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5 Things I’ve Been Thinking About
A lot bouncing about in the head today, and I wanted to touch briefly on a few topics that may be worthy of looking into and thinking about for all of you SMB owners/managers out there.
- Mobile enabled websites. I have heard surprisingly little talk about preparation from SMB’s to have mobile enabled web sites. Sure, Amazon has it, Ebay has it, but what about you? As more users search from a mobile device, you are going to be losing customers if they can’t display your website properly on their device of choice. I’m not going into options here, just do a web search for options… but the point is, have SMB business owners realized the criticality of mobile search and web display?
- All in one mobile devices versus specialty devices. This is a personal one for me (iPad versus Kindle) as well as a question of maximizing mobile productivity for workers. Multiple use devices do many things fairly well, making them convenient for users who want to limit the number of devices they have to haul around… but, are we losing out on productivity and the benefits of specializations. I fall into the camp of wanting my device to be really good at a few things. The important thing is to know what are your have to haves, and your nice to haves. Buy to meet the have to haves, and don’t let sexy, but unimportant bells and whistles take you off task!
- Data management. Data is being created at levels that will double itself every three years I’ve read. Amazing if you think about it. Wait, no, terrifying if you think about what it means and how we can get at that data. Traditional indexing and searching methods just won’t cut it over time. Fortunately for most of us, we don’t have to worry about worldwide data creation and storage, but we should worry about our own data proliferation and how easily we will be able to access that data and use it in the future. Have a data plan! If you don’t, or don’t know where to start, do some research and make sure that you are planning long term when thinking about database architecture and discussing data warehousing with your IT department. It just looks like a train wreck coming to me… but we have a little bit of time to correct this one.
- The costs of IT spending cut backs. What? That sentence seemed to not make sense, I know, but what I am referring to is the looming costs of hardware replacements and software upgrades that have built up due to continued putting off of IT spend due to economic fears. I know we are seeing an increase in complete failures of old servers, and maintenance costs of the same. Now is a good time to get a read out on where you are with your infrastructure – how old is it, what are the risks? Some investment now may save more dollars later, and more importantly, it may save downtime, and the one thing most companies can’t afford now is productivity loss. Just think on this – that four year old server that made IT nervous before the economy dropped out is now coming up on 6 years old. Sadly, unlike wine, IT infrastructure does not improve with age.
- What about green IT for SMB’s? There is lots of talk about green initiatives for large corporations, where green IT initiatives can convert to large dollar savings, but what about those SMB’s who simply want to do the right thing, even though they may not save those big bucks? Do a web search, and you will find surprisingly little relevant information. Despite this, there are some simple things we can all do and be thinking about to be more eco-friendly. Think about ways to reduce printing – this is a huge opportunity, as it’s not just about the paper, but about the printer, the consumables, the paper, the electricity, and the entire downstream creation and shipping process of all of these things. Find ways to reduce travel through the use of web meetings technology. There are dozens of little common sense approaches to being eco-friendly. Maybe we don’t need anyone to tell us how to save the world. We likely have many of the answers, but we have to implement them!
Well, there is my brain dump for the day. Five snippets to think about and talk about with your IT department. The world is shifting under us in so many ways, it is easy to miss things. Now I have to go and think a bit more about how some of these issues impact my business (does that website render well on a mobile device? Ugh… I don’t think so). Well, we all have things to work on!
Happy Computing!
Richard Brunke
