Network Support

When I meet with Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing prospects, I often tell them that the most critical element of a solid relationship between Port-to-Port Consulting and them is the level of trust we have for one another. I tell them that we can't be successful together unless we trust each other. When we find a sour relationship between us and one of our network support customers, it's almost always because we or they have lost trust in the other.

I have a new IT outsourcing customer right now who is having an issue with trusting us. His previous provider turned out to be very untrustworthy. These guys did things that verge on criminal. We came in and went right to work correcting all that we could. We even brought in a competing company to help with an area where they are much stronger than us. One of the things we needed to change right away was their telephone service provider. We started by asking their Internet service provider to quote the addition of telephone service, thus reducing the number of vendors and lines to manage. The vendor was excited for the opportunity to get additional business until the sales rep discovered that her company couldn't (or wouldn't) provide the SIP trunking that we needed. When she told us that, we expressed our regret and told her we'd use a different provider. We also told her that their inability to provide this service would be a hindrance to their success at renewal time.

She must have taken that as a threat. Her next move was to call my new computer network consulting customer and tell him how technically inadequate our solution was and to offer her "much better" solution. In this case, much better meant she gets a commission. My new client didn't know what to do. I simply asked him to trust the people he hired to take care of this for him.

The episode completely destroyed any trust I had in this particular sales rep, and it soured my view of her company. When Port-to-Port Consulting thought there was a better solution for this customer than ours, we brought that solution to the table, even though we will make no money for doing so. If you find yourself double checking every recommendation from your IT outsourcing provider, then you probably don't trust him. It's time to make a change.

I love it when a great marketing idea takes hold and everyone gets the craze to participate. I still think Gary Dahl was the greatest marketing genius of all time for coming up with the Pet Rock. The modern version of the pet rock in IT support services is the Cloud. So much money has been spent creating cloud buzz, and so many businesses have retooled their offerings so they can claim them to be cloud services that any of us who don't have some cloud in our lives is starting to feel left out.

For the majority of you reading this post, you don't have the foggiest (pun intended) idea about cloud computing. Neither do most of the people trying to sell it to you. Here's my free advice: Don't buy it because it is or isn't cloud-based. Your decisions should be based on what fits the needs of your small business computer network.

For the purpose of this discussion, let's say that cloud services are anything that is hosted on a server that you do not own and sits outside of your office. The plus side of this is you don't have to buy the hardware or the software. A big win! On the other hand, since the server is outside your office, you have to have more reliable connectivity to the outside world. Maybe that means a different Internet connection or even a second one to back up the first. A big loss. Add to that new monthly Internet bill the monthly fee for the cloud service. There would be no monthly fee if you had shelled out for the server at the beginning. Win or loss depends.

But now you have something critical to your business in a building that is 3 states away and you depend on people who do not know you to keep it running. Maybe that's good and maybe not. None of the major providers has been without outages of business-stopping duration. Sure, your server could die too, leaving you with a long outage so let's call this one a wash.

The point of my rambling rant is that. like most Information Technology decisions, the technical part is small in comparison to the business objectives of the decision. I'm not telling you to avoid cloud services. I use many of them. I'm telling you to decide based on your business needs after weighing all of the costs, benefits, and risks.

A recent survey by GFI Software found that businesses are still struggling to beat spam. This is a conversation I have with my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing custmers frequently. No matter what we do, eventually someone gets his computer infected by opening a bad message or clicking on a bad link. When it happens, they want to blame someone or something other than themselves, so they blame the crummy anti-spam software. It's not so much that the software is crummy, or that they did a very bad thing. It's just that spammers only have to win a small number of times to make their nefarious activity worthwhile. Sooner or later, we'll all have an inattentive moment and the bad guys will win that day.

So spam continues to increase both in actual quantity and in share of all email. And we continue to do what we can to keep it out of the Indianapolis computer networks we support. Smarter people than me have suggested ways of reducing the spam on the Internet. Each option comes at a cost that compares to our current costs of fighting spam with little more likelihood of better results. Spam is a part of the price we pay for having this wonderful Internet. When one of my customers call our computer help desk to complain about the crummy anti-spam software, we let them vent. Then we go to work getting their computer back in front of them so they can do their work.

