Indianapolis Information Technology

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.

We're pretty proud of our 19 year history at Port-to-Port Consulting. We've worked with hundreds of central Indiana small businesses and their Information Technology. In that time, even though we focus on small businesses, we've been a small part of 4 IPOs. In a state that has averaged less than 2 per year, it's notable. The other notable thing is that these companies outgrew our outsourced IT services before reaching their IPO decision. We really are a small business IT support services company.

With each of these companies, and many more, we've had to handle the transition to us from their previous network support provider. The handoff is critical to short term success. In most instances, we get thru it smoothly. On occasion, we get too comfortable with our success and find, like our men's and women's 4X100 relay teams in Beijing, that this little piece of the process can determine success or failure, no matter how fast the team is.

We were reminded of this a couple of time recently when customers told us that we didn't seem to be interested in solving a nagging problem for them, but instead were pointing them to another vendor. We thanked them for reminding us of our lapse, and got right to work bringing together all of the players needed to solve the problem.

Everyday, we deal with some kind of handoff between us and another service provider. Sometimes we forget that a bad handoff means we all lose. Thankfully, we have clients who remind us.

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.

A recent story on SFGate, the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle, tells of Google eliminating Microsoft Windows from all of the company's PCs. The headline says that Google blames security holes in Windows for a recently successful hack in China. Now I'm not going to try to tell you that Windows is a safe and secure operating system, but it seems to me that Google may be hiding their (perhaps a little bit evil) reason for dumping Windows behind a convenient scapegoat.

You see, Google wants to be the Microsoft of the 22nd century. So far, they are doing a pretty good job of it by creating or buying anything that might have a chance of capturing our fleeting attention. Among those new things are an up-and-coming web browser, Chrome; a rapidly rising mobile OS, Android; a steadily improving online office suite, Google Apps; and a soon-to-be-released operating system, Chrome OS. Now, if your company made a product that it hoped would compete with the Microsoft juggernaut products, wouldn't you want your employees to use it? Well, Google does too. What better way to get them to break free than to tell them how terrifyingly dangerous the product is.

Fear has always been a great motivator. Many Indianapolis Information Technology providers use it to capture and retain business. My view is that life is pretty scary, but living it is what it's all about. When people try to scare you into doing something, think more about their motivation than the fear they want to use to motivate you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This comic strip explains the difficulty small business owners have in finding a competent outsourced IT department. In the central Indiana communities of Carmel, Greenwood, Fishers, and Noblesville, my Indianapolis computer consulting company often runs into people like Henry. For whatever reason, they've decided that being a computer network services provider is much easier than their current occupations. Without delay, they run down to the local Kinko's and have a thousand business cards printed and start handing them out to friends.

Usually, the new Information Technology expert will find a problem or two that he can solve, which bolsters his confidence and makes him chase after more and more difficult challenges until, eventually, he really screws one up. At that point, he stalls until he can find a job in his previous career and gets out of the computer support business by throwing away the 950 leftover business cards.

Unfortunately he leaves behind a burned small business owner. He hired Henry because he was a nice guy he met at some Chamber function. Henry sounded like he knew what he was talking about when it comes to computers. He used a lot of technical jargon in the conversation. The business owner knew that his IT system had outgrown his internal ability to keep it running, much less to use it for strategic advantage. Since there's no industry regulation, he could only choose based on fuzzy factors or price. Henry fit the bill.

What's bad for that business owner, and for those of us who run professional outsourced IT departments, is that he will never again allow an outsider to work on his computer network if he can help it. When I meet owners who have had a "Henry experience," I try to console them for the bad experience. I don't try to win their business. Henry will have turned them into bad customers because they will never be able to trust another IT consultant. The "Henry experience" puts them at a permanent disadvantage. All I do is wish them well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we started doing computer network support as Port-to-Port Consulting in 1991, people didn't have much trouble figuring out the connection between our name and the PC on their desk. Sure, we've had a few troubled souls along the way who wanted to know if we were overseas shippers. We even had one poor man who hoped to rent portable toilets from us. Most, however, had no problem understanding that we were referring to all of those different ports on the back of your machine. As the PC has progressed, the number of ports on the back has gone down considerably. Today you can connect just about everything using only a USB port. So much for a cool business name!

