Solutions

So, How Do I... ???

As a business leader, one of your primary responsibilities is to ensure your business is ready for a disaster, big or small. For most businesses today, you need the capability of having your staff remain productive even in the face of a natural or man-made disaster. The current H1N1 scare is the most recent event that has brought this to the forefront; how do we manage to keep our staff productive through a major disruption.

At MikeTango, we work with each of our clients to ensure this primary business function is met, keeping in mind each organization’s tolerance to risk is unique. Together, we will work with you to assess your requirements for uninterrupted connectivity, your requirement for remote connectivity, your tolerance for failure due to power outage or fire; your requirement for employees to be able to connect remotely; etc. With this assessment, we’ll work with you to develop a plan that fits your needs and works within your budgetary constraints. By the end of this process, you will be well aware of how well your business’ IT systems are ready for tomorrow’s challenges.

Every business uses the web to communicate with its clients/customers/membership. For some organizations, it’s merely a means to push information on a casual basis; for others, it represents the organization’s lifeblood.

Depending on where your business falls on this scale, we will work with you to ensure this major facet of your business performs to your expectations, both today and tomorrow.

Today’s websites are becoming more sophisticated in the types of services that are offered, and are creating a much more personal experience for visitors. Getting to this point takes a significant effort and investment, and involves virtually all aspects of your business.

While many organizations invest heavily in the planning of the content they wish to display on their website, too little planning goes into the systems and software supporting the new site. MikeTango will work closely with you to ensure your web technology, including the servers used to support the site, are current and ready to handle your planned activities.

If your website is the face of your business, email is its blood. Everything in today’s modern business is done via email. It’s vital that your email system be reliable and perform to its potential. This includes ensuring remote users can connect properly, ensuring all email is backed up, ensuring spam filters are protecting you from viruses and spam attack, etc.

MikeTango works with each of its clients to ensure their email setup matches their specific business requirements.

We have all heard horror stories from colleagues where they thought their data was protected, only to find out after the fact that their backups have not run properly for over 6 months. Or a virus is able to take out a company’s email system for a week, and they lose face with their customers because they can’t get it fixed.

For MikeTango, we see this as a primary function we offer our clients. We ensure you have proper virus protection, and that you are protected from spam and external attack. We establish backup procedures that are tested and demonstratable, and we actually test them on a regular basis. We establish archiving processes for your older data to ensure you will have access to it when you need it. We ensure all your employees’ data is included in these backup and archival procedures.

Equally important, we will work with you to ensure that you understand the decisions and processes taken so that you will know with confidence how well protected your business is from threat or disaster. We see backup and related service as piece of mind; it just has to work.

Managing documents on a corporate-wide basis is a must for all businesses, especially for smaller organizations. It is possible to implement a cost-effective, easy-to-use document management process that provides the ability to, amongst other things:

• find documents quickly,
• carry out full-text searches to mine the wealth of knowledge across the company,
• support collaborative document generation, and
• backup and archive the large number of documents created and received.

Having said this, making document management work takes planning, care in implementation, constant tuning of the system, and a commitment to making it a success. MikeTango can help you with this. Using Microsoft’s SharePoint as the underlying platform, we have helped clients put in place document management solutions that are sized, configured and priced to meet their specific needs, ensuring it is simple to use and easy to stay disciplined. For more details, see our whitepaper.

More and more applications are available at an affordable price for you to use in managing your business. This includes accounting software, client relationship management, CRMs, website management, HR systems, timesheets, document management, etc. The challenge is – the recommended way to run each of these is to have them exist on a dedicated server. While we have occasionally deployed multiple applications on one server, it comes with risk and can sometimes lead to unwanted and unpredictable behaviour.

MikeTango has worked with a number of clients to leverage “virtualized servers” as a means to limit the number of physical servers that need to be deployed. This can be done in a number of ways, depending on your number of servers, the location of those servers, the storage and computing power required for each, etc.

MikeTango also offers a service whereby you effectively lease a server for a low monthly fee. This is different from most of the “cloud services” you may have read about, in that MikeTango offers its fully managed services for each of these rented servers, and it behaves as part of your local environment. We are very excited about this service, as it finally provides a solution for our target market that is affordable, manageable, and most important, actually operates in a way that fits the business model of most of our clients. See services for more details, or our whitepaper for a deeper explanation of this service.

Anyone with the responsibility of purchasing hardware to support a business knows that these costs don’t ever seem to end. You need laptops, cell phones, desk phones, etc. for each employee. You also need servers to run your business applications, as well as the related network connectivity, spam appliances, backup technology, etc. Collectively, these costs can feel crippling.

MikeTango works closely with its clients to find a way to manage these costs, including budgeting for upcoming costs, planning for upgrades and enhancements, and standardizing on hardware that keep the maintenance costs as low as possible. MikeTango also actively evaluates emerging technologies to determine how they may benefit our clients in mitigating their costs. For example, MikeTango has worked closely with a number of its clients to take advantage of virtualization as a means to limit the costs of adding physical servers into their environments, and to help mitigate the costs of server upgrades.

