IT-organisation for founders and SMB (small to medium business) leaders
As founder or CEO of a small business you should generally be taking care of things other than providing a suitable IT infrastructure.
And it is easy since there are plenty of companies who offer this as a service; install an office package of a renowned supplier on your PC’s, network it all with a server that runs a groupware for email, calendar and actions. If you want (or must) add to it a CRM system for your sales team and it’s a done deal. Sometimes done for the company, too – as this infrastructure falls short of providing the required capabilities and at the same time the investment for 5 workstations can easily exceed $ 25’000 (or more) – not exactly pocket money for many startups or SMB’s…
And don’t you forget the support contract so that your software is fresh a year from now and most of all remains safe and secure against the ususal treats (viruses, trojans, worms and the likes).
This article shows how you can have it differently: faster, easier and very cost efficient, too.
IT requirements of a small and flexible company have changed considerably in the last 5 – 10 years. More and more the work is organized around projects with teams assembled ad-hoc; teams don’t get together daily in the same office either to exchange information about their progress and difficulties.
Home Office and mobile Workforce are the buzzwords for the phenomenon.
The founder/leader faces the question: How can I get my IT organisation working so that my workforce, project team(s) or salesteam can cooperate swiftly and efficiently and at the same time required IT investment does not overshoot my budget or cooperation does not lead to total chaos – emails and chat protocols are not so easily stored and attached to other project related information after all…
It seems that big traditional software vendors have completely overlooked this clientele; and at the same time they have missed the fact that nowadays with ubiquitous high-speed internet there exists an infrastructure which allows totally new approaches to solving the problem – a paradigm shift so to speak.
A locally installed office package that allows creating documents, which are then sent to colleagues or Mr. B. for revision and comments (which creates several redundant versions of the document) today is neither suitable for efficient cooperation nor does it satisfy most QA requirements. At the same time a centrally organized sales support system is an outdated old hat, which is but boring for frontline employees or sales people.
Today what is required is the following:
A central storage for documents that can be edited by several people (i.e. team) at the same time – if possible with automatic version tracking, and the option to revert to older versions when necessary.
A group-email platform with team/assistance functionality and the option to attach emails to projects, customers or sales opportunities in a flexible manner; this solution should also show communication threads grouped together so that information can be found fast and easy.
The same is for group-calender (including ressource allocation) and for contact information – i.e. customer data – for who the company is working and adding value in the end.
All of this should be accessible with a variety of devices (PC/Netbook/iPhone) and from any place, without creating security issues – as we are dealing with internal and confidential company data.
If you as the founder or SMB leader are now tearing your hair out in despair and wonder why you haven’t studied computer science, don’t panic:
There is a solution to the challenge – faster, easier and much more cost effective than you can imagine.
(continued…)
Tags:Business-organisation, Gründer, Groupware, IT-organisation, KMU, Kooperation, Startup, Team-OrganisationHelp! my Dell says ‘NMI Parity Error’ and crashes with Bluescreen
There you go: My Dell notebook – which I know as super stable and reliable workhorse – lets me down with a Bluescreen and tells about NMI Memory Parity Error and that the system has shut down for security reasons. I am NOT amused – there is a lot of work to be done and without the f…ing laptop it can’t be finished.
Well now – call Dell support immediately – Business Premium Service has been paid for anyway. The result is meager – some experiments via phone and trying out diagnostics accompanied by friendly words – the symptom remains the same.
OK thinks me – maybe it is becaus my harddrive is almost completely full – a mere 2 GB isn’t good for much more than the pagefile… and maybe there is some truth in the bluescreen message after all – so let’s give the notebook some new ram and a larger harddisk to start with – fiddling around with data compression and searching which files to delete has been getting on my nerves for some time anyway…
A new 250 GB harddisk is quickly found and the 1GB RAM don’t cost an arm and a leg. After installing the new RAM, the bluescreen is still there. So I may as well use them both – with the little advantage that the machine runs a little faster now…
What remains to be done is changing the harddisk: How do you install a new harddisk in your notebook – replacing the old one – if you have never done it before and if you don’t have the tools that are supposedly required for the job either??
Searching Google for ‘Laptop Harddisk cloning’ or so finds me the right information:
Simply boot into Linux (Watch out: only boot the OS, don’t install it.. 
) – there is an Ubuntu-CD from the last ct’ Special flying around somewher – and then make a 1:1 copy of the old harddisk onto the new one using the ‘dd’-tool in a terminal window. The new one (of course it’s a SATA, and with those it works like this…) needs to be put into an external HDD case and is plugged into the laptop via USB. Copying takes a little over one hour for 100 GB then the new one has a complete disk image of the old one plus plenty of unpartitioned free space… Now change the harddisks – removing the old one from the notebook and installing the new one – and my Dell boots up like it had never had something other than this 250 GB disk…
edit: A detailed and very useful How-to for safely cloning a HDD using Linux can be found here: How to migrate XP, etc. to a bigger hard disk
I quit the experiment of enlarging the system partition quickly. It was much easier to just use the empty space for a new partition/drive and this is where all my user data will go from now on… that’s it – finished.
Oh yes, and the Bluescreen? That was still there after changing the harddisk – thanks god (Bill?) Windows XP comes with some decent maintenance tools. After some hours of chasing the error, I tried booting into ‘last known good’ configuration (F8 boot options) and voilà – everything’s fine again. That’s how easy it can be – I was plain lucky; and happy, too 
Trance-lator
