I do a range of different things from day to day, so you could read about pretty much anything in here. With any luck, it will be worth your time, and might even save you money!
Read, enjoy and comment …
Does Cloud Computing work for your business?
According to a recent survey only 19% of business applications in large American corporates (it was an American survey!) are clound-based. Unsurprisingly, it seems the biggest take up is in the technical and financial sectors, with health care and manufacturing showing a much smaller degree of interest.
Some interesting ‘cultural’ points emerge, though, highlighted in an article today in The Financial Post. What I have picked up on is how many of the possible reasons for resisting cloud applications actually have little to do with the technology.
Firstly, according to the article, cloud computing projects often bypass the normal IT partner, and instead the business engages with an external provider. I’m guessing that if you translate this to SMEs, you have two barriers to overcome – not only a move to the ‘cloud’ but also an awareness of the risk of outsourcing business critical activities in some cases.
There are problems in determining ‘return on investment’ data, largely because of the absence of benchmarks in a new sector. This creates another barrier to the adoption of cloud solutions as there is a lack of evidence to support claims of cost benefit. This is despite compelling evidence of both the cost- and time-savings that have been realised in some organisations – either the feeling is that it’s all ‘too good to be true’ or that these savings can only be realised in large corporate environments.
Also, of course, many people have had painful experiences in the past with systems offering potential savings that are not realised, or are achieved only at a much greater cost than originally anticipated.
Some of the benefits attainable by a move to the cloud depend on the business being strategically in the right place. These are benefits related to IT infrastructure, scalability and so on. Unless you are at the point where you are thinking about upgrading or replacing hardware, you are not likely to be moved by the possibilities that the cloud offers in these areas.
Security is, of course, the big issue that still causes concern, along with a scepticism about swapping a one-off capital payment for a monthly revenue one. The survey found that less than 20% of US firms would be happy with business critical applications being cloud-based. Private clouds (intranets, really) are obviously more trusted, but there is still a way to go.
The bottom line is that there is a cultural shift required that goes way beyond IT – it encompasses the whole business culture. Whether it be travel, meeting schedules, home-working, outsourcing or whatever, the business needs to consider the full impact and benefit of moving to the cloud. From some of the conversations that I have had, people are not appreciating this enough – they are still thinking of cloud computing as an IT shift, not a culture shift.
On a wider scale, of course, there is still a long way to go in terms of regulation and legislation, and the cloud is definitely not the right place for some businesses right now. However, I suspect that a lot of people are discounting it for many of the wrong reasons!
The upcoming revised ‘cookie law’ – are you ready for it?
You may have seen many and varied pieces on the internet about this new change in regulations, so I thought it was worth a bit of a look as it affects both sides of the browser divide – both website providers and users. Many of us, of course, fall in both camps. The full detail forms the substance of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, the recent revision of which we are concerned with here.
One official definition of a cookie is ‘a packet of data sent by an internet server to a browser, which is returned by the browser each time it subsequently accesses the same server, used to identify the user or track their access to the server’.
In essence, the revision to the regulations is all about informing the user of a website that cookies may be used, and obtaining their express permission to use them. This stands in contrast to the previous approach, which was to inform users that cookies may be used, and give them the option to choose not to accept them. This opt-out, however, was normally buried in the Privacy Policy of the website which, with the best will in the world, is not going to be something that most visitors to a website will bother to read!
So now the user has to explicitly agree to accept the cookies, having been presented with a clear and comprehensive indication of the purpose. If a user has already agreed or signed up for some functionality on the site that requires cookies, this consent can be assumed to have been given so no further confirmation will be requested, but in all other cases, you have to ask.
What do I need to do?
It will no longer be acceptable (after 26th May 2012, when these regulations come into force) to leave the opt-out information in your policies on the site. According to the Information Commissioner’s Office, you need to follow a three-point plan:
1. Establish what cookies you have operating on your site. Clearly, if you haven’t built it yourself, or if it is a highly interactive site, this may not be as straightforward as it sounds, but it’s an obvious and essential starting point.
