Social Network - dangerous to employment

A recent case where an HR manager who posted his CV on the LinkedIn.com web site highlights the dangers of revealing too much personal information n the Internet. He contends that he was forced out of his job as a consequence. While there is no law saying that you must not provide your CV to other potential employers it does demonstrate a certain lack of commitment to your current empoyer. It will be interesting to to see the outcome of the industrial tribunal.

Any employee tempted to use their employer's computing facilities for personal internet activity should have a look at the capability of  spyware tools available to employers should they choose to investigate the activities of their employees. Strictly speaking employers in the UK are not allowed to use such tools unless they've previously warned the employees, but it is something easily handled by fineprint on the employment contract.

Business ICT for less than 150 GBP/Month

Our business involves a lot of international travel for the principal consultants. However as a UK company we are bound by Company Law, UK Taxation laws and of course the needs of our clients that we must maintain long term records in an easily accessible form. We depend greatly on the availability of the Internet, voice/video conferencing and telephones. We often work across time zones so access is required to our systems pretty much 24 hours a day.

With the exception of physical documents stored for tax and company law reasons we hold no paper documents on a long term basis. Occasionally we'll print a document to work on it, but essentially all records and collaboration procedures are electronic. By the nature of our business we have to be mobile and often geographically dispersed, but we also need to have good access to our computer systems at all times. We need good document management so that we have a good document trail and also ensure that everyone works from the most current version of a document. We have the facilities of a large enterprise.

If a 747 aeroplane dropped from the sky onto our offices we could be back in business within two hours or less; excepting any people squashed in our offices. We wouldn't lose any documents, our contact lists and our phone system would be intact. We'd maintain all of the design, planning, accounting and billing systems. If there was a regional power outage or a flood the impact would be the same; none at all.

How often do we test our business recovery process? We don't. Resilient distributed working is part of our daily routine. Our systems are all configured to work seamlessly if some part of the whole system is unavailable. We also have local resilience at our office in terms of Standby power generator, UPS power, resilient Internet and Wide Area Networking.

This all sounds rather expensive, but it is not. These are our typical budgetary costs per person for technology per year:

Personal computing/portable: - £400

Power:- £150

Phone (Mobile & Land line):- £400

Internet Access:- £250

Office software:- £0

Software Maintenance:- £0

Support Technician/Help Desk:- £0

Servers:- £0

Email:- £0

CRM:- £0

Cloud Services:- £300

Web Hosting:- £150

Office rental, cleaning etc:- £0

Document storage:- £0

Specialist design software:- at cost

Total annual cost: £ 1,650 to provide resilient office and technology per employee. Circa £140 per month. If you want to know more contact me. I'll be happy to discuss, for free of course.

Here's some background to one of the techniques: - Google Apps

Trading Floor Project coordination

When I wrote my book “Creating a Trading floor” back in 2006, the concept of Cloud computing was still somewhat in its infancy. Things have now changed for the better. It is now considerably more easy to electronically control the distribution of project documentation. In the book I suggested that one of the early necessities once the Trading Floor project kicks off is to create a project server where documents could be held centrally for the project team. This avoids the problem of people accessing the wrong version of documents and also prevents over-burdened emails with masses of attachments.

Think about the nature of a trading floor project team. It is transient comprised of highly skilled people. It forms and changes shape dynamically. Members are added and removed as the project progresses. While the environment has to be dynamic and flexible, but there is also the need for comprehensive formal documentation. It is generally necessary to retain archival copies of progress documents, which may at some time need to be referred to in subsequent contractual disputes/resolutions. There also needs to be collaboration activities on documents as the project progresses.

Project Team members are often geographically dispersed. They are usually expensive highly skilled individuals who have many demands on their knowledge and skills. They may be located on the project site or they may be in another part of the globe at sometime during the life of the project. Previously the only way to ensure people had easy access to documents was for large emails to be sent to all active project team members when changes occur. Some of those working documents would be held on laptop computers, desk top PCs in head office or in PCs at the site office. It is difficult to keep documents in-sync and the loss of a laptop computer or site PC can be catastrophic.

