Social networking is going to work its way into your organization's routine activities in the next year or two. If you don't think so, remember back when email first appeared and how you thought there was no use for it in your organization. I've been watching the goings-on in the Web 2.0 craze with great interest in how it might prove useful to my Indianapolis computer consulting customers. We're not diving in and having them all Twitter their customers, or build a presence on MySpace or Facebook. We are having some of them create blogs. We've asked all of them to create a LinkedIn account. Many are using Google Apps to collaborate on projects.

There are so many Web 2.0 sites that do similar things. It's too messy right now for those to whom I provide business computer support. So instead I play with these things and bring the ideas I find back to them. If you have a computer outsourcing arrangement in your office, you should start hearing about how some of these online services may help your business. The web isn't just for advertising. There are tools out there now that can make you more efficient.

Not even the most optimistic economist in the country is predicting anything but hard times over the next few months. Small business owners are trying to figure out what to do to survive, if not thrive, during the days ahead. As a small business owner, you should look to all of your advisors for ideas on ways to get by with less. Your accountant can help with tax avoidance or delay ideas. Your banker (yes, he should be helping too) can offer ideas about refinancing lines of credit or other current debt. Your attorney may have ways to help tighten up collecting thru better contract language.

But what should your IT support services provider be doing to help out? All kinds of things. Now is the time to turn to your computer outsourcing company and ask how they can help you succeed. They ought to have a few good answers too. If they are going to really help, they'll start with a few good questions. For instance, are you or your customers harder hit by the recession? Are there markets that you can enter that will do better in these times? Where do you stand relative to your competitors in financial strength?

You see, the answers guide the discussion toward doing things to get more customers like you have, or seeking different customers, or looking for bargain opportunities to acquire competitors, or even preparing yourself to look acquireable. Each of these directions leads to different IT strategies. Those strategies vary from doing as little as possible and just keeping everything in its best running condition to launching some aggressive Internet presence activities to implementing internal system improvements. One thing is for sure: Your business computer support partner should have some ideas to toss on the table as you consider your options. Share your position and plans with him and ask him what ways he sees to help.

We've been trying to add to our technical staff for several weeks now. The task of finding good, qualified people is daunting even with the growing unemployment. The problem is not so much that we can't find people who have the technical skills for computer network consulting. It's that they don't have the skills that are most important to successfully provide business computer support in the Indianapolis area.

Eric Lundquist made this point in a commentary in a recent issue of eWeek. He summarizes the list of skills identified by the Society for Information Management, a decades old organization for technical managers:

1. Ethics and morals 
2. Critical thinking
3. Collaboration
4. Problem solving
5. Oral communication
6. Written communication
7. Interpersonal skills
8. Creativity
9. Managing expectations
10. Decision making
11. Functional area knowledge
12. Project leadership
13. Database
14. System analysis

Most job candidates find it difficult to understand that technical skills don't even make it into the top ten. My list doesn't exactly match this one from SIM, but it's not far from it. Having people who can't string together a sentence on paper or look me in the eye when talking to me is useless in the computer outsourcing business. My customers expect to get more than technical knowledge from us. They want help with their business problems -- especially the computer network ones.

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.

Trust is a common theme that comes up when I write about the relationship between a computer network consulting company and its customers. I mention it often because it is the most important element in the success of that relationship. The same is true for other professional relationships we have like doctors, lawyers, accountants, and coaches. A recent malware attack led me to remind of this again.

According to Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham, hackers figured out how to take advantage of the URL redirector function of some popular web sites including Microsoft.com and IRS.gov to send people to malicious sites. These people were looking for downloads to help them protect their systems from just such malicious activity. Port-to-Port Consulting's Pertingo(r) computer consulting clients can avoid these kinds of problems by trusting that we, their IT support services company, have taken care to protect their systems. They also know that because of the fixed fee relationship between us, a mistake in this area will cost us time and money to repair.

When people don't trust that their computer outsourcing company has their best interest at heart, they start searching for good advice from other sources. That search often leads, on the Internet, to bad results. It's like when your kids listen to their misbehaving friends instead of the good advice you give them.

So if you find yourself chasing online solutions to threats and problems instead of seeking your business computer support provider, you should perhaps seek a new provider. Find one you can trust and your life will be better.

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. 

I saw a fax machine for the first time when I arrived at Los Angeles Air Force Base in 1984. It was a large device and we cherished the fact that we had one. We could send papers across the country to our colleagues in Boston or DC instantly! There just couldn't be anything better, we thought.