2. Establish how intrusive the various cookies are. Some cookies gather and return more information than others, so going through this process may help you decide a priority for bringing their use to the attention of visitors to your site.
3. Establish the methods you might use for obtaining user consent. Although it’s possible for users to set a level of ‘cookie acceptance’ globally on their web browser, the regulations state that this should not be treated as a carte blanche by websites. Apparently, the Government is working with browser developers to agree future configuration settings that may conform to the regulations (so that’s all right then!) but the current advice is that you should obtain consent explicitly.
Guidance for obtaining consent …
One option would be to pop up a message asking for consent when it got to the point that the cookie was required. However, this could become cumbersome for the user if there is a cookie request interrupting their browsing experience every thirty seconds! It might work as a general ‘OK’ when they first arrive at the site, or if you have only one or two cookies in use.
It may be appropriate to ask for consent at the very start, if you have users registering to use your site. The consent could form part of the Terms and Conditions of Use. Remember, though, that if you change existing terms for existing users, you will need to get their agreement to those terms a second time – you can’t just move the goalposts on existing accounts!
Functionality can imply consent as well. It may be that a user makes a certain choice about how they want to use the site, and this choice includes an explicit confirmation that they will accept cookies to enable the functionality they are looking for. Again, this consent shouldn’t be simply implied by the user selecting the functionality, but it should be made obvious that the agreement includes the acceptance of the necessary cookies.
There are still issues around who is responsible for third-party cookies as well. Again the Government claims to be on the case, but it seems to be a matter of ‘watch this space’ at the moment!
Get on with it …
These regulation changes were published a year ago, and come into force in about a week, so if you haven’t yet done anything about this, now is the time to make a start. Personally, I have no doubt that there will be all sorts of issues over getting this to work, not least because the Information Commissioner’s Office doesn’t seem to have all the answers itself as yet, so it is unlikely that you will face any major non-compliance issues in the short term. Some sites will require a significant amount of work as well, so that won’t happen overnight – the enforcement of these regulations will need to be reasonably flexible at first, but [a] that isn’t a given and [b] you can’t afford to ignore them!
However, should a problem occur and a site you own is the subject of a complaint, you will be a lot better off if you can prove that you have at least addressed the matter, and made a start!
Here are a few links to get you started, and of course if it all gets a bit too much, please think about giving me a call!
All About Cookies – does what it says on the tin, to coin a phrase!
Information Commissioner’s Office – the regulations themselves
Business Link – a summary of the regulations, plus how they relate to telephone marketing as well – oh yes – there’s more!
So what does Business Process Management mean, then?
Perhaps to the younger generation, the acronym BPM is more associated with the art of the DJ – ‘beats per minute’ – but to those who are perhaps better left near the bar than the dance floor, it means ‘Business Process Management’.
It’s easy to see this as the province of the larger organisation, or the enterprise, but any operation can benefit from BPM. It is a way of looking at your business from a slightly different angle – taking the overarching view, as opposed to looking at individual areas in the search for efficiency.
Looking at things in this way helps you determine where the real weaknesses, or constraints, in your business lie. This is because it is easy to see that (for example) your order processing is held up the most by the time it takes to enter orders, or to invoice them, or perhaps to pick them. Only by looking at all these areas as part of the same review will you be able to see the constraint.
Taking operations one at a time, and making them as effective as possible [a] misses the point and [b] potentially wastes cash and resources. There is no point being able to enter and invoice 100 orders a day if you can only pick 50 – therefore throwing resource at the administrative element is likely to be wasteful.
Also, of course, consider your demand and your strategy – unless you are growing the business, or suffering customer service issues, you may find that 50 orders a day is fine, so don’t burst a blood vessel trying to do more!
So, decide how broadly you want to define your process – is it the core function of your business from beginning to end, or is it a specific area? Remember that the process can also involve third parties – if you are fulfilling orders, you may need to draw your manufacturers or suppliers into the mix.
