Category: Technology

Entrepreneurs can be notorious for their unique ways of thinking and working. The fact that they are often different from most people in the business world is what makes them branch out on their own and start up their own companies.

If you are the owner and progenitor of a small business, then it is your vision that drives the company and most likely you that is the heart of the business. Although your personality and unique vision as an entrepreneur is crucial to the success of your venture, it is also incredibly important that everything can run without you.

Business continuity and preparation is not just for big business

I was told by a former editor that all the work I was doing should be annotated and filed in such a way in a shared hard drive that someone else could carry on with my work in the event that I was hit and killed by a bus.

Aside from being slightly concerned that this was a thinly veiled threat and instilling an unhealthy dose of paranoia in me whenever I crossed the road outside the office, this struck me as good advice. If something does happen to you, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be as final as my editor had intimated/threatened, then the work that you were doing does have to carry on and you should be making it as easy as possible for someone else to pick up where you left off.

Whilst this is true for simple worker bees like I was at the time, it is just as important for those higher up the food chain. Imagine the impact that you as an entrepreneur and small business owner can have by going AWOL without instructions left for what to do in your absence?

Business continuity is indeed a whole industry in itself and preparing for the unexpected is something that you can cover to a certain extent with business insurance in general, but here are three other things you can do as a small business owner to make recovering from an unforeseen incident easier.

1. Self documenting

When it comes to computer work, there are some simple steps to make your system decipherable, and I will admit right now that I break every single one of these rules.

a)      Don’t hide important mission critical things away on a private computer that no one else has access to.

b)      Name things in a sensible and consistent manner.

c)   Place files in logical folders and sub-folders.

d)     Do not recreate the Labyrinth with your sub-folders – anyone trying to decode your system will expect to encounter a minotaur at the end.

e)      Do not append any version of a file with the word “final” because you will inevitably end up iterating that with “final final” or “final final final” or “actually final” or “REALLY FINAL”, which can make finding the actual final version rather complicated for yourself, let alone a third party tying to establish the hierarchy of “actually” and “really”.

Keeping stuff logical is important, but make sure that it’s logical by the standards of everyone else and not just you. As mentioned above, it is likely that your entrepreneurial brain operates vastly different to how most people think. In the nicest possible way, the way that you organise and manage things naturally will probably be a bit special when considered by other people.

2. Clear appointment of responsibility

Make it clear from the outset whose responsibility it is to take over abandoned business critical tasks if you are taken out of action and make sure it is clear who should perform your roles. This can make it easier for other people to prepare for the unexpected and any unforeseen events become much less of a burden on your staff or partners.

It’s also a good idea to make sure that you have some kind of deputy or second in command that you trust to run things in your absence. Without adequate delegation, your operation will most likely fall apart if you’re not there to see it through. You might be able to give it a nudge in the right direction depending upon how incapacitated you become, but being prepared sooner rather than later is the most sensible option by far. You don’t want to leave people bickering over who does what when there’s no one left running business critical operations.

3. Share your work

Unless you’re working on something that is absolutely top secret, sharing what you’re doing and updating someone on your progress from time to time is useful. This doesn’t have to be a time consuming/time wasting daily briefing, but a quasi-regular update can go a long way to keeping others in the loop.

This might be something you don’t feel you need to do if you’re running a small company and you might feel that your communication is already as good as it needs to be. It might also be that you feel this is something that only your staff need to do and that being at the top you shouldn’t really answer to anyone, but not only will you find it useful in the case that someone has to take over, but you’ll probably also find that it can also keep you to task a little more. Knowing that there is some kind of deadline on your work, even if it’s largely self imposed, can have the added bonus of increasing your productivity.

Your business shouldn’t end with you

The work you’re doing is important and if it’s not important, there’s not a lot of point in you doing it, much less investing your entrepreneurial efforts into it. With this in mind, it is important that anything you do can be finished by others. If you are truly irreplaceable, then you need to take measures to amend that.