Now I would say that the project team should make use of a combination of Google Docs and Google Business Apps for simple formatted documentation and something like SugarSync to automatically keep other more complex important documents such CAD files in synchronisation between the various PCs and laptops of the project team. To achieve this it is essential that the project team establishes a good Internet connection at the site from the very early stages of the project. Initially this may have to be a public wireless connection, but it should be replaced with a high speed Internet link as soon as possible thereafter. Clear project protocols should be established as to where, or which directories, individuals should store documents requiring collaboration or long term archive. Good Internet links will help also with web based meetings e.g. GoToMeeting, VOIP, Voice & Video conferencing. Using SugarSync it is possible to keep central copies on a project server as well as in the Cloud.

Devious Telecoms Account Managers

Purely by accident we've have been sent a contract renewal notice for 24 months of telecomms services that was meant for one of our previous clients. We've of course rejected the notice as we should not have seen it and sent a copy of our rejection to our contact in the client's offices.

We couldn't help noticing however that the contract renewal has subtly changed from the original terms of contract which we helped to set up a couple of years ago. Part of our services is to help to reduce the cost of telecoms for our clients. We don't charge any extra for this, but by careful sourcing we can typically halve the operational telecoms costs for our clients. In this case we'd arranged that all outgoing calls would be directed via another vendor B resulting in substantial savings, on our advice our client rented only the incoming phone lines  from the vendor A (who wrongly sent us the contract renewal mentioned above). Vendor A had previously been the route for outgoing traffic, but had been grossly overcharging for voice traffic. Needless to say the Vendor A account manager was quite distressed when an assumed revenue stream dried up; he'd not listened to our clear warnings.

We noticed in the new contract, from Vendor A, that they've now bundled an outgoing calls package in the price with a "minimum committed annual usage." There are now no technical personnel on the site of the client office and they've outsourced support to a large Indian offshore company. At a stroke whoever agreed to the "renewal" in our client has committed them to 24 months additional expenditure on outgoing calls they will not use. This will result in ten's of thousands of pounds of additional expenditure. It just goes to show that a lack of knowledge can be very expensive when it comes to telecoms technology.

Throw out your Servers!!

If you are responsible for a business that uses computers you should do the company a big favour and try out Gmail and Google Docs. You might find it can replace many of your servers and save your company a lot of money on software licensing. Have a look at this BusinessReview Europe article, it gives an interesting view on the expansion of Gmail and Google Docs.

At the very least you should ask what is the total annual cost of running local servers for email, office software for wordprocessing spreadsheet collaboration. The cost of running the desktop PC's and continual software upgrades. Take the total finance cost, capital write down, licensing costs, support costs, maintenance, electric power costs, cooling costs etc to develop a holistic view. Then add the cost of providing a business continuity facility for those services.  Take total annual cost and divide it by the number of people actively using the system. If the result comes to more than £35 a year per person you need to look more seriously at gmail and google docs. I'll exclude highly variable printing costs from this, but they'd be the same with either approach.

It is free to try.

If you are paying more than £350 to purchase a desktop PC (including software) once every four years to have a problem with your current arrangements. If your desktop PC uses more than 30 Watts power you could be paying too much in operating costs for the electrical power. There are better performing and lower cost alternatives.

Here's an example for 3500 staff at Hillingdon Council using Google Apps.

I'll happily chat with people about this on the phone. No charge!

EU Almost treaty

Once the media fanfare dies down over the UK Prime Minister Cameron's exercising the Veto on the attempted Merkozy Treaty, we'll see that the proposals contain no real solution to the problems besetting the Euro. It is like an Office Administrator applying rules on dress code when the primary business is failing. Once again European banks are increasingly distrustful of lending to each other. They are trapped on the deepening sides of a financial vortex.

Have you planned your next volcano?

The large Icelandic volcano Katla is rumbling and showing real signs of eruption. If that happens it could last for weeks and significantly impact air travel within europe. It could be potentially much worse that the Eyjafjallajokull eruption in 2010.
Make sure that your organisation's travel plans take this into account. Improve your video conferencing capability and avoid those long distance trips which are not really necessary. Travel planners should have alternate routing available.
If your organisation who was courageous enough to use an Iceland Data Center to offshore your computer operations you'd best say a little prayer. In 1783 the Katla eruptions killed one in five icelanders. It can get really bad!