I have an Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customer named Mark Zuckerberg. That's right, just like the Facebook guy. We call ours the "original" Mark Zuckerberg since he's older. I can't begin to tell you the mileage he's gotten out of the name confusion. He's been interviewed by international media outlets, and is something of a local celebrity here in Indianapolis. While Mark didn't set out to become famous for his name, he's used it to his advantage as he promotes his bankruptcy law office. Mark's good fortune at sharing a name with the social media wiz is something he couldn't have planned, but boy is it a lucky break.

So along comes the Oscars and Angelina Jolie sticks that bare leg out just a little bit more than normal. Do you think she expected the gesture would take off online? Of course not. She couldn't have planned a media blitz like that. I'm not sure it will provide direct benefit to her future marketability, but she's certainly getting more mention now than any other actress that might be in consideration for a part.

We spend a great deal of time and money promoting our Pertingo Computer Support services to organizations in central Indiana. Some of our best media coverage has come from things that were unplanned and out of our control -- luck. The same is true for acquiring new computer network consulting customers. Many of our long term clients came to us by strokes of luck rather than carefully planned and orchestrated activities.

If you're looking for IT support services in central Indiana, maybe this is your lucky day!

Among the many Indianapolis computer outsourcing customers that Port-to-Port Consulting supports are some Indiana Charter Schools. I also do a bit of volunteer work with community organizations that work with children. A common refrain in educational circles is the need for Lifelong Learning. Today's students need to understand that their education never ends. They must learn how to enhance their skills and build new ones in order to keep up with the expanding knowledge in the world. It strikes me that nowhere is this more true than in our small business computer consulting business. Everything that my computer network services staff knows today will be all but useless in a matter of months.

It's interesting also that none of our network support technicians see much benefit in the traditional classroom setting -- you know, the setup of most of our schools. Apparently the linear lecture based approach to teaching is one of the last choices when learning is important to you. We tackle learning in a variety of ways. Some of us need to have solitary time to read, experiment, and absorb new information. Others want to work thru it with a group and talk about it as we go. Still others prefer to dive in until they hit a roadblock, then go back for instructions. In the end, we all come together to share what we think we know until we either figure out that we've got it or someone heads back to study it some more.

Now I understand that this approach to learning may be a bit messy and hard to give a letter grade, but it sure does create knowledge that we can use. Information Technology in small businesses is critical to their success, perhaps more so than in larger organizations. We understand that, and we do all we can, in our various ways, to keep learning new things everyday that will help our computer network consulting customers be better at what they do.

I do a lot of reading. Most of my reading is in the nonfiction categories (my wife calls them textbooks) of business, psychology, or science. Lately, I've read several books that talk about the chasm between scientific knowledge and business practices, especially in the area of psychology. The books from Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Pink come to mind. A more recent trend has been the large number of books about networking. It seems that someone realized that no one is reading Dale Carnegie any more so they rehashed his advice and put a new media spin on it. Here's the thing: I thought everybody did this stuff.

It's just natural for me, and most of the people around me, to do what we can to promote others. I'm always suggesting the products or services of one of my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers to people that I meet. If you have a problem, I probably know someone who can help. I surely know someone who knows someone. Despite our Super Bowl hosting success, Indianapolis is still a big small town. The connections are complex.

Now I find out from book excerpts and reviews that what I do naturally is supposed to be the secret sauce in the recipe for business success. I can't say that I ever looked at it that way before. I just considered it to be good service. But I see the self-interested motive. If my computer network support customers get more business thru my efforts, their companies will grow, inevitably leading to more business for me.

Whatever the motivation, it makes good common sense to promote the people and businesses in your circle. If they aren't worth bragging about, you should find a new circle.