About The Author

Written by David Hing for YOUR Insurance, a broker specialising in public liability insurance for small businesses.

Article Contributed by Kay Ackerman

Have you noticed you don’t hear a formerly common question much anymore? “Exactly, what is cloud computing, anyway?” It wasn’t too long ago when, if you told people you use the cloud to produce and store your work, you received perplexed looks from even some otherwise tech-savvy gurus.

As many experienced observers believe, cloud computing is growing up. The excitement surrounding the cloud, including how it would save users money, sounded too good to be true–total hype. However, the skeptics, who also were concerned about security issues (at a minimum), aren’t saying too much anymore. Users realize that it’s not the magic bullet some proponents claimed it would be, but it works.

The cloud has survived its formative phase. It’s become a reliable tool.

Detractors still maintain that it comes with potential security concerns and user savings, which are challenging to measure. However, more and more entrepreneurs and businesses are trusting the cloud with their documents and data storage.

Infancy

The origins of the term “cloud” remain a bit cloudy (pun intended). Most believe it comes from the cloud-like drawings displaying the interrelationship between a network and its various components. Others maintain that the word “cloud” is simply a metaphor for the Internet, upon which the remote servers storing documents and data depend. Cloud symbols have been used to describe the Internet for over two decades.

Although most consider cloud computing a cutting edge use of technology, the concept goes back to the days of large-scale mainframes in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Who knew? Forward thinkers, who could also count money, realized that the cost of then-sophisticated mainframes was prohibitive for all but the largest corporations and universities. Some developed methods to sell “time” on mainframes to others to increase their return on investment (ROI).

Growing Up

Much like humans, cloud computing went through numerous growing pains. While it’s still not in the grizzled veteran status, the cloud is maturing. Its abilities to deliver numerous benefits consistently improve. The characteristics of cloud computing are expanding as is its reliability and acceptance.

• Cloud agility. Allows users to change, upgrade and expand their technology quickly and as needed.
• Accessibility to varied software. As new interface software and applications appear, the cloud enhances human and computer interaction.
• Cost savings, still challenged by skeptics, divert capital expenditures to recurring operations expenses. Instead of massive investment dollars, individuals and organizations enjoy budget-manageable expenses.
• User freedom and independence. Users can access the cloud from a browser, regardless of where they are or what devices, including smartphones, they are using.
• Sharing and migration. Cloud technology permits sharing of servers and storage. Apps can quickly and simply migrate from one server to another.
• Reliability. Once a primary cloud concern, much like secure backup systems with multi-level redundancy, reliability continues to improve. Redundant servers, usually at multiple locations and with efficient disaster recovery programs, make the cloud safer for users.
• Security. While not perfect–do you know of any security system in any industry that is?–cloud security continues to improve, consistently better protecting sensitive data from hackers.
• No deferred maintenance. The more sophisticated and complex your operation, the more important and costly its maintenance requirement to keep systems up and active. Cloud computing removes most of that daunting responsibility–and cost.

The cloud, while not a one-size-fits-all tech solution for every individual or business, is maturing quite nicely, thank you. If its popularity, efficiency and security continue to increase, the cloud could become the standard for personal and business computing. Stay tuned.

About the Author

Kay Ackerman is a self-proclaimed tech geek and freelance writer, focusing on business technology, innovative marketing strategies, and small business. She contributes to www.technected.com and you can also find her on Twitter.

Article Contributed by Penelope Edwards 

When a business starts out their software requirements are fairly limited, probably only needing to use basic office packages for word processing and accounting. As the business grows the need for more sophisticated inventory and order management systems arises and these are added into the IT mix. Later on still, the need to scale and grow means that the business expands into additional sales channels, each one requiring another software solution and further increasing the complexity of integration between business processes. All of a sudden the businesses IT systems are looking a bit like Frankenstein’s monster. All cobbled together from different disparate software packages that don’t quite fit together, absolutely riddled with inefficiencies.

