The Conjungo Blog

The news and media seem to focus on the potential of having a worldwide recession. We all know that that sometimes it can be perceived that we talk ourselves into recession, but let’s face it, the financial facts and figure are pretty miserable reading.

Still, life goes on and while it may be more difficult for companies to trade, continue they will. From a technology perspective, this shouldn’t really be an excuse not to buy, if anything it’s more than likely that you’ll get a better deal.

I don’t understand when companies cut back in certain areas, like marketing budgets for instance. If anything you should spend more to generate more prospects while your competition is doing the opposite. Likewise with IT investments. I’m not daft and I appreciate if the money isn’t there then it can’t be spent but frankly, you either need it or you don’t. If you don’t then why were you considering it in the first place?  It’s fine maybe to delay a project for a while, but the ROI on a potential purchase of IT should, to a large extent dictate whether or not a company buys or not. Ditto, marketing. If you cut back you’ll generate less interest, you’ll have fewer leads, less potential customers and ultimately lower revenues but you may feel great because in the short term you’ve saved some money. Longer term you might not have a company.

In such situations, companies should be more prescriptive and while I appreciate that financial planning is incredibly important, there are far more effective ways of saving and cutting costs.

The most straight forward is less travel. I’ve worked for a many companies where the second largest overhead outside of salaries was travel expenses. Now is good time to think about a revised technology strategy and maximising its’ potential in order to save money. Unified communications, remote working, conferencing and online meetings are all an effective way that an organisation can improve efficiency and reduce costs but allow it to operate albeit in a smarter way.

Well worth investigating, believe me!

A few months ago I mentioned in my blog that I was writing some content about technology with the aim of de-mystifying it. The purpose is to enable people who are non-technical to really understand what a particular technology is and what it can do etc.

Ironically, last week I finished one about disaster recovery and my conclusion was that every organisation regardless of size should have such a plan in place. It was rather ironic then that we had a meeting on Monday and Dave’s internet connection was down. Now fortunately for the rest of us, we could still access a mail server and although it wasn’t an elegant solution, it worked. For Dave it was a major pain. It took a couple of days to get an engineer out to fix the problem. Sure, Dave tried all the usual tricks such re-booting, switching things on then off but to no avail.

Then yesterday I had a problem with my own system and after countless calls to various support organisations I discovered what the problem is. Somehow the IP address for the network card has been ‘lost’ so I can’t access the internet via my PC. Fortunately, I can still gain access courtesy of my laptop until I’ve found my IP address. (Please don’t ask me ‘where did I last see it’…)

Then this morning Dave called to say that he’s had a power cut, so no server, PCs, internet connectivity or even phones. 

We are so reliant upon technology that it is difficult to work without it and yet while our Conjungo website is incredibly resilient and our own network is reasonably so, there is always a potential problem that you cannot plan for. Sure large organisations have dual emergency power supplies and two separate providers of internet access but most people and companies don’t have the resources or budgets to be able to plan for every possible eventuality.

You’ve probably gathered that I’m a proponent of disaster recovery and contingency plans and this week’s events have only served to emphasise this.

So, do have some form of recovery plan in place, a 250 gigabyte external hard drive costs about £50 so not to have as a back up is pretty inexcusable. I appreciate not everyone will have two PCs but still for £50, it is money well spent.

In the meantime I’m off to find my IP address, so fingers crossed.

I spent a large part of this weekend researching material and content for our website. I guess I am sad and should get out a bit more…

It still never fails to surprise me how much information is out there on the internet, how much is replicated and how the majority is utter garbage. The trouble is, this is my opinion and who is it for me to be the arbiter of what and what isn’t useful? Right now I feel that the information is based on quantity and not quality.

Before the internet was invented, we would nip down to the library and chose our books to read or research. The books would nicely filed according to topic, author etc. all based on something called the Dewey Decimal System. So if you were looking to write a thesis on Keynesian economics, you knew exactly where to go.

The trouble with the internet is that the content is not really structured. It’s meant to be but it isn’t. That’s because of the huge volume. It’s left to search engines that use complex algorithms to figure it out and not simple, good old human common sense.