Twenty-five years later, the fax machine is still alive and kicking. I find it unbelievable that in a time when email is considered too slow for the IM, SMS, and Twitter generation, the fax machine still exists in just about every office. Now I realize that a few offices still have an IBM Selectric typewriter hidden away somewhere in their offices, but they don't advertise it on their business cards. Some of the lead sharing sites won't even give you credit for a name if you don't include the fax number. Why can't we kill this thing?

The facsimile machine was patented in 1843. It didn't take off as an office machine until the 1980s. Now that faxing has become a standard feature of multi-function printers and copiers, they are actually selling faster than ever. The amazing thing is that so many offices still depend on them as a normal part of business. Even though scanning and emailing and shared online documents are all, pardon the pun, reasonable facsimiles for the fax, these little machines just keep going.

I guess there is a certain comfort in knowing that some good ideas take a long time to take hold, but once they get in, there's no way to get them out. That's what Port-to-Port Consulting hopes will happen with the Pertingo^® computer consulting service. We hope that as more Indianapolis area companies experience this new form of computer outsourcing, they'll start to demand similar models from others. We can only dream that someone will ask why this Pertingo^® thing won't die 25 years from now.

When Bob Beaty and I started doing business computer support in 1991, among the first things we purchased were electronic planners (before PDA had been coined). We loved the idea of having a device that let us take notes in a meeting then transfer them into our computers for safe long-term keeping. One of the difficulties we encountered in using these devices was that they tended to attract attention away from the meeting to the devices themselves. Times have certainly changed. Look around during the next meeting you attend with more than a half dozen people. You'll find at least one who is working a device in his lap, obviously not involved in the meeting.

The discrete lap typer has existed for a while. He's prevalent at computer outsourcing conferences and familiar to anyone who has been in a large audience (meetings, sporting events, concerts, parties). I recently attended a conference where I saw what I hope is not the future of social ettiquette. In a room of about 200 people, there were, at any given point, about 50 who were blatantly disregarding the goings on of the meeting in favor of whatever was on their personal devices (laptops, smartphones, and PDAs). In fact, during some pauses in the presentation, I could hear a cacophony of clickety clicks as folks pounded away on their toys.

I was embarrassed for being a part of such a rude audience. I was embarrassed that our work in IT support services had created the ability for people to behave just like this at conferences all over the country. Being one who presents often at conferences, I was also amazed at how little the presenters seemed to be bothered that a quarter of their audience ignoring them in favor of someone far away. I work hard preparing material for my presentations that is relevant and timely for my audiences. I take cues from my audience as to whether my material is hitting the mark. If I lost a quarter of them, I'd feel I had failed.

As I left this conference, I took away two important things: First, it is still rude beyond description to conduct electronic business when you're supposed to be the audience of an important presentation; and second, if you're the presenter, you'd better make your stuff good because your audience can change the channel without leaving their seat.

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 was in a car accident on Tuesday. I was just driving along when suddenly I heard a loud noise. It took a moment for me to realize the noise was the sound of another vehicle slamming into my car. I made the connection when I became aware that my car was spinning in the street. No one was hurt but my car was severely damaged. The other driver had run a red light.

No one who witnessed the accident stopped to offer assistance or to provide their version of what happened. I was apprehensive that the other driver would claim that I ran the light and, with no other witnesses, we'd have a long drawn out dispute. He admitted fault and we're well on the way to resolution.

The incident made me think about the many occasions we have in the course of our computer network consulting business to bend the truth, exagerate, or flat out lie to our customers. We usually know more than they do on the topic. It's the reason they use us for their computer outsourcing. We've learned over the years that those are character making opportunities. We tell our customers the straight truth, whether it's good for us or not. A good example comes from a recent email I got from one of our not-for-profit customers for whom we provide IT support services. He had asked me what it would cost for us to build a new website for him. He didn't know that I was in the middle of a decision about bringing on a full time web developer, but I knew that his project would provide the startup work to make the decision. I also knew that a local school was looking for a not-for-profit organization that needed a new website to use as a class project. I directed him to the school.

Michael wrote me back saying how much he appreciated that I would "take money out of my pocket" to help him. That's the value of honesty in computer outsourcing. Michael knows that he can trust my recommendations because they are made with his interests in mind, even when they don't align with my short term interests.

In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld earned the Foot in Mouth Award for answering a press conference question with his famous, “as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know.” As confusing as that sounds, it is the treacherous unknown unknowns that make the job of computer network consulting in Indianapolis exciting. I’m often told by prospects that they have everything they need from their small business computer consultant only to discover a few questions later that they are only happy because they don’t know what they’re missing.