We recently parted ways with a central Indiana small business computer outsourcing customer. We had provide their IT support services for several years. During that time they moved into larger space, completed the buy-out of another business, and expanded their reach to include an international presence. Throughout the entire time we provided their computer tech support, but the relationship never solidifed between our companies. At different times different people here at Port-to-Port Consulting would voice concerns about the way we worked with this organization. On each occasion, someone else would point out where there was something we could have said or done differently that might have prevented this strain in the relationship. We'd hash it out and decide that we should try harder to make this network support customer happier.

Finally, we realized during one of these hash sessions that the problem wasn't one of people or personalities, or even communication styles or knowledge: the problem was one of culture. You see our IT support services customer had a culture built around mistrust. In their industry, everyone was out to gouge you if they could. They didn't trust anyone to tell them the truth, and they rarely told the whole truth to anyone either, so we kept looking like patsies to them when we walked in and gave them the full story.

Their culture was so unaccustomed to our straightforward approach that they never believed we were telling them the truth. I tell people all the time that if you don't trust your advisor you should stop paying him and get one that you do trust. That's the message we finally had to give to this now-former client. It took us a long time to figure out why the relationship wasn't working because we looked for a person problem. In the end, the problem was compatibility.

This week, Symantec acknowledged that a hacker had stolen a portion of the source code to their flagship Norton Anti-Virus. The announcement downplayed the danger associated with the theft while offering tips to stay protected while using Symantec products. The whole thing brought to mind one of the questions most often posed to me by my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers. They want to know how to be sure that their computers are safe from viruses, trojans, worms, and other malicious software.

My short answer is that you don't know. The people who write malware are some of the most intelligent programmers in the world. They spend long hours working thru software applications to find odd behaviors that they then try to exploit to their advantage. This group used to consist primarily of young boys with little better to do. Today, hacking is big business and getting bigger. A talented programer with a tiny conscience can make a lot of money on the wrong side of the law. So the long answer isn't much more enlightening, but it is a little more hopeful.

Another change in the professionalization of hacking is that hackers, for the most part, aren't interested in the data on your computer. They want to use the storage, processing, and bandwidth of your computer to go after more lucrative targets. That's the good news. If your computer has been hacked, you probably don't have to be overly concerned with your personal data. The bad news is that so much bad software is out there, not to mention infected websites and emails, that you will become infected sooner or later. A good anti-virus program helps a lot. Sound computing practices - not clicking OK just because OK is there - help even more.

Good computer network services companies use professional anti-virus software that is centrally monitored and managed to help minimize network infections. They also work with their computer help desk customers to provide information on good computing habits. These two steps reduce your chances of infection greatly because there are so many computer owners who don't take these steps. It's like the old saying, "A locked door is to keep honest people out, but an unlocked one is inviting to the crooked."

Last February, I met with an Indianapolis area Not For Profit organization to discuss their computer network services needs. The organization was typical of many small nonprofits in that their computer network had been designed by one volunteer, built by a procession of other volunteers, and supported by no one really. They had reached a point where they realized the process of Information Technology management they were using was inadequate and wanted to discuss hiring professional computer network consultants.

Port-to-Port Consulting has a history of working with Not For Profits, and we usually try to provide a little extra when we work with them so I spent time with the staff and helped them develop a stopgap plan that would hold until they could develop a budget and plan for IT support services. Our conversations continued, on and off, for the rest of the year.

How surprising it was for me to receive an RFP for Computer Outsourcing Services from this very same agency a week or so ago. Small organizations should not use the RFP process for choosing an IT services provider.

1. They can't write one that will allow them to distinguish the differences between prospective bidders.
2. Most competent computer tech support providers will not go to the effort to respond for a small amount of work.
3. The relationship between the organization and the network services provider is far more important than most other elements, assuming all offerors are moderately competent.

There, I said it. If you're a small business looking for computer network consulting you need to face up to the fact that you don't need the smartest guy in the industry. Your network is actually pretty simple. In fact, its simplicity is what allows so many nearly-incompetent people to compete with good IT outsourcing companies. They only have to make it appear that your network is working and you'll never know the difference -- at least not for a long time.