I’m pretty thorough when I write content. I want it to be unique, I want it to be excellent and I don’t want to plagiarise. As a result it takes a long time. More often than not, and this is the issue, most people won’t read past the first couple of pages in their search engine results, but I’ve often found that you’ll find the most invaluable nugget of information, many, many pages in.

I’m sure that perhaps that I could use the search engines more efficiently, but surely that’s their fault not mine.

I know I could probably achieve more by just referring to the first two pages of results and cutting and pasting, but that is not the point. Conjungo strives to be the best in our field and this can be only achieved taking on the tedious tasks that no one else will.     

Content management systems are being used more and more by organisations, in order that they can search for information within their own networks according to what ever criteria is chosen for a search. It makes finding information faster, it means that information can be shared across a company rather than having to reinvent the wheel when the information is already there. The key to this is relevancy.

I’ve written before about the need for vertical search and how generic search engines should be a starting point to find them. We’re at a point now where some people are worried that the internet will stop working, simply because of the huge volume of information out there and the increasing number of users trying to access it. I don’t buy into that, simply because systems get faster, technology improves, bandwidth prices are falling etc.

My view is that there needs to be a major shift in the way information on the web is indexed otherwise people will switch off. I’m not suggesting that people will stop using the internet, quite the contrary. People will fail to find that incredibly useful nugget of information that just make a difference, to write a report, carry important research or a thesis.  
 
And that is what Conjungo is about. Researching, finding, accurate, relevant information that is actually meaningful and can be understood.

I recently wrote a blog in which I briefly mentioned the size of memory and how incredibly small it can be, especially considering how much data some storage cards can hold.

It struck me that it wasn’t only the manufacturers that were forcing the pace on size and weight, but like all markets it is forced by end user demand.

Ironically when it comes to gadgets, perhaps the perception is that men are demanding smaller, lighter, more complex, better designed gear. You’ll see this exemplified in magazines that are aimed at men. I don’t mean porn but magazines where a picture of a new PDA come phone, come camera, you name it, but all available in one unit the size of a fleas rucksack, is pictured with a semi-naked woman on the front cover.

Unfortunately this does seem to alienate the female audience as a result. I’ve been assured by Tabita that women are just as interested in gadgets as the male gender so it appears to me that there’s a gap in the market!

Sure when it comes to gadgets, it is fashion and consumerism driving it, but it does have an effect on business technology. PCs are smaller, lighter and more powerful. Memory, as I stated before is tiny and continuing to get smaller and more powerful.

At what point will this demand for size and power stop? We now have screens that are paper thin and can be folded or rolled up and this new technology will of course impact and enhance our lives.

I’m making these statements to make a point. With petrol at nearly £5 for a gallon, we are already seeing car manufacturers changing designs of engines and shedding weight. The oil cartels power is now moving from the Middle East to Russia, and it is unlikely, as a result that oil prices will move south.

Size and weight then has a massive bearing on our day to day activities. Smaller data centres and lower prices for technology make our companies more competitive. This can only be achieved through more efficient use of technology. If people can work more effectively from home or travel with light computers, and this is becoming increasingly feasible with the advent of super fast memory cards to replace bulky hard-drives, then the overall impact can be massive.

As a result, I maintain that size does make a difference.

Summer is truly upon us and people minds are turning to booking (if they already haven’t) a holiday in hotter climates, or at least where there is less chance of grey skies and rain.

There will be lists of what will and won’t be packed, hairdryers, curling tongs, travel irons, ipods, mobile phones, PDAs, mini-DVD players and so on. The issue used to be having to take a power adaptor so you could plug in all of these devices into the electrical sockets of wherever you were travelling to. You can a buy a usable travel plug for a couple of quid that will work pretty much everywhere nowadays.

The problem used to be compounded if you were travelling on business, especially before broadband was freely available. You would therefore require a suitcase full of devices that would let you plug your phone cable into an adaptor that would work with every foreign phone system.

Furthermore, you would probably have a load of devices that you might need for business, such as a laptop, mobile phone, PDA, etc.

The good news of course is that these days most phones are also PDAs.

