Technology Pain Points – How Long Can You Endure Them?

Do you know how much a slow, under-performing PC costs you each day/week?

A Large percentage of my business is from repeat customers, with re-occurring problems, that slow their businesses down.

Let’s take a look at two ‘Offices’. Which of the following two scenarios is your office?

Office A

10 PCs running Windows XP Pro, w/ ~2GB RAM, 2-3 servers running Windows 2003/2008 Oses, running managed services on all PCs and servers. All issues are resolved pro-actively. Microsoft Security Patching and Anti-virus updates and scans are run and monitored. Connected to the internet via cable. IT support costs are fixed, leaving your IT staff or consultant to work with you to improve processes.

Office B

10 PCs running Windows XP Pro or Vista, w/ less than 2GB RAM, 2-3 servers running NT/2000 Server. No managed services. No remote monitoring, no remote access. All issues are resolved after the fact (reactively) and at a premium rate, Microsoft Security Patching is off, PC/Server has not had updates since… ??? Status of your antivirus updates and scans is also unknown (who is responsible for this?) Internet access is wide open and not only do your employees have the ability to surf the web, but hackers have access to your private company files (they do???!!) IT Support costs are out of hand, you have to reboot PCs and servers more than once a day. ( You do know how to reboot a server, don’t you?) You have a high turnover rate of IT staff (if you even have someone at all, who is responsible for this??)

So? Which office is yours? Or which one has more of one than it should?

Enter managed services. Office A has managed services and there was no mention of rebooting PCs or servers. Nor a mention of hackers (but sadly hackers are still a problem).

So what are managed services you ask? We load a small program on your PC/Server and let it run. This ‘agent’ collects only information about the workings of the hardware and software. What you have, what you don’t have. When a problem occurs (and no you weren’t alerted to it because you don’t have this type of system or an IT staff to do it for you), an alert is sent to the monitoring station (in IT terms it is called a NOC Network Operations Center) which in turn creates a trouble ticket that is either resolved immediately or is sent on to a tech who will be on-site in the morning.

What kind of problems do managed services resolve? For one, problems are solved before ‘You’ the business owner or even end user know about it. Now that end user, your employee does not have to reboot their PC a few times a day.

And now back to my opening statement about ROI, how do we calculate that?

If one end user has to reboot twice a day (2) and it takes 10 minutes, that means that your employee was sitting idle for 20 minutes a day, times 5 days a week equals 100 minutes or almost 2 hours a week. Now how much do you pay that employee a week? Multiply that times how many employees you have. OK now you have lost time/money due to rebooting. Add the same amount of time/money to that to show how much ‘productivity’ you lost. And finally, add the number of minutes/hours lost due to employees not getting back to work right away.

Managed services are all the range now as they are a great solution to a lot of issues that plague companies. They are used by some of the bigger companies because they have to show productivity gains and that is done by getting more use out of every person and piece of equipment.

And now the bad part,,, (yeah you knew it was coming!) the price. Now that you have a ballpark number in your head about how much you are losing to non productive equipment, we can use it against what managed services will cost you.

$15/PC per month, $35/server per month. Take that number and subtract it from the one above, of course make sure that your lost is showing how much a month you are losing. If the resulting number is a positive that would be the price you would be saving each month. If the resulting number is a negative, well then your systems are running better than most and I congratulate you! So! Now we can talk about getting other processes running better! You do have a business continuity plan in place, don’t you???

Richard W. “Rich” Schierer aka MyIT GuyOnLI is President & owner of Make My Technology Simple

You can find him on Facebook, follow him on Twitter, at the company website www.makemytechnologysimple.com or call him at 631.375.4512 to discuss what managed services can do for your company’s performance or any other computer/network issue.

Non-Profit Work is good for the IT soul!

I am doing some work for this non-profit called Her Story Writers, A Community Memoir Writing Project for Women, www.herstorywriters.org/ . They provide a forum for women to tell their stories. Good and bad. To read some of the stories on this site will tug on the strings of your heart! And the people that volunteer for this non-profit and the women who I have met that write for it are wonderful people indeed!

I came upon this non-profit while attending the Greater Middle Country Chamber of Commerce meeting last month that is held at the Centereach Library. There I met someone from the Miller Business Center, which is a fantastic resource provided by the library. She had attended the Chamber of Commerce meeting and afterwards we spoke. She asked if I would be interested in doing some non-paid work for a non-profit.

Well in these days of everyone looking out for themselves, I pride myself on making time for those who don’t have.

And I have to tell you, not only does it feel good to do work for those who do good for others, but I find that I am exposed to new technologies this way. I learn new ways of doing the same thing. New experiences in troubleshooting PC and application issues.

Case in point, this non-profit uses Quickbooks which I only have a summary knowledge of. The director wants to create a custom thank you letter template to say thank you to all the people that donate to the non-profit. I spent about 2 hours with her learning what she wanted to do, how she was doing it in the past and how Quickbooks worked. I found that someone else had created a new thank you letter template, but over time the director wanted to add more information from the database when merging them.

I was very happy when I was able to connect the dots for both her and myself and create the template she needed. Now, I have to create a few more templates so that she doesn’t have to customize anything, she can just point click and print! 

The people at this non-profit are so genuinely happy that I am there to help them. They all volunteer their time, so I know that my part in the puzzle is to make sure that when they are there doing their ‘thing’ that they can do it without any problems from those old dinasaurs that they call computers!

 It is a good feeling! And I think if more IT people, heck! if more PEOPLE volunteered their time, they would discover that the feelings you get back from it are more than worth the time spent! Besides,,, what are you going to do with those spare hours anyway? Watch TV? Play solitare on the computer?