Now I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't do your homework. Talk to several providers and their current clients. Make sure you feel a connection with the company. Evaluate the fit between your culture and theirs. But don't write an RFP. The same volunteers who created your scary network are going to evaluate the responses. If they were as good as that, you wouldn't be looking for better help.

Pick your guy and then negotiate an agreement, or ask everyone you liked to provide a proposal.

My friend Robert Kyslinger runs a good computer network services company in Houston called Omnipotech. He is fond of branding his products and services by using the prefix "omni" in front of it. While I enjoy making fun of the consistent way in which he does this, I realize that he's onto something. Having a consistent name can help people remember your company. However, it is possible to over do that -- hence our teasing of Robert.

One of the problems that the many different Android tablet devices face is the wide variety of names for them. In a sense, the tablet world is divided into 3 camps: iPads, Android devices, and the hopefully-coming-soon Windows 8 devices. While Apple is busy readying for the release of the 3rd version of the iPad, the Android world is chasing a way to get their devices recognized by name. I've played with dozens of them and I can only name a handful. The problem is so bad that Amazon seemed to go to extra effort to avoid calling their device an Android tablet. In the process they have done what I believe is significant damage to their Kindle brand by prepending it to the Fire, but that's how bad they didn't want to be lumped into the other Android tablets. More than 100 tablets have been introduced since the arrival of the iPad.

So when my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers ask me about the potential for tablets in their organizations, I tell them it is inevitable that they will be using tablets at some point because their people will start bringing their devices to work (BYOT). I also tell these IT support services customers that the only platform that has enough history to consider right now is the iPad. Any of the dozens of Android tablets could be gone in a matter of weeks.

2012 will be the year that tablets come into popular use in small businesses around central Indiana. The Pertingo computer support services customers that Port-to-Port Consulting works with will be ready.

Now that the NFL season is in Playoffs, everyone in central Indiana is thinking about the hoards of people who will descend on us in early February to watch the Super Bowl. Our host committee has done a fabulous job of preparing for the onslaught of people who will spend that week here in Indianapolis. We here at Port-to-Port Consulting have started thinking about the impact of all of these visitors on our routine that week. Many of our small business computer outsourcing customers are also starting to wonder. One of my downtown Indianapolis clients told me that their parking garage has informed them that their monthly passes will be no good during the Super Bowl week. They don't know where they'll park, or what it will cost them.

For all of the companies to which we provide IT support services, there are some remote access capabilities. At least enough for our computer help desk staff to connect for maintenance and troubleshooting. For many, the remote access capability is more robust. We're talking to others about enhancing their remote access in advance of the Super Bowl. For the average office worker these days, the ability to work remotely is relatively inexpensive to provide. We add this capability to many of our computer network services customers after the first big snow storm each winter.

Because we know the date for the big game, we can get ahead of the traffic bottlenecks it will cause by making sure that our customers in downtown Indianapolis have a way to work without leaving home. Thank goodness getting them to come back afterwards is not our problem.

Last month, I was one of the computer tech support specialists who were guests on WFYI's No Limits radio show. Along with Regina Miller and Chris Flood, we answered questions about computers for callers during the one hour show. While No Limits is a fairly new show, the station reported that the response to the computer technology show was high. In fact, later in the month, the station re-aired that episode during their holiday hiatus.

The experience was a lot of fun for me. It made me start to think that Indianapolis could use a computer network services call-in show. It would be a neat way to provide useful information to the community about issues that we all have to fight with our home and small business computer networks.

I would have altered the format just a bit for this topic. John Krull, the show's host, generally takes calls, or emails, or tweets from the audience and then presents them to his guests to discuss. In the world of computer help desk work, it is imperative to talk thru the problem with the person. Troubleshooting a problem that gets described as a printing problem but turns out to be a keyboard problem is hard to do without the involvement of the person with the problem.

That's what made me think of the Car Talk format. Tom and Ray spend a good deal of their show querrying the callers to be sure the problem they have is the same as the one they described. They have a little fun with it as well. Both of these elements would make a computer call-in show less frightening to callers.

What do you think?

