Peer Power: 10 Key Area's of Attention For Your Business

Arlin Sorensen's blog - making running a business look easy!

Peer Power: 10 Key Area's of Attention For Your Business

Skills complimentary to your IT knowledge?

I remember doing work experience at a chemical plant and a steel mill in the late eighties (yup, showing my age here). The guy I was shadowing made a point of saying that IT skills alone were not enough to succeed and that I would need to have some complimentary skills and knowledge, such as chemistry or physics. Granted, most of the systems I 'worked' on during this time were process control systems rather than office admin type functions, so his comments were probably true.

I later took a full-time position at that chemical plant (along with a large percentage of the people I went to school with in all honesty) and though I didn't need any specific chemical knowledge, I did have to know a bit about accounting when dealing with the finance people, a bit about warehousing and transport when working with the logistics guys and so on. We spend so much time and effort (and money) on IT training, it is easy to forget that to properly support people running IT hardware and software, you really do need to know a about what they do and how they do it. Otherwise, you are just offering generic advice that may not suit the specific situation.

The same applies at all levels of IT. As a salesman, if you don't understand the requirements of the customers you are selling to, you are going to give them the wrong solution which then has pretty serious ramifications for the relationship going forward. In the almost 20 years I've been in and out of IT, I've learned about finance and accounting, factory production lines, steel fabrication, food processing, legal documentation, airline ticketing, construction and property management ..... I could go on!

So I was thinking the other day about the guy telling me I needed to go and learn about chemistry and thinking he was pretty much spot on - not specifically on chemistry but on needing to know a lot more than IT to be successful in IT. Here endeth the lesson.

Jailbreaking your iDevice

Jailbreaking - the process of removing your device from the restrictions imposed upon it by the manufacturer. Opening the operating system up to allow new addons and installations.

I'm on my third iDevice now and I've always had them jailbroken. There are so many great apps out there that Apple wouldn't allow in the App Store - often because they replicate features that exist in the stock firmware and quite often because they do it better!

There are lots of contentious issues around jailbreaking your device. Apple have tried to say it invalidates the warranty but most jurisdictions have ruled otherwise. Apple will tell you that allowing 'unsupported' third-party apps on your iDevice poses security risks. And while this may be true to an extent, time and again we have seen the 'hackers' fix security holes that Apple has taken months to attend to.

From a personal point of view, jailbreaking allows me the freedom to do whatever I like with the device I have spent my hard-earned dollars on. Why should Apple dictate how I use my own device? I bought it, I don't rent it from them. Can you imagine buying a 50" high-def plasma and the manufacturer saying "well yes, you can only watch it in black and white". Not bloody likely!

Anyway, what prompted me to write this short piece was an interesting article on jailbreaking on Gizmodo.com.au. Have a read and tell me what you think.

How do you manage smartphones?

They are everywhere these days. And not just smartphones but tablets and other mobile devices. Whatever flavour they are, they all have the ability to access and store all manner of information. Email and calendar sure but in some cases they will have access to your CRM, your terminal server and even files from your network. So how do you manage this? Or do you manage this?

From a business point of view, if a member of staff comes in on Monday with a new iPhone and wants to read their email on it, it is probably seen as a positive thing. So you give them the details they need and they start syncing.

From that point on, you need to at least have a policy telling your staff what they can and can’t do - what information should they have on the device, force secure passwords, force entry of a PIN or password when the device is unattended, etc. You should also have procedures in place to remote wipe a device to protect your IP. Blackberry has had remote wipe functionality for a long time through BES and the iPhone has had this since version 3. This at least gives you the ability to remove data from a lost or ‘rogue’ device. BES also gives you a certain amount of control over what a user can do with the device, as can third-party tools such as Good Mobile.

You are very protective of the data you store on your computer systems, so shouldn’t this protection extend to your mobile devices? These devices are so powerful these days that they really are just another part of your network and should be treated as such.

Backing up your cloud services

So you've moved into the cloud and you use Google Apps, Picasa, Flickr, etc, etc. Great. But can you trust these sites - particularly the free ones - to look after your data with the care and attention that you would like? Maybe not - even Google lost a heap of mail recently.

