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The Russo-British Chamber of Commerce, which is a not-for-profit, company limited by guarantee that has worked to promote trade and cooperation between the UK and Russia since 1916.

If you’re planning a business trip to Russia any time soon, there are several things you may not have even thought of which will need to be taken into consideration. Here is a quick checklist just to make sure you have everything covered.

Currency
The dominant form of currency in Russia is the ruble. It is best to get your money exchanged before you get to Russia, although there are plenty of places to exchange your currency, especially in the bigger cities, you might have problems exchanging large amounts of pounds sterling. It is much easier to exchange dollars and euros.
There are cash points in Russia, but unfortunately there are not as many as there are in the UK in a normal city or town. It is best to be prepared to pay for most things with cash and take advantage of cash points when you see them, especially if you’re staying in a smaller town.

Visa
There is a visa requirement between the UK and Russia; if you’re going to Russia on business you’ll need a visa. If your business trip is going to be short, or you’re just going for a meeting, you will simply need a business visa, this would usually be provided by your Russian business partner.
If you’re trip is going to be slightly longer, if you actually intend to work in Russia, then you’ll need a work permit as a business visa will not suffice. A work visa is much more difficult to obtain and you will need proper legal advice and the aid of a government institution to help obtain you one

Accommodation
The central city hotels will be the most comfortable for businessmen, they are safe, clean and hospitable.
If you’re trip is going to be too long to justify a hotel and you decide to rent accommodation, it is advisable you have someone with you who speaks the language and knows the legalities of the property market to ensure you remain safe.

Legalities
According to Russian law, any foreign citizen arriving into Russian territory has got to register with the police, if you don’t register you’ll have to pay a fine and find yourself in a lot of trouble. It’s common practice for Russian authorities to stop people on the street and check documents and passports.
There are two ways of registering with the police, you can either register at the hotel where you’re staying and that will count as registering with the police. Or making the state aware you’re in the country and you’re being looked after and it’s easy to find you. If you’re renting an apartment, your landlord should be able to do this for you.

Travel
As far as traveling in Russia is concerned you’ll probably find public transport more efficient than your own car because the traffic situation is quite difficult in the larger Russian cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Most of the bigger Russian cities have an underground system, this tends to be very reliable and is particularly economic too, and is very easy to navigate as all the signs and maps are translated into English too.
If you need to travel across Russia, the most effective way to do this would be by either train or plane. Both, like the underground system, are rather cheap. Obviously the train takes a little longer but it can be a nicer journey where as the plane would be much quicker even though it may cost a little more.

GuruOnline offers an exclusive video interview with the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce so for more international trade advice on doing business with Russia, you can watch the whole interview for free now.

Last week I gave a brief overview of one of the new IBM sets on GuruOnline all about IT Support, this week I’m going to explain a bit of what is covered in the second new IBM set about performance management and business intelligence.

Stephen Brook is from IBM Cognos Innovation Center and he explains in detail how performance management and business intelligence can work for business.

Business intelligence and performance management is really concerned with providing the tools and processes to help you make better business decisions. It tends to be characterize in terms of being able to answer three critical questions, the first is, how is my business performing? Secondly is, why is that so? (Understanding the driver behind your business) and thirdly, being able to say in the light of that, what should I be doing next? Answering the how question is usually done with tools like dashboard, score cards. Understanding why you’re getting the results you are, is something you typically do with reporting and analysis tools, finally understanding what you should be doing next is with planning and forecasting.

Stephen then goes on to explain the differences between business intelligence and performance management.
Business intelligence is sometimes characterised as having an effective corporate memory, it’s about being able to take the data you have in your organisation and turn it into useful information that people can use.
Performance management is an umbrella term that extends that concept, and talks both about understanding that process and the drivers in your business and pulling that information together then using that to make forward decisions like budgeting to forecasting.

In essence you will see improved business performance, and the ability to make better business decisions faster, that’s about being able to identify the key risks facing your business, and understanding how to mitigate them, and also about being able to identify opportunities, and very quickly put action plans in place to capture those opportunities. In practical terms, it’s about avoiding situations where people in your organisation are arguing or debating whose numbers are correct and what data is correct, because they will have the correct single version of the data at their fingertips if you have a performance management system in place.

These are just snippets from three videos, taken from a set of 17 videos. For the rest of Stephens free business advice on performance management and business intelligence, follow the link to GuruOnline to watch them all.

We’ve recently added two new IBM sets with over 30 videos to GuruOnline. John Burchill explains in detail how IT support can work for business.

When it comes to IT support your business is probably looking for two things, you’re looking to save operational costs, especially in this current economic climate, and you’re looking at protecting and maximising the IT investment you’ve made to support your business. Both of these objectives are easy to achieve so long as you understand the criticality of the IT systems and components in relation to the business. The higher the importance and criticality then the higher the service level. The lower the importance and criticality then the lower the service level. By taking this approach customers can actually realize saving of up to 30% as apposed to a single service level across the business. This is the smart approach to IT support.

The smart approach to IT support means there are packages available for every business, from the global corporation down to the small businesses. Off the shelf, prepackaged, pre priced IT support is going to be more suitable for some small businesses and it’s available in different service levels. If you’ve got a mission critical server that you want covered, then you could get a committed or guaranteed service which is straight of the shelf, and for a lower level of service, say for a development or a test system, then a Monday to Friday, or a next business day responses would be appropriate. The key is really to understand your environment and assign the right level of service.

One of the most significant changes in IT support in recent years is the growing importance and dependence on remote support. Traditionally, when customers had a hardware problem they’d call in an engineer, and engineer would order a part and if they couldn’t fix it, they’d maybe get the senior engineer involved and this meant long down times for customers. Remote support really turns that on it’s head. It takes the burden away from the customer site so the support translates into higher availability for the customer.

Most IT systems these days are built with a level of resilience, resilience is designed into it to protect against critical business impact, but it’s important to look at what the implications are of an outage on the business, it’s also important to consider how systems and IT components interact with each other regardless of manufacture. It’s then a case of taking all this information and creating a benchmark. Against your IT systems and components, what support have you got in place today? Is it fit for purpose? Can you identify any gaps that require addressing? The next step is to get a align the service with the business critical components making sure to remember software support because operating system support is a key component in any IT systems, not only the technical support but also all the non defect support so for business critical environments, is it appropriate to have a service which answers the ‘how to’ questions. There are tools available on the web that can get you started with self assessment.

To find out what else John has to say about IT Support visit GuruOnline to view the rest of the sets.