With the possible competition of Social Media, Cloud Computing has been the question on the minds of my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers in 2011. How can you not think about it when you're being bombarded by "to the Cloud!" commercials during prime time television? I've told many of my Pertingo IT support services clients that even though the name is cooler, cloud computing is just a re-branding of things that didn't have great names before: client-server, ASP, SaaS, and others.

The reality is that anything you do where the processing (or the bulk of it) is happening on a machine other than the one you're sitting in front of can be considered Cloud computing. A phrase my computer support technicians have used is "Cloud in the Closet" to explain to some of our network support customers that they already have some of their computing in the cloud because their server in the closet is doing the processing for them.

The reality is that cloud computing is a way to trade one set of limiting factors for another. Smart small business owners will work with their computer network consulting provider to develop a plan for testing parts of their system against cloud alternatives. The best time to consider this is when critical IT infrastructure nears its replacement date. It's easier to make the switch to avoid a big capital expense than to switch and be left with a piece of equipment that has no purpose.

We have yet to find one of our computer outsourcing customers that can go completely to the cloud, but every one of them has something worth considering for moving out. You probably have something too.

A well kept secret among the companies that provide small business computer outsourcing services is that the majority of people working in their tech support positions have little or no formal education in the area of IT support services. They are mostly self-taught tinkerers, or vendor-created "certified engineers." Not that I'm knocking the need to learn thru experience and tinkering. Some computer network support concepts can only be understood by building a network and then breaking it and seeing if it can be fixed. However, having spent 4 grueling years earning a real engineering degree, I'm a bit put-off by the flipant use of the engineer designation after passing a couple of multiple-guess questions, no matter how hard they might be.

An unintended downside of this industry full of people who are eager to chase the next great idea. Afterall, if the company that certified you thinks you should be moving in a new direction, who are you to argue. This, I believe, is what creates the compter network services of the month. Right now, there are two related IT services being built up by the hype: Cloud Computing and Virtual Desktops. I'll leave the Cloud for another discussion. It's the Virtual Desktop that has my ire now. While there are instances where this makes absolute good sense, those aren't most of the situations in which my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers find themselves most often. Virtualized desktops work best in environments where lots of people use their computers for nearly exactly the same small set of tasks. That doesn't describe most small business network environments.

Even if it did, we've found that the cost of outfitting the proper network infrastructure to support reliable desktop virtualization is comparable (if not larger) than the cost of doing things to "old fashioned way" of buying regular desktops and a file server. However, the cost of support may be higher because the "engineers" who support your virtual environment have more certificates than the other guys.

A good computer network consulting company will take the time to evaluate the latest craze to see if it really fits your needs. Ask lots of questions when offered something new.

One of the services that Port-to-Port Consulting provides to its Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers is registration and management of their domain names. On the surface, this seems like a simple thing, but we've found that many people involved in IT support services don't understand much about the magic of Internet domains. The most recent example of this problem is one of the worst we've seen. We have a new Pertingo computer network services customer whose previous tech support guy died suddenly. As we began to unravel the many things that were not documented about their system, we discovered that the previous IT guy had registered their domain using his name and company as the registrar. Consequently, we could not take control of the domain to make the changes necessitated by their merger with another group.

Since nothing at the registrar indicated a connection to my new network support client, we couldn't even talk to the registrar about the problem. When we told them the previous guy had died suddenly, they said that they could give access to his heirs if provided with proof of death, but that wouldn't help us. The grieving widow has been unreachable, so my customer has had to engage attorneys to fight to get control of their domain, which they paid for when the previous guy registered it.

We often see similar situations when we win a new Pertingo customer. Usually, a series of calls to the person who did the original registration, along with some tutorials from the registrar gets everything straightened out -- unless the original person is dead. If done properly, the domain should be registered with your company and a contact in your company as the Registrant. If your IT support services provider is going to manage the domain settings for you, he should be listed as the Technical Contact, and either of you can be the Administrative Contact. Under no circumstances should you let your network consulting provider be listed as the Registrant. When he tells you it must be done that way, he's misinformed and you should make sure his skills in other areas of IT are not as poor.