I came across a web site service that offers to back up your Gmail, Google Apps, Flickr albums and even your Facebook and Linkedin feeds - Backupify. I've signed up for the freebie account for starters and first impressions are good - the very simple interface is a bonus.

I'll let you know how it goes when it has done a few backups for me but I just wanted to share what looks like a little gem with you.

Apple's Publication Subscription Strategy - good business or magazine-killer?

This one is slightly off-topic but one that is close to my heart - Apple's policy on subscribing to newspapers and periodicals through iTunes. I have an iPad and one of the things I love is being able to read all manner of magazines on it - particularly overseas mags such as Wired that I can get on the iPad for $4.99, instead of paying $15-20 for an imported print copy. If I lived in the US, I could get a print subscription for very little but the international subscriptions are fairly pricey. So I've been looking forward to being able to subscribe on the iPad and get the benefits & discounts over the per-issue cost.

Apple finally released their strategy for magazine subscriptions through iTunes this week. And it's a little bit controversial. On the surface it looks great and in the usual Apple way, they are making it as easy as possible to make a purchase. You will be able to download the publication's app through iTunes / App Store, then hit a button and subscribe to the publication using your Apple ID and iTunes account. All good so far. The controversial part is that they will take 30% of the revenue and pass on 70% to the publisher.

On a per-issue basis, 30% is probably not unreasonable for the store front and distribution - be it iTunes or your local paper shop. But subscriptions work differently. Normally if you purchase a magazine subscription - particularly from the bigger publishers - you engage the company directly. Subscriptions are usually an economical way of getting every issue at a fair discount below the cost price. Part of this 'discount' is due to the fact that there are less middlemen involved in the transaction. In the modern age of free information on the internet, that is the preferred way for the publishers to go in order to thrive and survive. Subscriptions and sales of newspapers and magazines are down considerably on a few years ago - google for magazine circulation figures and you can find plenty of examples.

Apple's 30% cut will mean that either subscription prices go up or the publishers profits go down. Either way it isn't great for an industry starting to struggle. But this is only part of the problem. Publishers will give you cheaper subscriptions because they will capture your personal data, which they will use to advertise other products and services to you, or sometimes sell to third parties. This data is pretty valuable these days. When a company has free access to this information and knows your habits and preferences, they can target advertisements and special offers to you, making marketing and selling that bit cheaper (in theory at least). With Apple's subscription model, they will have this data and not the publishers. Another example of why they will either need to increase prices or reduce profits.

Well why don't the publishers go direct, you say? Because Apple won't let them. OK, not strictly true. While the publishers can market and sell directly to you, part of their agreement says they must still pay 30% to Apple. Wow! I understand Apple should still be able to take some cut for handling the distribution but if they are not having to do any marketing, financial transactions, etc then 30% becomes very greedy indeed.

So what's the answer? I think that what we will see is publishers creating web readers, so they can sell you these subscriptions directly and you can view the magazine on any web browser. That way they can manage the costs. There could well be an issue with security / piracy with this model but I can imagine that development is already in hand to address these. Normally what Apple wants, Apple gets and this will be the case at least initially. Ultimately this will cause a lot of pain to publishers but let's hope they use this pain to motivate them to provide some better, where consumers can pay a little less and they can make a little more, cutting out the middleman.

Business and IT Objectives - Service Management / ITIL Focus

It sometimes seems that IT is just another expensive function of the business. Even in these modern times when we rely on IT for everything from checking out the latest news to processing payroll and way more, there is still some kind of disconnect.

ITIL good practice says that we should align our business objectives with our IT objectives. They both have to support each other so that's obvious isn't it? But does it happen in your organisation?

Bob Anderson's Blog shows some common business goals and their corresponding IT goals. Straightforward thinking it may be, it certainly does get overlooked.

Think about it. You set your goals and targets and budgets every year but many companies don't even consider how their IT processes and systems are even going to be able to support and promote these goals. Some people expect their IT to 'just work' but if there is no strategy around it and no investment in it, it will soon turn into a sick puppy and quite possibly bring your business with it.