Disruptive Technology
by Chris Geiser – cgeiser@pcstechnology.com

Can you make it to the end of this article without getting distracted?

I admit, in writing an article advocating less technology, I feel as sheepish as Anheuser-Busch must feel in posting the “Enjoy Responsibly” tag at the end of one of their million dollar Super Bowl commercials. But this problem of office distractions has been gnawing at me since Outlook began popping up email notifications some 10+ years ago. Ding! Hey, there’s another one…

Your Achievements Start With Ideas

Think of your top 3 achievements within your current occupation. You probably defeated some entrenched and inefficient process, won over some big new account, or convinced your boss/co-workers to look at a problem from a new perspective. Now, think about what provoked this magical moment of accomplishment.

Your achievement began with an idea, didn’t it? Okay, it was probably somebody else’s idea originally, but with your unique perspective and some new associations, it became yours . Then, you got nervous that your new idea wasn’t good enough, so you played a solitary version of “devil’s advocate” with it… Then, you modified it. Then, you grew impatient with your idea and set it down for an hour, a week, a year. Then, something in nature reminded of your idea… Then, you modified it. Finally, you mustered up the courage to propose your idea and asked for your colleagues to support it. Then, THEY modified it! What’s left of your idea gets implemented and with it, a little piece of your identity follows wherever it goes.

Your Ideas Shape Your Identity

In your quest to create ideas for the sake of profit, beauty, or efficiency, you often incidentally locate a part of your own identity, that which makes you unique amongst your 6 billion comrades. This requires a pretty deep dive into your own psyche. Ideas, by their nature, have not yet been tested against reality, so certainty is nowhere to be found. And in those solitary games of “devil’s advocate” confronting any penchant for inconsistency (dare I say, hypocrisy?) is uncomfortable study, at best.

Your Ideas Are Worth the Trouble

Look around your office and note what most of your fellow office workers are doing, right now. They are executing their assigned duties. They are processing orders, servicing customers, organizing information, and preparing their fellow co-workers for their, next-in-line, assigned duties. Yet, someone within your organization, hopefully not too long ago, conceived an idea that precipitated all of these activities. He/she designed your product, or constructed the sales pitch that won over the big account, or implemented a series of smaller ideas on the way to becoming the most efficient widget builder in the region. To say that your job security, professional status, and income level all depend upon ideas is not to overstate it.

Your Ideas Are Under Siege

According to CNET, the average office worker is interrupted once every 3 minutes (phone calls, emails, IMs, visitors, etc…). CNET also states that it takes 8 minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state. Imagine those 8 minutes as an entrance ramp onto the creative-thinking superhighway. You know you have been in the creative “zone” for an hour or two when you finally click back to Outlook and see that 2 or 3 important messages arrived, the Ding! and accompanying popup window having failed to pull your attention away from your idea. Pat yourself on the back.

Multi-Tasking for Dummies

In case you haven’t already heard, the notion that multi-tasking drives greater productivity is, in most cases, utterly false. Sure, any dummy can cook dinner and talk on the phone at the same time. Instead, let’s consider your most important work: when you create something from nothing. A recent study from Stanford found that performance suffers for people who consume more than one media at a time (i.e. composing an email, while listening to iTunes, with a Star Tribune article and all its advertisements open on your secondary monitor). That’s because you are not simultaneously paying attention to two (or more) things at once, rather you are switching your attention very rapidly between those tasks. The Stanford study revealed that, compared to lighter multi-taskers, heavy multi-taskers:

1. Have more trouble ignoring irrelevant information
2. Had poorer recall of important information
3. Took longer to switch from task to task (ironically, the heavy multi-taskers were actually worse at multi-tasking).

Silence is Golden

The process of idea formulation requires your brain to hold onto several thoughts simultaneously and for extended periods of time. You need time to draw associations, pull threads apart and dispose of some notions, while combining others. Now imagine doing all that while navigating your Rush Hour commute with Minnesota Public Radio squawking in the background.

Disrupt This!

The title for this article, “Disruptive Technology,” was used improperly. Disruptive Technology is a term that refers to a new product, so advanced in its value, that it completely shatters the existing marketplace. Remember how many Walkmans/Discmans you owned before the debut of Apple’s iPod? How many Walkmans have you bought since? The irony is now thicker than Apple’s stock price, as it is these disruptive technologies that now lay siege to our concentration. Tweets, text messages, emails, social networking, and devices that beep, shake, flash, and practically beg us for our attention, all feed man’s insatiable desire to feel connected. In a world of always-on, connected devices we have reached a point of diminishing returns. We need be aware that we sacrifice some of our most valuable future ideas, indeed our companies’ future identities, simply to be exposed to more and newer information. If you want to do something about it, one way to start is to encourage the use of “Do Not Disturb” around your office.

