Testimonials

Changing Your Business

"So here, today, you have learned a fantastic new set of ideas, but here is the key question.  Will you apply this before you forget about it?

In 10 days you will remember about 1/3 of it. In 20 days you will remember only 1/10 of it. In 30 days you won’t remember that you were here, at all!
What can you do to avoid the graveyard of good ideas?"
Robin Robins, Owner, technologymarketingtoolkit.com

". . . Those whose goal is merely that of control will find that storytelling is not a very useful tool.  For them, the important thing is to maintain conformity. . . For the instigator of change . . . change ideas will only have resonance for us if they respond to our own preoccupations, doubts, hopes and fears.  In this process, storytelling offers more than a tool. . . It enables us to surmount a humdrum world where everything makes sense and is logical, and get to that realm where deeper meaning is revealed. . .  The story is something that comes from outside.  But the meaning is something that emerges from within."
“The Springboard” by Stephen Denning

Managing Small Business

"One of the biggest problems I see in your (small) businesses is lack of adequate management system tools.  You must have adequate tools for that job."
Larry Schulze, the Taylor Business Group

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result.  Benjamin Franklin

"The key to your greater success in the near future is doing a few things in new and better ways, and in taking advantage of the breakthroughs in management systems that you can easily adopt.  It is possible to make great progress in just one or two months."
Claude Feistel, President, IntegraShere Inc.

Managed Services for Business

"Managed-services is unrivaled as the trend that will define the IT industry for many years to come.  But the channels dirty little secret is a 21st century version of the cobbler’s children’s shoes: too many service providers run their businesses on inadequate systems while preaching the latest and greatest to their customers.

If you plan on making the move to managed services and if you still run your company using spreadsheets, white boards, stand-alone applications and home-grown solutions you’re in for a rude awakening."
Vice-president of Sales, Autotask Inc.

"As a managed services provider, I make money when my clients are up and running.  My traditional IT competitors make money when their clients are down!  What do you think makes more sense to the client?"
Owner, A New-Era IT Solutions Provider Company

"One area where the small business IT solution provider is ahead . . . is in the area of managed services . . . proactive solutions to prevent and monitor problems BEFORE they may arise.  These types of automated services will be created, installed and monitored by the trusted IT solution provider . . . making them even more important to the millions of small businesses (they serve)."
Alan D. Wienberger – Chairman of ASCII Group Inc. The 2006 ASCII BootCamp

Changing Role of IT

"From now on, IT will have transformational effects on everything we do, in America and around the world. . . America has now entered the final stage of the Information Revolution, and we should see a sustained surge in general levels of prosperity over the next 20 years. . .we still have another 15 years of institutional adaptation ahead of us - before this turbulent phase is over," from
"Living in the U.S.A. - 2000 to 2020 by David Snyder an editor of The Futurist

"Our expectation is that real value will come from business processes - and this could mean the end of the IT department as we know it."
From Garnter via Computing Magazine Oct, 2004.  Gartner predicted the management of business processes will supersede management of technology as the leading value contribution for more than half of the blue-chip IT departments in three to four years.

IT directors will take on more management focused roles ... as IT becomes imbedded within the business.  "You could see this as bad, or as an indicator of the increasing maturity of IT.  But what this will all mean is huge changes." 
From Garnter via Computing Magazine Oct, 2004.  Gartner forecasts that at least one-third of IT director roles will be transformed within five years.

Being " Small Business"

While small businesses perform a variety of service roles . . . it is their under-rated role as institutions at the economic and cultural margins that is actually most important. . . . Small business is the arena in which pragmatists, inventors, and idealists operate, where they can act clearly, directly, and affirmatively. . . Ideas, licenses, new technologies, and companies themselves are constantly being passed up the economic line. . . Sustainable businesses do not require exotic sources of capital in order to develop and grow. . . . You create a business to serve the needs and wants of a customer.  If the business creates the customer, the question is, what customer do you want to create?
“The Ecology of Commerce” by Paul Hawken

. . . a small organization has to make itself appear whole and complete no matter what angle you view if from . . . everyone in the organization better be versatile because today’s crisis might be in accounting and tomorrow’s in marketing and the next day’s in production, and everyone who counts will have to fill the battle lines in all three areas . . . everyone (must know) what page the hymnal is open to, and know it all the time.  Small organizations can’t afford to “come up to speed”; they have to be at speed.  Life in small organizations can be a bitch.  Being everything all the time is enervating.  That’s why the rewards can be so big.

