April 18th, 2010 by Al

I want to give an update of what’s been happening: Things are going well in the PDA department. A special call-out to Mindy Byers of “Mega-Mouth Mindy” who gave me incredible insight and opinion with her own experiences the iPhone. Many thanks Mindy. I appreciate your time and willingness to answer my questions.

The iPhone is working out better than expected. (That’s always good, right?) It’s simplified my personal data, solving communication problems by providing real-time access to both email and voice. In all actuality, it’s FUN! I’m using 2 productivity applications daily:

iTimeSheets,  which tracks many different yet recurring tasks I’m working on. The great part is, it emails the report in a CSV format, easily imported into Excel.

MileBug, which tracks mileage for IRS purposes, allowing me to toss the paper log book. This one allows setting presets for orgin and destination, business purposes and start/stop mileage. In all, it does it all. Plug in the IRS allowance and it calculates the total mileage and $ amount. The reports are emailed as well, in the same CSV formats.

The other standard applications  on iPhone are simplifying my organization and making my life so much easier, I can’t even begin to explain. Maybe it’s just my own personal preference, but my philosophy is, if it works for you, then it’s right.

I’m continuing updating my systems here at home, this is a must. Connecting to anyone’s corporate network is an exercise in personal responsibility. What I mean is, you must practice safe computing. You can be held liable for disruptions. Your Anti-virus software must be updated (which I just updated yearly subscription) and you must scan your drives, regularly.  All of them, including and especially your email as most viral payloads are delivered by attached documents.

Verify your security settings and make sure everything is ship-shape, because when you connect and accept, you are saying you’re good to go and will be held accountable for infecting their servers. As for mine, they are clean and I’m now set for remote work. Updated systems makes life easier don’t it?

The current project I’m on is just awesome. I enjoy the people I’m working with and the environment is more than I could have hoped for. It’s stretching my abilities and providing a great opportunity to grow and learn from professionals that love and are good at what they do.

Last Friday, in order to really become acclimated, I visited the co-location DataCenter where our corporate servers and network gear are hosted. Wow, talking about expansive! The sheer size of the place was impressive. It’s beyond imagination at how much data passes to and from this location and how much is stored there. Think about that the next time you IM, text, send an email or connect to a website it going through or stored somewhere, often many times over!

I’ve been dealing with server names on master sheet but seeing them, yields a whole new perspective that will help as the project moves along, which it is in full swing. Well, that’s my update, hope you leaned something and enjoyed it.

© Al Ardon IT Strategies Inc. 2010

February 27th, 2010 by Al

Impact of Obsolete Business Systems

Obsolete Systems Impact Operations
Inefficiency in Business Computing impacts productivity and worker morale. The purpose of Efficient Business Computing is to maximize work flow and accomplish business objectives. Lack of fiscal provisioning stalls business growth, affects worker productivity and morale all of which impacts its ability to compete.
Business Systems Must Be Planned For
When a business starts up, they must take into account all the necessary tools and equipment needed for the successful operation of the business. These costs, as well as their maintenance and support, should be planned and accounted for in your annual budgeting cycle.
IT strategic planning is part of the business owner responsibility to its customers and shareholders.  IT strategic planning ensures the business is capable of booking, transacting customer requests and delivering its goods and services to those customers. Meeting and exceeding all performance expectations should be at the forefront of its strategic direction. Today, no business or service organization can afford not having an IT strategy.
Successful Planning Nets Huge Results
There is nothing better for a business owner that is partnered with an IT consultant who understands both the impact and potential gains coming from having a successful IT Strategy. IT Strategies featuring standardized systems are far easier to deploy and maintain verses a mixed bag of obsolete Non-Standard systems and operating systems.
Efficiency is utilizing Standard applications correct for the intended task and it is not based solely on user popularity. If that were the case, you’d be overspending, you’d have an unsupportable infrastructure, and enormous administration costs. Incorporating a strategy that is annually budgeted for is smart, both in terms of maintenance and upkeep, as well as administrative support and makes good fiscal sense maximizing ROI.
Running with it – Hire the best!
So, you’ve decided, you have a project in mind, what now? What I hear most is “there is no budget”, “money’s tight”, or “I can handle this part of it…” and a host of others–This is dangerous thinking, and puts your project, vision and goals at extreme risk! It is not cost effective to “kind of” hire someone.  The reason it does is because it introduces an element of failure at the start of project, which is due to the distrust that is apparent with this line of thought. If I know someone who can do the job better and faster than I can, I’ll hire them, its going to save me time and money in the long run. Trust! its key!
Your IT consultant should work with you, the business owner, to understand your desires and this takes immersion into the business process in order to truly understand it.  And finally, the IT consultant must be someone you can entrust with your entire vision. IT Strategic Project planning is not just going out and buying a bunch of gear,  installing it in a haphazard way, hoping it all works. It doesn’t work that way.  Like any other business process, it has a certain flow to it, and the pieces of the IT sub-systems must  complement each other.

For example, you don’t mix RAM manufactured by 2 different companies, you can’t mirror identically sized hard drives from different manufacturers, they won’t mirror, the internal specifications aren’t the same.

My Analysis
The people that work for you are your lifeline to your customer, so what affects their morale, will ultimately affect your customer. A person that is forced to work with slow, obsolete systems is not very productive and is impacting your bottom line. I’ve observed people who are over-taxed just trying to accomplish simple tasks like sharing a file or printing a document.
Current systems are easier to support and maintain which make the work easier, result in higher productivity and increase morale among your workers, all of which positively impacts the delivery of your goods and services to your customers.
After all, is this why you’re in business in the first place?

