For anyone trying to run a business in the 21^st century, an employee who “doesn’t know” how to use computers is more common than we’d like to admit. They “know” how to use their computer; they just can’t understand how to use it productively. If I tried to tell my boss that I can’t be productive because I can’t figure out how to use my phone, I’m sure I’d be fired on the spot. So why do we tolerate it when people say that about their PC or their software?

Seth Godin talks about the difference between “not knowing” and “not wanting to know”. He’s talking about the difference as it relates to marketing, but it’s just as applicable to technology. I spend a lot of time with relatively few users trying to get them to understand how their systems work. Perhaps I could better spend my time maximizing the productivity of those users who do get it?

Looking through my bio, you may notice a slant towards Microsoft technologies. I will readily admit that when I do application development, I mostly use Microsoft tools. That’s because Microsoft has always done a great job getting part-time developers like myself the tools and training we need to quickly build and deploy solutions.

So what does this mean to you, a business leader at an SMB? Well, I’m not a professional software developer, and I don’t try to sell myself as one. I focus on the business processes and then I find the right technology that will enable process improvement. I need to do my work in a way that does not box me into one potential solution. After all, if you hire an Access guru, you’re going to get an Access database no matter what solution will work best.

Once I understand your processes and can help you identify opportunities, I need to be able to quickly produce solutions that meet several criteria:

• The solution must fit in your environment with minimal additional investment,
• The solution must be able to scale with you as your business grows.,
• You must be able to use the solution without constantly calling me back for (billable) assistance, and
• If you do require additional assistance, you shouldn’t have trouble finding someone to support you should I get hit by a bus or win the lottery and retire.

Here’s an example. I needed to develop a multi-user application that would read data from a database and would write information to the client’s intranet. One of my client’s main concerns was that the application operate quickly. The client has no internal IT staff, and their intention to rapidly expand the scope of the application meant that distributing an application to PCs of the users was not a great idea. The database was MS Access, and the intranet was built on Windows Sharepoint Services.

A web based solution made sense for obvious reasons. I had never gotten much real-world experience with AJAX but the ability to process transactions without full page refreshes would certainly be appreciated. In a couple hours, I had built the required pages using the ASP.NET AJAX toolkit. We are now extending this application, and what I was able to produce in those few hours has enabled the client’s staff to think completely differently about their processes. Not only that, but the client is now moving their data into SQL Server 2005 Express. This application is remaining virtually untouched.

I certainly keep my eyes open when designing a new solution. If a client already has a significant investment on a LAMP platform, I’m certainly not going to recommend that they implement Sharepoint for document management. But more often than not, I find the client already has the environment in place to support a Microsoft approach. And I know that there are 20 other people in town that can pick up right where I leave off when my numbers come up!

I was reading through some other SMB technology focused blogs today and ran across Bill Russell’s blog for his company, Pioneer Solutions Group. Over the past couple months, he’s written a couple posts about outsourcing email (here and here).

I’m a big fan of hosted email solutions. Whether it’s Google’s service or a hosted Exchange solution, it’s a rare situation where email makes more sense to keep in-house. Even if you have HIPAA or SOX compliance issues, think twice before assuming you have to host your own email server. Vendors exist that specialize in providing compliance services in a more secure, more reliable, more cost effective manner than you can do internally.

Found this post by John Soat today that validates my thinking about not hiring IT employees. Luckily, I started publishing my 3 part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) before he published his. I like to think I’m not just regurgitating someone else’s thoughts.

While he’s specifically talking about larger companies, the trend still applies to the SMB market. The IT skills of the future are project management, business analysis, vendor management, and especially communication.

Today’s “jack-of-all-trades” will either go to work for IT firms that resemble law or accounting firms, or will become internal IT managers. They’ll be capable of doing some things, but time and cost pressures will force them to push most non-value-added technical work to outside sources.

As an example of fully leveraging your technology, I’d like to share a story about one of my clients.

I have a client that is a food service chain with about 10 locations. They had purchased and implemented the Aloha QuickService Point of Sale system from Radiant Systems. Stores were then setup on Radiant’s Enterprise.com service. That service pulls sales data from the stores and allowed them to view consolidated reports online, schedule alerts for conditions such as high labor, and even drill down to transaction level information. It’s really a nice service for a reasonable monthly charge per store.

But the online report builder was not flexible enough to reproduce this client’s more complex reporting needs. A brief conversation with Enterprise.com’s outstanding support team yielded a great solution. Enterprise.com runs off of SQL Server. So they are able to replicate the same data that their online system uses into an internal instance of SQL Server. The client purchased a license for SQL Server 2005, I worked with Enterprise.com and my client’s infrastructure support to get the replication setup, and I used SQL Server Reporting Services to rebuild their core reports and prototype some dashboard style reports.

The benefits here are just starting to get realized. Store managers would fax in reconciliation sheets every morning with the previous day’s sales and cash deposits. That’s not necessary anymore. Store managers print out payroll reports every pay period and fax them into payroll. That can be eliminated since the timesheet data in now already in-house.

Remember, the replication is available at no additional cost. The client was already paying for it just to get the stores on the polling service. By replicating the data internally, the client has vastly superior capabilities and incredible flexibility to do their own reporting and integration.

And there’s more! Also included in the standard Enterprise.com monthly charge is a service called Centralized Data Management (CDM). This allows central control of POS setup at all the stores. Simply make any changes on the corporate workstation, and they’re automatically pushed out to the stores. Voila! Every store is now setup with the right menu items at the right prices.

We just did a price change and it took 2 hours to setup and push out to all the stores. That’s longer than it would usual take because the changes were rolled out to half the stores one week followed by the rest the following week. But compare that to faxing out the new price list to all the stores, store managers taking (at least) 30 minutes each to make the changes, and hoping that all the changes were made consistently.

Again, no additional cost to do this. Just making the effort to learn the capabilities of your technology and get them implemented.