Does this sound anything like your current setup? I know the prospect of unpicking this mess and changing systems is daunting to say the least. It’s easy to rest on your laurels and claim ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. But you could be losing out on a huge amount of time, money and ultimately scalability, due to badly architected systems that have organically evolved on the basis of short term thinking.

Here are four problems that might kick-start you into taking the plunge into the efficiencies and longer term scalabilities that come from implementing an integrated business management software solution.

1) Buying, maintaining, and upgrading multiple different software packages is not cheap.

You’ll need to shell out for multiple licences, as well as pay someone with the experience and skills to work will all of these different packages.  Add in the cost of integrating them so that they can share data and whoa nelly things are starting to look pretty pricey. Any integration will need maintenance too; possibly every time one of the software vendors releases an update. This IT resource could be used elsewhere to improve productivity or just eliminated to save cost and improve your bottom line.

2) Often you won’t be able to fully join together different software packages as they will be too dissimilar to make integration possible.

This means that your staff will need to waste valuable time re-entering information into multiple packages. The likelihood of human error is also increased meaning all your data is more inaccurate. This re-entry of data takes your staff away from using this time in more beneficial ways for your business, such as generating more income. Look at it this way if 5 people save 30 minutes per day, and there are roughly 252 working days in a year, then you’re wasting a whopping 630 hours annually that could be put to more productive use.

3) Waiting for data to be passed between numerous separate systems, which is both an error-prone and time-intensive process, results in critical decision making being slow and choices being made on the basis of inaccurate analytics.

Important business decisions are therefore often too late to have the most effective impact or could actually be detrimental to your business.

4) A lack of quick and efficient processes will affect customer satisfaction as well.

If you have poor integration and lengthy transfer processes between your software systems you are unlikely to be able to gain instant access to the information you need to service them well. Order information, inventory levels, order status, billing history and more will not be easily accessible. This leads to a poorer customer experience so they won’t buy from you again and even might be prompted to about you negatively to others.

The best time to get an integrated system in place and avoid the issues of managing multiple systems is now (or as soon as possible!). It’s never too late or early. Getting the right system will help you to scale as you’ll be more efficient and have more time to grow your business.

About the Author

Penelope Edwards works at Brightpearl – business management software for small businesses integrates inventory, accounting, CRM, order processing with sales channels. Run your website, physical shop and online marketplace listings from a single back end system. Sell more, and sell better.

Businesses are increasingly migrating away from providing their own infrastructure for IT-related tasks, toward a model wherein necessary services are managed in the cloud by other companies. Before relying on JD Edwards managed services, it is essential to know the advantages and tradeoffs of having a third party manage key infrastructure.

The technology needs of businesses continue to increase. Once it was sufficient to host a website and perhaps to provide a few organizational mailboxes. Eventually, web applications came to replace tools such as calendars, contact lists and other physical components of running a business. Today’s smart companies manage information electronically by default, producing hard copies only when necessary.

This has vastly increased the burden of maintaining the infrastructure that any business must have to compete. Businesses can respond to this in one of two ways. They can either host all necessary services themselves, hiring essential staff and purchasing additional equipment, or they can contract a managed services provider to do it for them. Managed services bring along a number of benefits and disadvantages.

Managed Services Pros

Easing Maintenance Infrastructure
First, managed services encapsulate a number of solid choices and best practices. Choosing a suite of applications to meet a given need is challenging, but any business that hires a managed hosting company, such as IQMS’ ERP software or other planning software, can be certain that the proposed solution will be well-integrated to meet a given set of needs. Said services will also be kept updated, are managed securely, and often come with a service level agreement which commits to high availability.

Cost Benefits
Managed services generally cost less. Just as buying in bulk saves money, so too does hosting in bulk. Buying new servers and bandwidth while also hiring new staff to host a single set of services costs more than does hiring another company. By hosting multiple instances of a similar stack, efficiency is increased and costs are reduced.