If you didn't register your domain yourself, you should check right now to confirm that it really is registered to you. You can do this using any number of whois websites. We often use whois.net. If you aren't listed as the Registrant, make whoever has control of it make the chang immediately. There is NO good reason why someone other than you has to be listed as the Registrant.

I have been providing small business computer outsourcing in the Indianapolis area for more than 20 years. In that time I've worked with hundreds of businesses and not for profit organizations. Most were transitioning from one form of computer network support to another. Either they had an internal guy or two, or they were using one of my local network consulting competitors, or they had been relying on the kindness of someone close to the to keep them running and had worn out their welcome with them.

In all cases, one of the services high on the list to discuss was the computer help desk. It's one of the most visible parts of good IT outsourcing, even though we'd all like for it to be unnecessary. As a small business computer network consulting customer, you want your staff to be able to get their work done without having to reach out for IT support. As the IT support services provider, I want my staff to be working on more strategic and impactful issues with your Information Technology. Yet we both know that times will come when help is needed. The challenge for us both is to be sure that our Help Desk services don't become the landing place for all of the problems created by the other elements of a competent IT outsourcing engagement.

Frequently, poor planning and communication causes the compute Help Desk technicians to become burdened with calls that make them become defensive. When this happens, your Help Desk starts to hurt your business operations. Here are four ways this can happen:

1. The Help Desk staff forgets their main purpose. This problem is usually caused by heavy handed measurement on the part of the Help Desk management. If the help desk techs are measured by the amount of time they spend on each call, or how many calls they complete each day, or how many issues they resolve (as measured by their close rate), they will have a tendency during stressful times to get off the phone with their network support customers quickly, or to declare problems solved prematurely. This usually leads to repeat calls from the poor customer who still can't work, but it's a new issue from the monitoring standpoint.

2. The Help Desk staff doesn't listen. This is the expert error. People who are very familiar with a subject tend to try to jump ahead to the answer instead of listening to the problem. This is why your Help Desk technician starts fixing your email connection when your problem is opening an email attachment. She heard email and went to work.

3. The Help Desk staff doesn't tell you what's happening. Computer tech support involves a troubleshooting process that sometimes amounts to trial-and-error. Your network support technician doesn't want to tell you all of the things he's trying or eliminating. He only wants to tell you the successful solution. As a result, you feel as if you're being kept in the dark. You are. Good support people will tell you what they're doing and why.

4. The Help Desk staff won't admit when they're stumped. Since you're paying for the expertise of your computer technical support, many providers have a fear of admitting that they don't know how to fix your problem. As a result, they say things that are packed with jargon and techno-speak in an attempt to make you feel like they have a clue.

Watch out for these issues as you deal with your computer outsourcing provider. Call them on it when you notice these behaviors. Remember that many are just habits that need to  be monitored.

I got a call the other day from a friend who owns a clothing store. He sometimes calls me when he's having computer problems. Port-to-Port doesn't work in retail establishments but we have a few friends who ask us to sanity check what they hear from their computer tech support professionals.

In this case, the computer that runs the POS was unresponsive. They had called their software company and been told that it was a bad motherboard. I stopped by and quickly determined that the problem was a bad power supply. I shared this happier assessment with my friend and told him to pass it on to his computer help desk guys so they could be prepared when they came out. He did.

The next day, my friend called me to tell me that my diagnosis was correct and his IT support services technician had replaced the power supply and gotten the computer working again. I expressed my joy at having been able to help when he said, "That wasn't the end of the story."

He went on to relay how his computer network services guy had replaced the power supply, turned on the machine, watched it boot, and then packed up and left. It wasn't until he was out the door that they got logged in and discovered that the computer wouldn't talk to the receipt printer. Attempts to reach their network support tech were unsuccessful so they were left with a computer that worked but they couldn't use. Luckily, a customer with some network consulting experience volunteered to help out and managed, after more than an hour, to get the printer working.

Situations like this play out everyday in the Indianapolis computer outsourcing arena. Technicians finish their work at the point right before their customer starts his work. The result is one side who believes the work is successful and the other side who is extremely frustrated that he still can't work. Good computer tech support happens when the provider understands the real reason he has a job.

