box. Now consider if your computer network consulting company had approached you in 1992 with this idea of sending electronic messages to your employees, customers, vendors, and others. What would your response have been? How about if your IT support services provider had suggested around that same time that you provide cellular telephones to key people in your organization in order to stay in touch?

What is your response today when you're told that you should consider having some of your critical software applications hosted at Amazon.com or Google? How hard would you laugh if I suggested that you may not need to purchase another server? In my Indianapolis computer consulting company, we have made suggestions like these and others to some of our small business customers. They are laughing at the suggestion (mostly because I told them they'd be talking to their computers by now). They are also considering the possibility that this may very well be the future of their small business computing.

Most of my competitors will tell you that you've got to have your critical information and applications right there in your office where you can make sure it's secure and properly backed up and fully supported. The next time you hear that, ask the speaker if he uses any of the Software-as-a-Service applications like Salesforce.com. Ask him if he's heard of Amazon's EC2 or Google's App Engine, not to mention the hundreds of hosted applications from CRM and accounting to word processors and spreadsheets.

These changes a frightening to a traditional network support company because they don't know how to make money from it. They are reluctant to suggest something that will prevent them from making money. If your provider isn't bringing you the latest ideas in technology, then how are you going to know what technology you need to compete successfully?

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

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

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

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

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

 There has been a lot of speculation since Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone on July 11th that he is once again suffering from a serious medical condition that Apple is keeping secret. Just the speculation has Apple investors worried. Why? Apple has had its best performances during Jobs’ tenures at the helm. If he were suddenly to be gone, there would be no one to fill his role in the organization.

 We’ve found in our Indianapolis computer consulting business that many small businesses are filled with people who hold vital information that keeps the business running. In fact, we frequently come into organizations where the previous network support person held a lot of that vital information. When this happens with your computer system, you are really at the mercy of one person for a key piece of your operations.

 Even in traditional computer tech support companies, your IT system knowledge will likely reside with one person at that company. We avoid the single silo of information by spreading the work around. The person who provides computer help desk support to you will not be the same person who installs your new equipment. That person will not be the same person who provides computer consulting services. And all will change as time goes forward. The reason is simple. You aren’t getting the benefit of computer outsourcing if only one person in your support company knows your system. Similarly, one person can’t keep up with all of the various aspects of technology in even the simplest of office networks any more.

 Often we find that we are the deepest corporate memory in our clients’ offices. Port-to-Port has been there longer than many of their existing staff members and, because of our Pertingo^® relationship, we know a great deal about their operations, in addition to their IT system.

   When Port-to-Port Consulting decided to abandon the preferred approach to Indianapolis computer services in favor of the fixed fee support plan that we call Pertingo^®, we talked a long time about naming it. We really wanted to call the program Catalyst. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in the world who like the word catalyst so we had to go with something else. Pertingo is Latin for “to extend; to stretch out.” Our goal is to help our computer network consulting clients “extend” their operational capability by “stretching out” the ability of their Information System. Really though, we act as a catalyst in the truest sense of the word.

    In a chemical reaction, the catalyst is there to facilitate the process, but it really isn’t a part of the process. Sometimes the process would happen without the catalyst, like when a particle dropped into a supersaturated solution causes it to solidify. Other times, the catalyst must be present for the process to work, like when iron catalyzes the process of hydrogen and nitrogen. In any case, when the process is over, the catalyst remains, ready to facilitate the next process. Of course, all analogies have their limitations. Unlike the catalyst in a chemical reaction, our computer tech support is changed by each interaction with our customers. We learn things that we can take with us to our next computer consulting encounter. The new experience and knowledge makes us an even better catalyst for the next process. Unlike the iron’s efforts at making ammonia, we become smarter, faster, or better in some other way the next time we work with a client. It’s this improvement that moves Pertingo^® forward. We get better the more we do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I received a piece of promotional email today that had the title, "IT as a Weapon." The first image that popped into my mind was of a large viking wielding a hammer to smash his competition. The reality is that the reason we provide computer network consulting in Indianapolis is so that our customers can take advantage of the weapon that computer outsourcing can be for their organizations.

We don't look at it so much as a way to smash your competitors, although that does happen on occasion. We look at it more as a way to defeat the doldrums that tend to settle in after we've been doing something for a while. I know this because Port-to-Port Consulting spent a decade doing business with the same model as all of the other Indianapolis computer consulting companies. While it wasn't working, everybody was doing it so it had to be at least "OK."

Our first shift came during a January staff retreat. I posed the question, "What use of technology could put us out of business?" One of the first responses was desktop remote control. I said then let's start using it to put ourselves out of business. We did. Our revenue suffered because those one-hour minimum service calls started turning into 15 minute remote sessions. The strange thing was that everyone was happier: me, my staff, my customers. This revelation planted the seeds for the change we eventually named our Pertingo(r) Computer Support Service.

We continue to hunt for the ways in which our IT support services can be used by our customers as a weapon for improving what they do, as well as ways for us to improve what we do for them. The hammer jumped to mind for me because it's a tool for smashing old ways of doing things.