© Al Ardon IT Strategies Inc. 2010

February 25th, 2010 by Al

If you’re an employee, “Are you on the lookout for goods and services that may save money for your company?”

I ask that for a reason.

In being involved with the upkeep and maintenance of the Technology Infrastructure for a billion dollar company for over 12 years, I understood one thing: In a department that is referred to as overhead, you better deliver and add value, or your job will disappear like smoke.

There is symbiotic relationship at work here. The company must provide  quality products and services for it’s customer, and drive profits for it’s shareholders. There is a business aspect to the terms of my then employment. As I my career grew through promotions, I had to keep an eye on what was happening in the business and adjust my orientation. I had to look out for the business, and be on the lookout for ways to drive down cost in the strategies we sought to implement.

I had numerous vendors and suppliers.

Some were excellent to deal with, others, well, enough said.

One in particular was a veep of his company. A hard worker and never ceased to present killer deals for me to consider. I’d say, he was on my “A” list. I knew if I need any piece of gear, this guy would find it, and present a deal that would blow others away.

You respect that kind of a person. I know I did.

One day, I was trying to figure out how I would meet the demands of an ever growing database system. We needed another Storagae Array–ours was at capacity. So we called the main supplier, who also was the manufacturer.

The suits came and presented their top-line product, with all the trimmings. When the quotes came in, we’re talking $525K with 3 years of support, the enthusiasm for the project dropped. Numerous discussions and debates ensued, but the number didn’t budge. I was frustrated, as was my boss, when my “A” list buddy called. We had lunch and he told me, “Let me see what I can do..” and we left it at that. A few days later, he sent me a quote that floored me. We would have enough storage to last us the 3 years remaining on the product life-cycle, and was actually faster than our current array.

The quote in hand,  I excitedly presented it to my CIO. We immediately went into conference, and began drafting a counter-offer. I forwarded it to my friend and he said, “Let’s do it.”

We brought it in-house for $275K with 3 years of support.

Working with my friend, and my CIO was the most memorable part of my career. We worked seamlessly and a team and pulled this off. If I’d blew this off, we would have overspent eventually, and something else would have been cut from the budget, namely, jobs.

Many people serve as a first line defense to decision makers, it’s understandable. But they somehow also see it as their responsibility to be rude and crude to visitors. But they do so–at their own peril. I guarantee you that one day this reactive way of dealing with visitors, will affect you.

How do you know if that person in front of you is capable of saving your company time and money? Are you really qualified to make that call?

Even in situations where I knew I had no capacity to make such a call, I would always discuss it with my peers, and then kick it up the line.

I’m glad I didn’t do this with my vendor. Our businesses relationship helped our careers in many ways. All by deciding to be proactive instead of reactive with one another.

Which one are you?

© Al Ardon IT Strategies Inc. 2010

June 18th, 2009 by Al

An interesting article in the Kitsap Peninsula Journal (http://www.kpbj.com) this month about this. I fled the PC world in ‘06, trading my Dell for a MacBook Pro. Three years later I’ve no regrets. Upgrading to MacOS Leopard was the most seamless Operating system upgrade I’ve ever done. I’ve used it to provide after-hour support for the corporation I previously worked for and use it now to support my present clients.

Here’s an excerpt of the  article:

Is it time for IT department to learn the Mac?
Could embracing Mac skills propel your career forward if more corporate IT departments decide they need to support this platform?
By Deb Perelman
From eWeek Online Mac skills have long been seen as superfluous for IT professionals; Apple platforms are rarely used in medium and large enterprises, and not even the release of the OS X operating system chipped away at Windows’ claim on the IT department. Yet some observers feel that this is set to change. Between October 2007 and January 2008, two dozen researchers at IBM participated in an internal pilot program designed to investigate the possibility of migrating employees to the Mac platform. At the end of the trial, 86 percent of the testers asked to continue using their Macs, leading IBM to plan to expand the pilot to 100 users by the end of 2008.   <<More Here>>

June 3rd, 2009 by admin

Technical Talk

IT – Stands for Information Technology and is comprised of systems and services supporting a business.

This morning I read a question that was obviously troubling to a person that works within an IT organization as a Software Developer. His concern was that most of the time, his particular service group has been lumped into and generalized as just another function from within IT. However, if you really look under the hood, most of the time IT is defined more in line with the underlying infrastructure rather than the programming.

Here’s my answer:

“I think it’s common to see it condensed into one general field. Most of the time, the other departments see it as another single part of the organization. We had one department (IT) but 2 distinct service groups:

•    Infrastructure
•    Information Management

Your team would have fallen under the second because most of those making the changes to code running business processes.

However, there was a third group that was focused on developing software for the product called, “software engineering” and was within the Engineering department.

I do see your concern and agree that this renders your particular field into a meaningless category. One that quite possibly will have a detrimental impact how your particular service group is represented and valued.”

I think it’s up to people like you to help set the record straight, in constructive ways, if you want to better the visibility and importance of your profession.”

Clarifying it a bit, let’s just saying, most organizations are all for streamlining and efficiently. Having as flat an organization as possible, is advantageous. So is many parts within an Infrastructure.

For example: Servers. Consolidations have saved companies millions of dollars in support and maintenance costs along with space and cooling. I see no difference with organizations. It’s more efficient to think in terms of a single org, than separate and I think the 2 that I mentioned in my reply are descriptive and serve to distinguish each particular service group.

Best,