Ever since Microsoft released Windows 3.0 with Solitaire included I've found myself frequently having conversations with my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers about restricting employees' access to certain applications. Lately the conversation revolves more around access to certain Internet sites. The purpose is always to get employees to focus their energy on getting work done instead of personal activities. In the Windows 3.0 days I made the argument that letting your staff play Solitaire is a form of Mr. Miyagi training. Solitaire was designed to force the player to use the mouse. Clicks, double clicks, drag-and-drops -- these were transferable skills just like "Wax on. Wax off."

With the advent of virus inflicting websites, I started supporting my network support clients to manage where employees can go to avoid gunking up the network. If people just click their way around the Internet without some kind of supervision they will surely rain damage down in the whole network and lead to the need for lots of computer network services to get things going again.

Today, I sit on the fence between the two camps. I say let your employees do their holiday shopping online, as long as they are reasonable in their use of time and do the shopping at sites with name recognition. Sure, there are some risks to both productivity and network security, but neither should be at great risk. First, if your staff has so little to do that they can spend hours shopping online, then you've got a business and management problem that can't be solved with Information Technology. Second, if the shopping is restricted to the major sites, the risk of attracting a virus is pretty slim. Finally, no matter what you do, a third of your employees are going to shop online at work anyway. Why not deal with it head on.

If you think my stance is extreme, you'll be more shocked than I was to read this. I talked with a prospect for our Pertingo Computer Support service last week and he described his biggest problem to be cleaning viruses off his network from his staff porn surfing. I assured him we could reduce that to nearly nothing and identify those who refused to stop. He told me that would be detrimental to morale since his folks worked a lot and they were unable to porn surf at home. He just wants to keep the network virus-free as they do it.

We won't be providing computer network consulting to that organization.

The first time I visited a restaurant with a sign out front that said "BYOB" I was unsure what it meant... until it was too late. Don't let that happen to you with the latest acronym to hit the computer tech support: BYOT. It stands for Bring Your Own Technology. Now that the real innovation in Information Technology is in consumer products, we're starting to see more and more people at work using the same equipment that they've become accustomed to using at home. This started with home laptops, and that was a nightmare because the consumer versions of computer equipment was not the same in terms of features and capabilities. Hardware manufacturers fed you the numbers that you thought were important, and made the computer cheap by cutting every other corner.

Not so with the latest set of smart phones and tablets. Many of these consumer products have the ability to do the work that my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers need to have done. In fact, the trend to bring in home equipment that started with laptops and moved to smart phones and now is going into tablets (and laptops again), is putting pressure on companies to upgrade their computer network equipment more often so their employees have equipment that is as capable as the devices they have at home.

Perhaps one day soon our computer network equipment will be like the craftsman's tools. We'll only want to use our own because we know it very well. That will be a living nightmare for those of us who provide computer tech support in central Indiana and elsewhere, but the possibility looms large now that we have BYOT.

As I grow older, I find that some things aren't as easy as they used to be for me. I can't run as fast or as far as I used to. Just thinking about eating causes my waist line to expand. My arms just aren't long enough to hold the menus where I can read them. More and more people refer to me as "sir" than ever did before. I look at all of these things as the small price I must pay for living nearly half a century, except for my declining memory.

Now don't start thinking that senility is right around the corner for me. I'm still sharp enough to keep my Indianpolis small business computer network services customers up to date on the things that are happening in the IT industry that affects their businesses. I haven't forgotten my anniversary or anybody's birthday. I just don't have the quickness of recall that was once a hallmark of my personality. I have found that this problem isn't all bad. In fact, forgetting is an important thing for humans. Our memories don't work like computer hard drives. Although a new service connected to Foursquare is working on that, and another does it for Facebook.

By signing up for 4Squareand7YearsAgo.com, you will receive a daily email reminding you of the places you visited one year ago today. PastPosts.com does the same thing with your Facebook updates. It's like going back and reading your diary daily. Well, almost like it.