Easy Deployment
Managed services are also fast to deploy. It is often possible to set up infrastructure in minutes or hours, rather than the days that would be necessary to set up and network physical servers, as well as to hire essential maintenance and support staff. Managed services can also scale to meet new demand, thus eliminating the need to acquire new hardware and personnel as demand increases.

Managed Services Cons

Reliability Concerns
There are also disadvantages to managed services. When hiring another partner to host critical business infrastructure, one hopes that their business will endure. If it fails, any businesses relying upon them might be left scrambling for a way to replace email, web hosting, calendars and other critical pieces of infrastructure without which any business cannot run.

Less Flexibility
Managed hosting offers less flexibility. While the choice of which applications to use for a given need might be a daunting one, it does allow meeting specific requirements to exacting standards. Managed services take some of this choice away, resulting in combinations that may not be as ideal for a given use case.

Finally, managed service providers generally store information outside of a business’s own infrastructure. In many industries this is a perfectly acceptable choice, but regulated sectors such as health care may require that service providers adhere to additional standards such as HIPAA and HITECH. Such compliance increases complexity and costs.

Whether to use managed services is a complex issue. For some businesses, they represent a great way to cut costs while quickly coming up to speed. For others, the risks and added complexity might override any benefits. As such, there is no right answer for everyone, and businesses and organizations must individually weigh these factors to make the right decision for their unique circumstances.

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking once said “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”  This is very true in the educational field as educators and students alike have been forced to adapt to things like the internet, smartphone technology, and e-books.  It also can translate to the business world.

In most cases consumers do not consider the changes a business must adapt to in order to remain competitive.  Things like offering wifi service and outlets for consumers to charge electronic devices on was not in a business’ thought process five years ago, but are now things consumers seek out when looking for things like coffee shops to go to.   Consumers enjoy these luxuries, but in most cases have not considered the culture coercion it places on small business owners.

Businesses fear losing their customers so they adapt to their needs to provide them with a pleasurable experience, even if their risk to reward is questionable.  Airlines offer seating in airport terminals with USB adaptors attached to them that allow riders to charge their smartphones before boarding, McDonalds offers free wifi for anyone eating in their restaurants, and Starbucks recently launched an application that lets users pay for their order with their iPhone.

These businesses all show their intelligence by adapting to technology and the consumer demands that they come with.  None of the businesses knew what the level of success was going to be for these launched campaigns, but it is safe to say they generated more come-back customers out of them.  Not every advancement a business must adjust to is in best interest of their customers, rather some decision’s in the past were made based on the interest of the business.  Location to open is the oldest and most universal decision an entrepreneur has to make.  But once you decide that other decisions also need to be made.

The old way was not convenient to a business, especially a small one, as funds often took days to receive. This could be potentially harmful to a small business who is awaiting a reimbursement for a large transaction. This caused a tough decision to be made for any small business owner.

Since 1979, businesses of all types were faced with the same decision on credit card acceptance.  It was in that year that Visa created the first electronic data capturing credit card terminal. It was a huge advancement from the manual card imprinters as it sped up the transaction and made it more secure and easier for businesses to accept credit card payments.  The time it took for funds to get into an account was shortened, allowing smaller businesses that were on a tighter budget to explore the benefits of accepting credit cards.

There have been a variety of credit card terminals since the first imprinter. They have gone from slow dialup connections that required a cashier to manually enter the credit card number to tap and go machines. The range of machines offered from companies such as North American Bancard makes it easy for a business to adapt to accepting credit cards.  They offer machines that run through dialup, high speed and wireless connections. These advancements make it easier for any industry to accept credit cards.

It wasn’t until recently that companies like Pay Anywhere developed a device that turns a smartphone into a credit card terminal.  Pay Anywhere is backed by North American Bancard who is currently helping over 100,000 merchants with their credit card processing needs.

Thanks to developments like Pay Anywere, businesses have more choices than ever to process credit cards and need to adapt to this industry before it’s too late.  This advancement in the industry makes accepting credit cards more cost and energy efficient.  Mobile credit card processing makes it easier for a business to adapt to the change in the merchant account industry.