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Office 2010: Pros and Cons
Every time Microsoft develops a new release of Windows and/or Office, the questions begin around upgrading. CIO Online recently put out a great high level summary of the Pros and Cons of Office 2010 for Business. Follow the link and take a read. In a nutshell, if you are an office users, you are likely going to want these upgrades. The increased integration with Sharepoint and simplified ability to share and edit Sharepoint content coupled with a slew of new features, including many that integrate social media sites such as LinkedIn via the Outlook Social Connector make this a really innovative and valuable release.
But don’t forget the challenges! As more and more users switch to 64 bit from 32 there may be real compatibility and integration issues, and you should speak to your IT professional about these issues and how they will impact your business. While integration and upgrade issues will drive complexity, the upgrade to 64 bit enables many things such as much larger Exel workbooks for example.
As always, the choice to upgrade will be divided between the desire to have the newest and coolest, and the need to balance productivity gains with upgrade costs. I think this particular release brings some new innovations and ideas that will begin to change the way we look at productivity suites, and bears some careful thoughts when planning your IT budget for the next year!
Happy Computing
Richard Brunke
In: Business, Technology, Uncategorized
Things To Think About as IT Spend Comes Back
Although economies rarely behave in an orderly and predictable fashion, the industry experts are claiming that good times are returning for IT and that IT spending will be increasing in a ‘V’ shaped fashion in 2010. While it is always hard to really know what will happen with IT spend, it does indeed seem likely to me that IT spending will increase, and increase at a strong rate in 2010. This may not be driven by the economy, however, as much as by neglect and natural replacement/upgrade/maintenance cycles.
Let’s face it, 2009 was a scary year. Many companies pulled back on all spending to ensure they had the reserves to survive a downturn that at some points appeared to be an ever deepening pit. As preventative IT spend went down, coupled with holding off on many much needed infrastructure and computing equipment upgrades, a backlog of spend was being created. In IT, that backlog always has to clear at some point. Server upgrades become needed, user machines have begun to breakdown, software upgrades have been skipped – ultimately productivity is impacted.
Yet, despite the significant need, there is lingering fear of hiring in a world with a lot of uncertainty around the recovery, taxes, and health care reform impacts. For SMB’s, there are added questions around keeping IT costs variable to match business cycles.
This becomes a perfect storm for growth in the IT outsourcing world, as businesses scramble to play catch up without having to over commit to long term labor costs. There are countless articles and white papers on how to select IT providers. Many of these provide potentially valuable information on ensuring that your provider can support your business and technical vision.
All this is very educational and interesting. What always seems to be missing from these discussions is what the underlying motivations behind IT support really are. At the simplest level, business owners (and computing users) just want to be productive and feel supported. You want to be happy with your IT provider without having to get distracted from your businesses core mission. These things have less to do with the technical details of how work gets done and more to do with how that support is systemically delivered. In my experience, many computing users feel annoyed, frustrated and abandoned as they have disruptions, followed by a feeling of desertion as their vendor is delayed in providing the support they need.
Ask any potential vendor how they will help ensure your computing users will be happy, and wait for the blank stare. Ask about how they minimize delay and ensure you’re never deserted. Ask them how they limit disruptions in the first place! At the end of the day, those are the real key questions, and the key to finding a great IT service provider. Any smart IT consultant can explain the specifics on how they remediate an issue, but at the end of the day, that is a transactional approach. Take the conversation up a notch and ask a few key questions about their client support model:
- Do you have the breadth and depth of expertise to ensure you can manage all my needs now and as I grow?
- Do you have the size and scope to ensure you can always respond to my emergencies? What if a local issue causes multiple clients to go down at once, how can you handle that?
- How do you handle inbound client calls and emails? Do you count on a field technician to respond to those when they can, or do you have live dispatch that can triage, prioritize, and assign all issues to the best resource?
- Do you have live local remote staff that can immediately solve my user issues when needed?
- Will I have access to multiple resources, or just one?
These are basic business level questions that will help you gain confidence that your selected partner can fulfill the goal of ensuring your users don’t feel disrupted, delayed and deserted, but instead feel happy, productive and supported. At the end of the day, THAT is the real end goal of all IT support.
Happy Computing!
Richard Brunke
Smart Phones – Blurring the Distinction Between Work and Home
I was reading an article about smart phones and I had a few thoughts perhaps worthy of comment. The first is that consumers want smart phones. People want to be seen using the coolest gadget to update Facebook, check email, and tweet the details of your dinner. The second thought that came to mind was ‘is this making us more efficient, or just more available, and what is the impact of all that real time availability’?
There was a time, not so long ago, that we had to consolidate our thoughts and questions, organize them, and present them over a phone in a conference call, or face to face in a weekly meeting. ‘Oh the humanity, Oh the hard work’ people think. How did we ever crawl out from the primordial slime without our smart phones to keep us in touch with everything and everyone! Well, I for one wonder if we are always better off. There is a certain scattered pattern to communications today, as each thread of thought is tossed out to the world to be digested and replied to. The simple art of organizing ones thoughts and creating some cohesion is getting lost. Then there is the simple concept that your mind blowing revelation may not really need to interrupt me in real time. It is hard to find a half hour of truly uninterrupted work time these days without changing gears a dozen times to answer all sorts of emails, texts, etc.
So, am I against these ubiquitous devices? No, of course not. I do, however, think that we need to learn how to live with these devices in a smarter way. Clearly as an employer, you should buy one for every employee. It has been shown time and again that people will embrace being online all the time when it comes to having these smart devices! Email is no longer a chore, but something you do in line at the movies, during dinner, and at all sorts of other little pauses in life. It’s like getting 20% more time from your employees!
Maybe…
Smart phones are electronic crack to be sure. You just can’t say no to those little buggers. You bring them to the bathroom with you, you look at them while eating, and they even go on vacation with you. We are addicted to information. We crave it. We crave the sense of connectedness to the world that we get surfing the web while simultaneously checking email, tweeting, and letting our face book friends know that we just saw the greatest movie ever… For all the home time that we seem to spend on work with these devices, we also see more personal time spent at work. On the whole, I don’t know if they add to productivity or detract from it, but they do integrate work and home life more deeply than ever before, and perhaps, given time, the right functionality will continue to push the needle towards productivity enhancement.
There is no slowing momentum on these cool gadgets. They are here to stay. But, perhaps we can at least realize that not every time is the right time for online… and that sometimes always on is not such a good thing. Balance is a key we have not found with these devices. We need to discover the difference betwee ”can’ and ’should’ (texting or tweeting in a public bathroom stall for instance should be grounds for an immediate device time out). Employers will increasingly realize that these devices are as critical of enablers of productivity as desktop computers and will soon find themselves pushing them to all employees. Pagers and cell phones are obsolete methods of communication, and the incremental costs of a smart phone should be minimal compared to the potential return. It is the equivalent to the difference between getting an employee a calculator and a notepad instead of a computer.
A final thought is this: the adoption of smart phones broadly across business will drive new IT issues and challenges. Just like laptops, these devices will have critical data on them. Just like other technology, they will need to be supported and managed. The concept of complex and mission critical business applications being served by a handheld smart phone may not be new, but it is just now becoming a widely adopted reality.
Once again, time to rethink how we do business, how we do leisure, and where the distinctions are between the two.
Other key questions to be asking:
- Do you have a plan for the adoption of high end smart phones or are you sitting on the sidelines?
- Is your IT ready with a plan to support them, keep them secure, and integrate them into your technology plan?
- Do you understand the HR implications (what happens if hourly employees have them?)
Happy ‘handheld’ computing!
Richard Brunke
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