About the only thing that is the same about our Indianapolis small business computer support company is the name. Our logo has changed several times. Nearly 100 people have worked here at one time or another. We've served more than 300 different businesses. And the IT industry has changed so much that we tell stories to our new staff members that sound like our grandparents stories of walking to school in the snow (uphill both ways).

My son turned 21 over the weekend. Thinking about how much he has changed thru the years made me start to think about how much other things have changed. One steady element of central Indiana computer outsourcing has been the people at Port-to-Port Consulting. While there are as many as 60 companies in the Indianapolis area that provide some subset of the services we provide, few of them have been around for more than a few years. Most are the result of recent layoffs. 

It does make me feel old to reminisce about the times we've spent working with Indianapolis small businesses on their Information Technology support. It also makes me proud of the incredible things we've done for our community thru our efforts to keep some of the most vital organizations in the area operating at peak efficiency.

About a year ago, my business partner joined an industry peer group: HTG. Both of us had been members of the Young Entrepreneur's Organization. His group disolved and mine defected. He decided to join HTG to get a different peer experience. In YEO, the commonality is business size and geography. Everyone is local but works in a non-competing industry. In HTG, everyone is geographically separated but works in the Computer Network Consulting industry.

Last week was the fourth quarterly meeting of Rob's group, and he wanted me to attend with him. I had a blast! I'm a fairly gregarious person. I like meeting new people and I believe everyone has something to teach me. It's that curiousity about people that makes my job of supporting the Information Technology of many Indianapolis small businesses appealing to me. I get to learn how businesses in different industries operate. But I digress. At the HTG meeting, the owners of 12 IT support services companies spent two days talking to each other about their businesses.

Two things struck me. We are on a par with the companies that are most professional in our industry, and none of us has found the silver bullet or secret sauce that will allow us to revolutionize small business computer outsourcing. Both were reassuring revelations. I appreciate the challenge of running my little Indianapolis Information Technology company. If there were a cookbook, I'd want to treat it like all the other instruction manuals I get.

Many of my Indianapolis small business computer support customers ask me what additional things they can do to ensure their data security. They all have the expected firewall, anti-virus software, anti-phishing software, and password protection in place. Most have tightened their password policy to require more difficult passwords and periodic changes. So, when they ask what else they can do, my response is usually to tell them they need to train their staffs on the importance of information technology security.

I mentioned in a previous post that an incredibly large number of people in a random survey admitted to have visited pornographic sites while at work in the previous 30 days. Now a new survey reveals that about half of people say their corporate data security policies are largely ignored. Nearly half admitted to have shared their password with another employee or contractor, and twenty percent have turned off their anti-virus or firewall.

Add to that the increase in power of mobile devices and things get even scarier. How many of your staff members have a complete list of all of your corporate contacts in their cell phones? Do you even know for sure? What about those who transport corporate documents by copying them to a USB flash drive? Is anything ever encrypted?

Nothing your computer consultants do can prevent things like password sharing. We can create rules that prevent some of the other abuses, but in the end, you and your staff are the weakest link. If everyone in your organization doesn't follow the guidelines in your Acceptable Use and other Network Services policies (or if you don't even have them), your data and network resources will remain at risk.

In the end, if someone wants to get your corporate data specifically, you can't do much to prevent it. However, you should take the steps to ensure you've done the common things that prevent data loss or resource compromise. Your network consulting company can offer some guidance.

 In a recent blog post, Mack Earnhart asked the question, "How do you tell someone they stink?" The title caught my attention because I really thought he was discussing BODY ODOR and it's a sensitive topic that I have a hard time with when I find myself in an "odiferous" situation. To my surprise, and slight amusement, he was writing about getting introduced to prospects thru networking. How do you prep your new networking acquaintance to introduce you to his friend, your prospect?

I've found that most of my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers don't need to be told that their Information Technology is bad. They know it deep down inside, but they are in denial of it. They've spent months, or even years pretending that their computer network is modern and up-to-date. And I don't think it's my place to tell them differently. Certainly that's no way to start a relationship. Imagine the bedside manner!

No, instead of telling that small business owner that his network support stinks, I encourage him to talk about his business and how his computer services support his business. Then I suggest other ways in which it might be able to help if it consisted of slightly different pieces or configuration. I haven't found a nice way to tell someone their network stinks because the reality is that it works, at least somewhat. Your network doesn't stink, nor do your IT consultants. The odor you're smelling is from the relationship you have with your computer consultant. And, like Mack's readers suggest, if we find that we can get along, then we can work together.