GuruOnline Blog

This post is taken from Nick Drabble’s GuruOnline interview ‘building a dynamic infrastructure‘  and you can view the whole video in its entirety at GuruOnline now.

When it comes to building a dynamic infrastructure, firstly you need to understand what’s right for your business and there are a few ways you can go about this, in the first instance there are executive briefing documents, white papers, and client case studies etc which all document what others have done before you. Next need to work out what your business priorities are and understand where you’re trying to get to, look at where you are today and map out a series of steps that improves your IT services in line with your business goals. Read more…

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.

Last week I told you all about IBM’s Darren Adams set on how to improve collaboration in mid sized businesses.
Most of the IBM sets can be found under the technology channel but there are plenty of other contributors under the technology channel, in fact there are over 340 sets for you to view on a whole host of topics.
These topics include free business advice on driving traffic to your website and search engine optimization, e-marketing and e-commerce, AV technology and how to install and maintain it and telecommunications for businesses among others. All these of course are from industry experts with a proven track record.
Here’s a brief introduction to some of the more popular contributors and the free advice they’re offering.

Reflex AV has been in business for over 25 years since the data projector first presented the opportunity to display computer generated data to large audiences. As the technology has grown and developed so to have Reflex who has always made sure they’re at the forefront of new technology. In their sets, they give free advice on Audio Visual technology.
Audio Visual technology is basically about improving communications. This can be the way you deliver a presentation or how you want to impart information, and the AV technology is how you go about that, for example, projector equipment, displays, or video. It doesn’t have to be ridiculously over the top or too expansive but most businesses will need some sort of AV technology especially if part of that business involves presentations or conveying information. In their sets, Reflex give free advice on what sort of AV technology a business will need, how to install and maintain it as well as explaining all about digital signage.

One of the other popular contributors on the technology channel is the National B2B Centre. They have over 75 sets discussing e-collaboration, e-commerce and e-marketing. The National B2B Centre is a Centre of Excellence for e-business and they specialise in giving advice to small and medium sized businesses.
e-collaboration, e-commerce and e-marketing all fall under the topic of e-business which is the term used to describe the utilisation of internet technologies to improve the productivity or profitability of a business. This can expand much further than just having a company website, there is a whole host of technologies online which can help benefit the way a business works.
In their sets, the National B2B Center explain how e-collaboration can help a business run more effectively (this set compliments Darren Adams set on collaboration very well). The e-commerce sets explain all about how trading online can benefit you business and how to go about setting it up and the e-marketing sets give free advice on how e-marketing can benefit your business and how to go about establishing an online presence.

These are just a very brief overview of two of our contributors; check out our technology advice channel for loads of other sets offering great business advice.

Since GuruOnline was launched last year it’s gone from strength to strength with every month seeing more visitors than the previous one.

One of the more popular sets on Guru, are the IBM ones and in particular, Darren Adam’s sets on how to improve collaboration in a mid sized business. In one of my previous blogs I gave a brief overview of the IBM sets in general so you know all about the different great topics there are for you to chose from. In this blog I’m going to try and condense Darren’s 28 sets down into just one blog to give you a more in-depth overview of the type of free business advice on offer.

The two main themes around collaboration are the quota restrictions on inboxes and the file attachments often sent round with email. Due to the fact that a lot of organisations impose restrictions on the size of employee’s inboxes, staff end up spending time keeping their inboxes in check rather than concentrating on their actual duties. When file attachments are sent round with emails, you have no control on who can edit the content and to what extent, so you never know who’s working from the original and therefore cannot verify its content.

A simple solution to this problem would be for staff to start storing their content centrally, which would ensure everyone who needed it, has access to up to date information. The tools which are used to do this have to be easy to use and easy to integrate into everyday working life. Having documents managed centrally also gives an extra level of security as you can control who can read and edit the document too.

Another method of improving collaboration in mid sized businesses is unified communications, this is a very broad term for the unifications from a desktop point of view of access to things like telephony, voice over IP, video and unified messaging. When used properly, these tools can help utilize time effectively, for example, through instant messaging services, you can not only see at a glance whether someone is at their desk, but also whether they’re available to take a call – which is much quicker than having to phone them, maybe go through their secretary and inconvenience them if they’re busy.

Activity centric computing has to support both ad-hoc and structured modes of working. Ad-hoc, because a lot of business activity had to happen within a matter of days and will come up very quickly and therefore has to be completed quickly.
It is equally important to support structured activities as there will be many things which are repeatable on a monthly basis so the activity centric computing has to support a more template driven approach.

Comprehensive collaboration is not just for the benefit of your own business and employees, it’s very important to be able to collaborate effectively with organisations outside of your own, if you don’t, then the common denominator that you have is email. Which we already know can have too many failings.

The most important aspects in terms of collaborating outside your organisation is going to be security and access control because you’re starting to share some of your content and business processes outside of your organisation. The important thing however, is that it has to be easy for people to access not only in terms of security and login but also in terms of the tools they use on a day to day basis, what you use in your organisation might be very different to what another organisation uses, therefore open standards and an adoption and integration of commonly used business tools and productivity suits is very important to ensure you can collaborate in the same way.

This is just a brief overview of some of the things Darren talks about in his sets. For more business advice on collaboration why not check out the rest of the sets. Don’t forget, there are loads of other sets from IBM covering a whole host of topics from IT security to IT finance to information management.

We’ve already established why GuruOnline is such a useful and productive resource, now we need to know exactly what it contains. In this blog I’m going look at some of the newer sets.

Last summer, IBM provided some very useful information on business IT. In their sets they talked about IT Security, they explained what it is and how to manage the risks it can sometimes entail. They also talked about IT collaboration and how it can be improved in mid sized businesses. Due to the success of these sets we’ve added some more content from them. There are now two new sets from Richard Bingham and Ian West.

Richard Bingham is responsible for IBM’s financing offerings in the UK and Ireland. In his set he talks about how small and medium businesses can finance IT. Today’s current economic climate is making a lot of businesses nervous about borrowing money and investing in new projects. Unfortunately it is not going to be feasible for most businesses to wait that long before they invest in new security and IT systems. Richard’s sets offer free practical advice on how small and medium businesses can finance new IT projects.

Ian West is responsible for all aspects of IBM Software Group’s Information Management Business. In his set he talks about information management, what it is and how it is essential for the smooth running of any business. No matter what industry your business is involved in, information management is imperative if you want your business to be productive. He covers all areas of information management from information management strategies to data warehousing.

To view all the IBM sets check them out on GuruOnline.tv