Now for the bad news. All of these devices have different power supplies. So if you’re going on holiday but want to stay in touch with the office and the kids want to take their mobile computers to play games and stay relatively quiet on that long haul flight, thereby preventing them kicking the seat in front of the psychotic ex-Para who is hoping to have a quiet holiday but is still coiled up like a spring having served yet another tour of duty…. You will of course need all of the power supplies and cables to go with them. This will require a large empty suitcase and probably mean that your luggage will be over the weight limit and you’ll have to pay a penalty at which point you’ll decide that you just should have ditched all of the stuff and used the money to go somewhere really nice instead.

It’s ironic that we live in a world where we have, in computing parlance, open systems and interoperability. Yes, indeed, devices will work with all computers regardless of operating system, manufacturer or application. They’ll all work together in harmony and peace. It is actually fantastic. No more proprietary systems and those that are, still work with others.

And yet despite the difficulties that had be surmounted to achieve this, we still can not agree to a single standard whereby all power cables and supplies will work on all devices.

With all the incredible technology out there and the fantastic achievements that have been made, surely someone is smart enough to be able to invent one. 

You’ll make a fortune you know.

When I first started to work in technology in the mid 1980’s, much of the talk within the tech sector was about the ‘paperless office’. The idea as the word implies, is that with the judicious use of technology, the office environment would no longer require paper as all information would be stored centrally on (expensive) computer systems.

My view at the time was somewhat contentious as I did not believe there would ever be a paperless office. This was particularly at odds with my colleagues because I was working for companies that espoused the ideal of the paperless office. My reason for saying so was how could you justify a company spending a few hundred quid a year on stationary should all of a sudden spend £10,000 on a 10Mb hard drive (which, lets face it, stores practically nothing)? The cost justification for this would be difficult, to say the least.

I believe that the development of the computer actually fuelled the use of paper for a couple of reasons. People felt comfortable about having pieces of paper that they could hold - because it is tangible. What happened if a computer broke…and they often did. Furthermore, the cost of hard drives were incredibly expensive, so it was far more cost effective to nip down to the stationers, buy reams of paper, loads of files, pens and some correction fluid, just in case. Furthermore, all these new fangled computer applications generated more information that needed to be printed out.

But, I’ve found myself over the past few days thinking that it might be achievable. You see I’m writing some content about storage and I now regard myself as a bit of a guru on the subject. I am to technology as Basil Fawlty is to good manners. The cost and size of storage has reduced considerably over the past 20 years. We pay a few bob for a couple of gigabytes of storage for a digital camera, the size of which is less than an ant’s finger nail. In fact it has got to the point where it is too small as I keep losing mine.

The reality is that storage is now incredibly cost effective and prices are dropping and technologies are constantly evolving so it is actually possible to have a paperless office. It is a positive thing. In light of all the recent compliance legislation, could you imagine how much paper organisations would require and how much office space they would need to house all of the files? Sting would have a fit.

We can all be a little cynical sometimes, me especially, but technology has its place and in most instances makes our lives easier and can have a positive impact on society and to the decrease of global warming.

So, I was possibly proved wrong. A first.

The IAB released its annual online advertising survey last week. Interestingly it shows that online advertising continues to grow in Europe despite the perceived credit crunch.

An average growth rate of 40%, with the majority of ad spend taking place in the UK, Germany and France, proves that advertisers believe that their campaigns are working.

Alain Heureux, President of IAB Europe, comments in the official press release: “Despite a slowdown in advertising spend on some traditional media, the rise of online advertising in Europe continues unabated. Not only is the growth coming from some of the smaller markets which are seeing significant increases in their market value, but also from the more mature countries as companies move their advertising budgets online for the first time.”

It’s not surprising really, with buyers of most things now starting their research on the web, online advertising is a good way of getting in front of the right target audience. As opposed to offline advertising, online campaigns can deliver measurable results, lead generation, and targeted brand awareness. It really should be part of all marketers’ mix.

Not many people appreciate that 6 June 2008 was the 64th anniversary of D Day.

