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!

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!

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 …

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?

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!

These are valid concerns, of course, but the move to cloud services is happening. Can you afford to ignore it, and are you missing opportunities by not considering cloud solutions, or “Software As A Service” (SAAS)?

As with anything you do in your business (I hope) you need to do a bit of due diligence, and I’ve set out a little acronym to help you with some of the key areas you need to consider – appropriately enough, it’s all about TRUST:

T – transparency
R – reliability
U – usage limitations
S – security
T – terms and conditions of trading

These five key areas give you a broad scope by which to measure potential providers, and cover areas that you need to be asking questions about. Here’s a bit more detail:

Transparency:

• Cloud solution providers should explain their information handling and data storage practices in a clear and concise manner.
• Check whether their websites and marketing material include information about the reliability of their services, preferably independently measured.
• A definitive list of countries in which customer data may be stored or where applications may be hosted should be provided, and this is especially important if you are concerned with any element of Data Protection.  Some vendors can’t or won’t guarantee which country your data will be stored in, which is not always acceptable.

Reliability:

• A clear indication ought to be available of the uptime and downtime of all the cloud services, as well as any security or system issues that may have occurred.
• If there has been any sort of security breach in the past, this should have been notified to customers immediately.
• Verify the backup policy of the provider, and the policy concerning the duty of care of the customer data should be clear and concise.

Usage Limitations:

• Providers of cloud solutions should claim no automatic rights of any kind over customer data. Data should be used purely to fulfil the obligations of the software – for example, calculations or other activities that form part of the provided solution – or to meet statutory or regulatory requirements, such as the online posting of VAT returns.
• All the data within a customer’s instance of the cloud solution should be made available for download in some standard format, should the customer require it.
• Cloud providers should disclose customer data to a third party only with explicit permission of the customer, or if required to do so by law. Any legal claim from a third party to access the data should be notified to the customer immediately and before any such disclosure is made, so the customer has the opportunity to challenge the request.
• Some providers may reserve the right to use some client data anonymously for bench-marking.  Make sure you understand what is involved here, and be sure that you are happy with the policy.  In general, it’s a useful thing to many businesses as a performance indicator, so don’t discount it out of hand, but be careful.

Security:

• Cloud service providers should protect customer data via internationally accepted and visible information security standards, like ISO 27002.
• All security management standards and processes should be audited by third-party auditors to ensure compliance, and the outcomes of these audits should be made available to customers, at least, if not publicly on the provider’s website.
• Such disclosures should also include information about how any issues raised in the audit are being addressed, and within what timeframe.

Terms and Conditions of Trading:

• The main message here is to actually read them!
• There should be a clear, concise and comprehensive set of terms agreed between the provider and the customer. These terms should set out defined areas of responsibilty and accountability, with the aim of avoiding disputes about who is liable shoudl some problem occur.
• Typically, these disputes will arise owing to either service provision or availability, or data loss or mismanagement. A key area, however, is privacy and security – the control of who has access to what elements of the system, and how that access is policed. The customer should be in control of the security relating to their own users, and the provider should deal with the wider issues of data protection and security.
• This agreement also need to make it clear where the responsibility for Data Protection compliance lies.  Be careful of the small print, obviously!

Hopefully, if you can satisfy yourself on most of the issues mentioned above, you should have found a competent service provider.  Each business has its own needs, however, and this list of suggestions is far from exhaustive, but I hope it will get you started, and will help you to build TRUST in cloud computing as a technology.

Happy hunting!

The response was that she had searched in Google for “checklist for IT Director”, and somewhere among the returned results was a link that took her through to my site, and as a result of what she saw there she very kindly got in touch.

Excellent stuff – we had a good conversation and, like with all these things, you never know where it may lead.

However, I was intrigued by the “checklist for IT Director” thing, because as far as I am aware, neither the term “checklist” nor “IT Director” appear on my website currently, and have not for some time.  So I decided to investigate further, with intriguing results.

A couple of years ago, I did do some marketing around the virtual/ outsourced IT Director model, and as part of that process I had a Twitter account in the name of @it_director.  I put out a couple of dozen tweets on this account over a few months, and the last one was over a year ago in January 2010.

One of the tweets I had put out concerned a checklist (can you see where this is going?) for various issues, in this case whether or not you should block automatic updates for Internet Explorer 8!  This was in March 2009, and contained a link to a long-dead page, on a website that I no longer use.

Happily, I had maintained the domain, and pointed it to my current site, so when the link was clicked, up came Expedio and the contact was established.  So the moral appears to be that you should always ensure that any domains you link to from Twitter, or any other forum postings or social media activity are redirected if you close the website.  You just never know – in a few years time, someone may stumble across one of your current tweets, even if it’s actually totally irrelevant to what they were looking for, and click on the link.