Also remember that you are looking at the business as a whole – what is a good optimisation for the overall business may be a problem for individual areas. It is the resolution of these conflicts that turns BPM from a science to an art!
Try it, and let me know how you get on …
Do you find describing what you do to be difficult?
“Well – tell me about it,” as the saying goes!
In my case, it’s an IT thing – as soon as you stand up at a network meeting and mention IT, you are either in IT support or you are something to do with the web. Unhappily for me, I am neither of those things, so am not so easy to pigeonhole.
As I have met with other business people for one-to-one meetings over a cup of coffee, I almost invariably hear, “Now I understand what you do – I didn’t really get it before,” at the end of the meeting.
I’ve spent a long time thinking about the elevator pitch – find the pain, and all that sort of thing. In truth, though, you need a slightly different elevator pitch for almost every person in the room; generic pain is never as severe as specific pain. Are you worried about wasting time and resources? Well, I can help you with that. What about the risk of getting your data into a mess, or being unable to access information that you need? I can help y0u with that as well. Perhaps you want to integrate your website and your back-office systems? No surprise, then, that I can help with that, too.
Sometimes, it’s the same solution, but the ‘pain’ it salves is completely different from one person to another. After more than three years of networking, and the help and advice of a number of very knowledgeable people, I’m still totally unsure about what my elevator pitch is, or ought to be.
As a result, I tend to just stand up and say the first thing that comes into my head, and that’s probably not a very good idea!
Perhaps I need to keep away from the IT element, and pitch myself as a saver of time and money. That’s what it boils down to, as often as not. Most business owners are spending a lot of time on their administration, which can be trimmed down with the right tools, allowing them to work on developing and growing the business as opposed to keeping up with the paperwork.
Do you have this sort of problem with your business? How do you deal with it?
Issues opening Word 2007 documents in Word 2010?
This is another one of those problems that online forums suggest is experienced by a good number of people, but the same forums don’t seem very good at offering solutions. Therefore, having got to the bottom of it myself this weekend, I thought I’d share the outcome in case it helps anyone else.
My son has a new laptop, and we had just set it up with a brand new installation of MS Office 2010, with Service Pack 1. Windows 7 was similarly updated, and everything was about as clean as it will ever be. I was surprised, therefore, when I moved his documents over from the old machine, where he had been using Word 2007, to find that there was a problem opening them in Word 2010 on the new machine.
When you tried to open a Word Document (either from within Word, or from the Explorer view) Word produced the helpful message that it had ‘stopped working’. This was easily spotted, to be honest, given that the screen had whited out and the application had stopped responding. If you clicked through the error message, it produced another warning that the Normal template had been modified, and asking whether I wanted to save the new version. That would be a ‘No’, then.
Off to the forums, to see what the problem is. As I say, it seems a few people have hit this issue, and proposed solutions ranged from deleteing the Normal template file and allowing Word to create a new one (tried that, even though it was obviously not the problem, but it made no odds) to removing a couple of Registry keys. Again, given that the machine was brand new and clean, it seemed unlikely that there was a problem with anything in the Registry, so I didn’t bother with that one.
Reinstalling Office (the default position of a lot of forum posters, including some Microsoft people) seemed unecessary, given that the current installation was barely an hour old!
After seeing a forum post that suggested that an add-in (which I didn’t have) was causing a similar problem, I decided to check the rest of the installed add-ins out. There weren’t very many, but there was one called ‘Send to Bluetooth’, so I disabled it as I couldn’t see a need for it anyway. Happily, this resolved the problem and (as is often the case when you know what to search for) there are a number of forums that mention having had issues with this third-party add-in.
So – check your Microsoft Word 2010 add-ins and, if you have ‘Send to Bluetooth’ in the list, I’d suggest getting rid of it. If it causes an error serious enough to corrupt the document templates and crash the application, I suspect you’re better off without it!