The problem of “desktop support’ has been around since the introduction of computers into business decades ago. The issues remain the same – it is a constant challenge to ensure that employees have the tools they need, and the know-how to use them.

MikeTango understands this is a major irritant to business leaders when this isn’t done properly. We pay very close attention to ensuring desktop support is done properly, and work to do this according to each client’s policies and procedures, and to ensure this gets done within the budgets allotted.

More important, we feel, is the need to be ahead of issues that employees may encounter to prevent them from becoming problems. Again, this means proper planning and preventative maintenance, scheduling of upgrades and ensuring training accompanies any upgrades, standardizing on technologies used, etc.

While this is very open-ended, we feel it is an imminently fair question to ask. Measurement is key to evaluation of any aspect of your business, whether its sales, employee costs, inventory management, etc. With respect to technology spending, the answer to this question is dependent on a number of factors, the most important of which is “did our spending allow us to meet our business objectives?”

MikeTango can work with your leadership team to compute your technology costs, including the hidden costs of labour, lost productivity, etc. We can also work with you to quantitatively assess the impact technology has had on the success of your business. Together, this information can lead to a clearer assessment of the impact technology spending is having on your business, and will allow us together to strategize on future investment and to redirect the efforts spent on technology to ensure we are maximizing the value you are receiving.

This is a complex issue that offers no simple answers. However, starting the process of carrying out this type of assessment may be the best “first step” your business takes this year.

Technology is constantly changing. New software applications become available each year. Existing systems become obsolete or difficult to use, and feel like they no longer suit your business. At any given point in time, one faces pressures from all aspects of business for investment and attention. We know that technology can help in some cases, but it can also hurt if it is not executed properly.

MikeTango’s senior staff has extensive experience that can be called upon to assist you in evaluating your current systems and processes, and deciding how best to proceed. We can work closely with you in aligning your use of technology with your business objectives, and give you the confidence that you are taking the best actions possible to meet those objectives. We are well versed in a wide range of technologies, and also partner with industry leaders to ensure we can provide you with timely answers to your questions.

Technology is intended to make us more efficient. Sometimes it succeeds, and sometimes it’s a colossal failure. Why the difference? A number of factors come into play, including whether the technology is actually a good fit for your business, whether the system is well implemented, how well your staff is trained, etc.

Coupled with this uncertainty is the difficulty leaders have in evaluating the impact the technology will actually have on the business ahead of time. Will you see a real return on investment by making a move with technology is always a difficult question. For most of us, the scrutiny that comes from our boards or investors as we undertake a significant technology project is quite intense, and often it’s just easier to stay with the status quo.

Our role is to assist you in assessing your existing business processes and your desired outcomes. From there, we can help determine the most appropriate investment to make, be it with an off-the-shelf software application, using virtualization, custom building a small application, or simply re-engineer your existing processes. In the end, you will have the information to make an informed decision that includes costs, potential benefits, timelines, risks, etc., and will have the tools to communicate this decision to your key stakeholders.

Buy versus build (versus do nothing) - it’s one of the hardest decisions any of us face with technology. The trade-offs are easy to understand. If you buy an existing off-the-shelf solution, the initial up-front costs are typically lower; the quality of the solution is usually better; and you often can get to implementation faster. With a build solution, you typically get a solution that better fits your business; you are in more control of your systems on a go-forward basis; and your total implementation costs are typically lower. In both cases, you inevitably become tied to the vendor/builder of the solution, so relationship is key regardless of approach.

We can point to many success stories using both approaches for our clients. We have helped clients select and implement an off-the-shelf solution, including help manage the implementation and the on-going vendor relationship. Similarly, we have implemented significant dedicated systems for clients that have dramatically transformed their business processes.

Obviously, there is much more to this topic – please call us and we’ll be pleased to discuss your scenario.

Our clients range from having a fully staffed IT department to having no IT in-house expertise whatsoever. For those clients with no staff, the choice is easy – MikeTango provides a full-suite of services to ensure their needs are met.

For clients with IT staff, leadership is often torn, and sometimes frustrated, that their staff is unable to manage all aspects of the company’s IT functions. When you think about it, this is an almost impossible task for most smaller shops. The demands on an IT staff are diverse, from desktop support through server support through managing projects through to full budgeting and planning activities. For most IT staff, the day-to-day grind is such that little time is available for planning and managing.

MikeTango can complement your in-house staff by off-loading certain aspects of your IT activities, allowing your staff to focus on those key aspects that matter most to them being successful. We can also work closely with your IT staff to help them be more effective with what they do. Many clients have one or two IT staff, which leaves these people in a particularly difficult position – they are isolated, they have no backup, and they have no one to communicate with and explore alternative ways to carry out their functions. MikeTango can provide them with a better sense of accomplishment, a reduced stress level by providing a manpower backup plan, and can most importantly, provide a sense of community and career progression.

It’s easy. Just give us a call and we’d be pleased to talk about your specific needs. All of our current clients were just like you at one point – they had a very specific requirement, and we worked with them to address it. From there, it’s a matter of sharing with us your prioritized needs, and allowing us to help your organization prosper.