The role of the visionary . . . isn’t to be a seer but to be the provocateur: to present a series of visions of the future against which those who want to prepare for the future can react.
“The Visionary’s Handbook” by Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker

The time for leaders to act is now. The revolution has begun, and it is a new era for owner-developers of the Compact Enterprise^tm.

Next Steps

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Moving Business Technology
Behind the Scene To The
Web/Internet Infrastructure:

"Can you imagine an IT environment without applications to roll out? You're going to have to if Google's plan to conquer the enterprise works. . . In this environment , upgrades are easy. Instead of an IT department pushing out a patch to every user, or installing software from a CD onto machines one by one, the application provider updates it once, and everyone gets the new version the next time they log on." Ben Worthen in CIO Magazine, May 1, 2006.

"Nearly 300 million people can call one another anywhere in the world for free. They can call everyone else for a fraction of what they'll pay with most phone services. Their secret? VoIP [phoning over the internet]. . . proponents think the service may do for telecom what eBay did for buying and selling commodities. . . The user dials 8 to use Skype (VoIP) or 9 to get a traditional phone (number). . .Last month the company launched Skype for Business allowing small businesses to leverage voice (telephony), voice mail. . . and to link multiple phone numbers via a control panel." Jeffrey Schwartz in VARBusiness Magazine, April 17, 2006.

". . . last October Gates blasts out another high-priority email, this time warning of the coming "services wave" of applications available instantly over the Internet. "The next sea change is upon us", he writes. . . .

. . . Some IT managers see this [these services] as a godsend with time to market and low maintenance core to the appeal. . . I don't have to deal with servers, staging, version management, security, performance, etc. . . another benefit is escape from the application-upgrade treadmill. . . The ultimate effect of the "service wave" may well resemble that of the dot-com era, when companies that were smart about leveraging the web exploited unforeseen growth opportunities. . . Small businesses that figure out how to tap into the power of [the "service wave"] could become the enterprises of tomorrow." Eric Knorr in InfoWorld Magazine, March 20, 2006, "The Next Big Thing".

"What about those outages? The first objection to [web based services]. . . is that reliability and availability are in someone else's hands. . . In fact [some customers] consider [web based services] because it appears less risky than running a system in-house. After weathering Hurricane Andres, [one CIO] decided that 'we didn't necessarily want to house the data ourselves. . . " Eric Knorr in InfoWorld Magazine, March 20, 2006

."CRN [magazine]: Is it really still the case that small businesses are behind the curve as far as technology adoption is concerned? Or are they becoming more aggressive adopters?
Dunkelberg: I'm not sure you would say they're behind the curve. . . Ten years ago, you couldn't fit a lot of technology into a small business, but now you can. . . when technology changes enough to become a feasible investment then [they] go ahead and make that investment." CRN Magazine interview with William Dunkelberg, Chief Economist for National Federation of Independent Business. Dec. 26, 2005.

"For small business owners, the idea of software as a service is not exactly the best way to think about this trend, but traditional software vendors are eager to send the thought process down a side track. Where overall business performance is the concern, and it is always the concern for small business owners, the topic is business management systems, offered via the web infrastructure. Thus our focus should be on complete end-to-end management and not about fragments of functionality that people refer to as software or as applications. So, be careful of those who would sell you the same old software running over the web. Rather, think about systems to empower your whole team and organization, end-to-end systems delivered by the new services model." Claude Feistel, IntegraSphere Inc.

". . . technology adoption has continued at a torrid pace and even accelerated at times dispite the [dot.com] bust. . . Today, broadband is mainstream, online shopping is common place. . . we've started to live a life only imagined in the mid-'90s. . . we're enjoying super cheap bandwidth, storage, screens. . . and a host of technologies. . . hardware will soon cost less than the electricity it takes to run it. . . or, if you prefer, you can buy hardware and software as hosted services. . . The result is that you can start [or run] a company for a tiny fraction of what it took five years ago. . . start-ups can grow organically. . . so there you have a recipe for a healthy boom, not a fragile bubble." Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine, February 2006.