Another computer outsourcing provider passed on a story about a business computer support customer he had a few years ago. She was visiting the office and noticed that every printer had a bottle of white out next to it. The customer explained that their word processor automatically printed the page number on the first page of each document. They used the white-out to cover it, then copied the first page before sending the document. When the consultant showed them quickly how to change the setting, they exclaimed that the solution would save them several minutes per document, not to mention paper and white-out. They hadn’t asked before because they thought the cost to have it changed would be burdensome.

How many White-Out Cures are there in your office just waiting for a good computer help desk tech to get rid of them for you? The reason that we charge a fixed fee rather than an hourly rate is so you can ask those questions without regard to the burden they might be.

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.

In the Middle Age Vikings lived and literally died by the sea. After death, wealthier Vikings were placed in ships filled with food, jewels, weapons, food and even sometimes servants or animals for their comfort in the afterlife. The boats were interred in the ground, set alight or sent out to sea. This seems to be the way many small business owners make their computer network decisions. They believe that they should have the latest and greatest so they can impress others with their state-of-the-art technology. I frequently meet with business owners in the Indianapolis area who have rooms full of computer equipment. They brag about the manufacturers of the equipment the way teenagers talk about their clothes designers.

The goal of any business computer purchase decision should be to help the business generate more revenue or realize more profit. Anything else means you’re stockpiling your ship for your afterlife journey to Valhalla. My computer network consulting customers are always telling me that I’m the most “no saying” sales guy they’ve ever met. I point out that I’m not saying no to the purchase. I’m just pressing them to understand their true motivation in making the purchase.

Now I’m no Luddite. I love to have neat baubles to play with. But I don’t pretend when I buy a Samsung micro-PC that it’s going to make money for my company. I buy it because I want to play with it. Sometimes that playing leads to some useful business benefits that I can share with my customers. The PDA was a great example. The first Palm Pilot I purchased was the fifth device I had owned. I saw a real benefit even though the products coming to market weren’t quite there. Smartphones are another, more recent example.

This is one of the intangible benefits that a good computer outsourcing company provides. You have enough to keep up with changes in your specific industry. Let us keep up with the changes in ours that will affect yours. Stock your ship with more impressive things than failed technology.

 

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.

I recently had a meeting with a customer in which we agreed to part ways after a short relationship. It was a lot like breaking off a new relationship of any kind: Regrets for not having made it work; Sadness that it didn’t work; Guilt for not having tried harder. In the end, we parted because, as the old Teddy Pendergrass song says, we didn’t have a fifty-fifty love.

One of the most difficult things for outsourced computer support people is to be so mistreated by our customers. We understand that technology inherently brings with it some confusion and frustration. We get that most of the emotion isn’t about us even though it is often directed at us. But a good customer will treat us with the same respect and decorum that he gives to his staff and co-workers. After all, we’re a part of the staff. I have customers for whom I have worked longer than anyone else on their staff.

Your small business computer support provider may be one of the hardest working members of your staff because she’s only at work when there is work for her to do. The problem is often that the only time your computer help desk staff comes to mind is when you have a computer support issue. You begin to associate their appearance with trouble even though they are actually there to fix it.

Make yourself more conscious of the way you treat the people who keep your computer network running. Try to have a fifty-fifty love.

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.

Computer network consulting is not as straight forward black-and-white as it appears to be to most small business owners. There are multiple ways to accomplish the same tasks. Some are more elegant. Some are more expensive. Some require a great deal of setup. Others require a great deal of ongoing support. Some are just different from others without being either better or worse. As long as this continues to be true (and it will for some time to come), it is every bit as important for a business owner to find a network support company that operates with a similar style.
Style, as you know, is a difficult thing to define. There are those whom most would agree are stylish, and there are those whom most would agree are not. Just about everyone falls somewhere in between, meaning a lot of emotion goes into a discussion of style. Take Halle Berry. I love her style: chic, modern, confident. Some of you are right now thinking, "Yeah, Halle is the essence of style." Others are thinking, "This guy wouldn't know style if it bit him on the ass."

Which proves my point. Before you make a computer outsourcing decision, have a style discussion with your candidate providers. I know it sounds strange, but your small business cannot be happy with a provider whose style is considerably different than yours. A good fit means you and the prospective support company's owner have similar philosophies about business. You feel comfortable when you talk to him about things other than computers.

When company styles get in the way, communication breaks down and before long, everyone is unhappy. The time to avoid a bad fit is right at the beginning. If you don't find out until later, separation becomes more difficult. Now you don't have to believe that Halle Berry is a stylish woman to work with us, but a conversation that starts there will tell you a lot about me, and how well we fit.