Stranger things have happened …

Perhaps I’m losing you, so let’s start at the beginning.  A few days ago, our oven stopped heating up properly, and we took the decision to replace it, given that we have already repaired it a couple of times over the seven or eight years we’ve been using it.

During the purchasing process it came to light that we needed to have it hard-wired into the electricity supply now, owing to changes in the regulations.  Our existing oven, along with its companion combination microwave, is plugged into a wall socket behind the fixture.

So a shiny new oven was delivered yesterday, and the electrician duly turned up to do the necessary wiring.  We switched off the 30amp cooker circuit at the fusebox, so you can imagine our surprise when on our return to the kitchen the light on the microwave was still on!

An investigation of all the sockets in the kitchen revealed that the dishwasher and a freezer were plugged into this 30amp circuit (with a socket intriguingly positioned beneath the sink), whereas the oven and combination microwave have been operating off the standard ring-main since the kitchen was installed! It also emerged that the electronic ignition for our gas hob was powered by this circuit too.

Well – obviously this will necessitate a slightly bigger job than anticipated in terms of wiring up the oven, but a number of things have come to mind since yesterday:

Firstly, if I hadn’t decided to do the job properly, and call the electrician, I could have just fitted a plug to my new higher-powered oven and started using it.  Besides invalidating the warranty on the oven, if I was unlucky enough not to blow the fuses I would probably end up burning the house down!

Secondly, the ‘professionals’ who installed the kitchen for the previous owners of the house were clearly muppets, having breached all sorts of regulations, I would imagine, even 10 years ago.  What sort of idiot would simply fail to move the supply approximately seven feet to the right?  It’s on the same wall,  so would have been very easy to do – it’s not as if you’d have a major issue running the cables.

So I can see some morals here, which do have a business application (so we get there eventually!) and are worth thinking about if you are embarking on something new, or planning some changes in your operation.

1. Don’t cut corners – plan properly, and don’t be tempted to take shortcuts.  If you do, not only could you have a problem in the short term, but also you will be discovered in the end, even if it takes ten years!

2. Make sure that the people doing the work are competent, and try and find some way of checking that they have delivered what they claim.  They will also be rumbled eventually, but after ten years you can’t do anything about it.

So, excuse a slightly bizarre post, but there is a bit of relevance there!

One common question is about web design, and the answers often concentrate on the distinction between designers and coders.  The generalisation is usually that designers are concerned with form over function, and developers or coders are the opposite.  However, the focus of both of these is on the creation of the site itself, in whatever form it takes.

Another common query is about CRM – how do you identify the best system?  Again, responses revolve around features of particular solutions, often based on the respondent’s experiences with a given solution.

What intrigues me about all of these threads is the fact that people are often not looking at the business for which the solution is required.  Websites and CRM systems are not like cars or washing machines – you don’t just buy one that you like the look of because you know that whatever you buy it will drive you from A to B, or wash your clothes.  The solution you need in terms of technology for your business is one that you can work with, and which will deliver what you need with minimal impact on the way you operate.

You have to start from the business end, and look at all the processes and aims and personalities involved (yes, personalities are important!) and then start to look for the solutions to meet the business need.   When you are buying insurance or a mortgage, you need a broker that has access to the whole of the market, and can therefore pick the best option to suit your needs.

Why then, when you need a new CRM system or website, do you go straight to the provider, rather than through a ‘broker’ who can help you to ensure that the final solution is a fit for the business?  Many business owners are not technologists, so this type of support is vital, and can save huge amounts of time and money in the end.

A year or two ago, I saw a statistic that said that a significant percentage of CRM implementations fail to deliver.  I suspect that this is because the systems selected were not a good fit for the business, as opposed to them being bad systems.  The advice of someone with nothing specific to sell, and an objective opinion as to the way to get what you want and need, could be worth more than you think.

The dreaded problem of inconsistent results reared its head on a project – sometimes we got the right and expected results, and other times it failed.  This is always a tricky one, as it often points to a data problem rather than a procedural one, and can be hard to track down.

So, I spent some hours going through all the queries and procedures – extracting the code for each one, and running them manually and all seemed fine.  I’d bung in the parameters, and away it went – no issues, and the correct result every time as far as I could tell.  Yet when the process was run through the application, we’d get wrong answers.

This morning I found the problem.  We had a query built within the application code, one element of which was to collect some data from a table based on the year.  The query parameter was built by appending a two digit year number to the end of the field name – so ‘pop09′, ‘pop10′ and so on.

The code contained a variable that held the year number selected by the user, and this variable was the problem.  It was defined as an integer, and not a string (a legacy from an earlier version of the code) so therefore if you selected 2010, it would store 10 and everything would be fine – however, 2009 would end up as 9 instead of 09, and the process failed.

This explained how the queries worked when I ran them manually, because of course I was providing the correct 09 parameter, so this bug snuck through that stage, but we got it in the end – it had nowhere to hide!

So a fine example of how a zero (especially a leading one) can turn out to be a lot more important than it looks.