I wouldn’t normally personalise my blog too much, simply on the basis that it is fundamentally about business issues and technology. Today is no different except I was looking for a reason or indeed perhaps an excuse to highlight this event.

It baffles me when people ask the question: “What did we do before we had computers?” Well, I don’t regard myself as particularly old, but I remember selling one of the first model IBM PC XT and having to type my thesis using an electric typewriter and that was in the 1980’s, so not that long ago (I do expect comments!).

64 years ago, there were no computers certainly with anywhere near the capability that we are used to, but the Allies still managed to plan and execute the successful invasion France. This was achieved by 800,000 incredibly brave men. Perhaps the most incredible achievement is that it was done without the aid of computers, just simply through brain power, organisation, leadership, some pens and paper. Can you imagine having to set up the plans for logistics to service this vast army?  The supplies of food, ammunition, medical equipment, armour, weapons… (I could go on) and yet still keep it a secret from the Axis powers. That is truly remarkable. There were no spreadsheets, logistics packages, ERP software, communications software, email and so forth.

On a personal note, I am particularly proud because my father served in the US Army on D Day (it’s a long story…) but we should all remember those brave men that took part but also those incredibly clever and resourceful people who planned, supported and allowed the invasion to be brilliantly executed.

Clearly we managed without computers.

This title will probably lead you to the conclusion that my latest blog will be somewhat ‘dry’ but hang on…

The purpose of an IT department is to provide technology, service and support, to an organisation in order to help achieve the company’s goals and objectives (so far so good).

In many ways, IT is the life blood of a company. What would happen without it?  I’m not suggesting that it is in any way more valuable than people because people are any organisations’ most important asset, but it’s hugely valuable none the less.

Yet I still see many IT departments under-resourced, under-staffed, over-worked, and over-stressed with budgets being constantly cut. That I hear you say, is the nature of business. The irony is, that technology is there to either help make money or save money and if you’re really lucky, to achieve both. Yet, when it comes to the general view of an IT dept, it is generally seen as an overhead and a necessary evil.

IT people are generally, well educated, smart people, hard working, and remember this - the learning curve for an IT person is ongoing until they retire.  IT personnel need to have an up to date knowledge of technology and to be able to translate this into how this may benefit the business.

Technology people are blamed when things go wrong but rarely praised for when things go right, well from many of my experiences anyhow.

So why am I writing this, I hear you ask? Am I an IT Manager? Nope – never was and probably never will be, but I know many that are and I’ve been in involved as a third party bystander where IT has been blamed for all of an organisation’s ills and woes.

Next time the proverbial hits the fan and some facet of technology fails, and remember, technology is complex, take a step back and appreciate what it would be without technology and your IT department.

Even better, when things are going swimmingly well a little thank you goes a long way.

There is a theory in applied mathematics that is also often used in economics, called Games Theory.

The theory is that a game can be won, drawn or lost, as you would expect, but in some games there may sometimes be two winners or indeed losers. This is called the Zero Sum. It was also used in the Cold War where by the Soviets and the West worked on the premise that if both sides had a huge nuclear arsenal, then neither side would use them and if they did there would be ‘mutually assured destruction’.

Still with me?

In practice this theory can be applied to negotiations, where naturally the supplier and the purchaser should aim for a ‘win-win’ situation and not in any way a ‘win-lose’ or vice versa. I have often seen both scenarios but it will only ever cause resentment.

Resentment from a supplier who feels that this customer has pushed them too far, and as a result they are making very little or no profit. As a result, the supplier will turn to more profitable customers and provide them with a far better service.

Resentment from a purchaser who feels that they have been duped into paying too much. They won’t be using that supplier again and who knows in the long run what the value of that business will be?

Good customers are those that value the service that they receive and appreciate that this comes at a price – not ridiculously high but they know that as a customer they must be profitable to the supplier in order to retain their interest and service levels.

Likewise, with suppliers. A supplier may get away by overcharging (these days it is very rare), but it will only happen the once. I’ve often heard from customers ‘I know I pay more but it’s worth it’. It’s about value for money.

Ultimately the buyer-seller relationship should be based on trust and not on concerns on either side of being duped or misled.

It should always be a ‘win-win’.