From the Cloud: How to Get Started With Telepresence
used with permission from the Cisco Small Business Resource Center

Are you ready for the new face-to-face experience?

Businesses everywhere are signing on with telepresence. And it’s easy to see why.

A Different Kind of Videoconferencing

One differentiator of telepresence is technical: full-motion frame rates (30 fps) and high-definition (HD) resolution (720p and 1080p).

But what excites companies most is the immersive experience–the feeling of being there, in person. Sharp and fluid images–often life-size–make participants who are far away appear to be together in the same room.

“Everyone wanted to shake hands at the end of our meeting,” says Chad Paalman of NuWave Technology Partners. “One problem: we were actually in different cities. Telepresence is an amazing experience.”

And now you can bring the experience into your business, and use it every day.

Easy, Affordable, and Interoperable

The Cisco TelePresence® Callway® service, hosted by Cisco, works with a variety of Cisco TelePresence endpoints, such as meeting room products and personal units for offices. Participating is as easy as making a phone call. Subscription plans start at $99 per month; all plans include unlimited video calls and desktop sharing.

The service is standards-based, helping ensure that your business can have telepresence meetings with customers, partners, and others who do not yet have a Cisco® Callway subscription. Any Callway subscriber can connect to any standards-based SIP or H.323 user over the Internet.

For a successful deployment of telepresence technology, consider five technical areas: bandwidth, endpoint platform, routing and switching, security, and support.

Sizing Up Bandwidth

High-quality streaming video eats bandwidth. A rule of thumb: at least 1.5 Mbps symmetric (two-way) bandwidth for each endpoint.

“Before starting a customer’s service, we run the Callway Line Quality Test tool, because bandwidth intensity depends on the endpoint’s specific network configuration and which endpoints are used concurrently,” says Matthew Slye of Cerium Networks, a Cisco Silver Certified Partner. Cerium Networks also offers evaluations that consider a business’s current IT and future plans, to ensure that its network will provide the needed services and performance.

Choosing Your Endpoints

To select the endpoint that meets your business needs, answer these questions:

• What qualitative experience do you want? Most businesses choose a dedicated endpoint for a meeting room; the resolution for these endpoints is typically 720p or 1080p. For personal use, Callway desktop units also offer 720p or 1080p; the resolution for an IP video phone or computer (Windows or Macintosh) is typically 448p (an HD webcam is 720p).
• Where will it be located? Consider issues such as privacy, sound, and lighting. “For a meeting room, consider its acoustics and how it’s used,” advises Ed Pryor of NuWave Technology Partners, a Cisco Premier Certified Partner. “For a multipurpose room, for example, you may want a retractable display.”
• Who will you meet with? Cisco TelePresence Callway endpoints with multisite capabilities allow up to four endpoints in a video conference. And a Cisco Callway bridge can instantly connect up to 12 participants.

Routing and Switching

Don’t trip up your network with latency, jitter, and packet loss. Apply traffic management, advises NuWave Technology Partners, which provides businesses with telecommunications systems and computer networks, as well as custom software and e-commerce solutions. NuWave’s tips include:

• A requirement: QoS settings that prioritize IP voice and video traffic
• A best practice: Layer 3 switching and routing that uses VLANs to segment traffic and can control inter-VLAN traffic

Security

Any cloud-based telepresence service should guard your sessions; for example, the Callway service uses advanced media encryption. You should also apply security in your own network, in accordance with the sensitivity of your telepresence sessions.

Engineers at Cerium Networks–which holds advanced specializations from Cisco in telepresence, unified communications, wireless, data center networking infrastructure, and VPN/security–recommend that all businesses use the following:

• Firewalls to control and monitor the traffic between your own network and any others
• Secure channels for traffic traversing the Internet, such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) for signaling and media
• Encryption of the signaling and administrative access, as well as the video/audio payload
• Conformance between the telepresence service’s security and your security policy and controls (for example, who at the provider is allowed to manage your data? What access do they have?)

Technology Support

When will you try the new face-to-face experience?

You can rely on the expertise of a Cisco Certified Partner to help you evaluate telepresence (and other technologies) for your business, and to help you get started. The Cisco Client Services Group also offers new Callway customers free training on how to make the best use of telepresence technology.

reprinted with permission from HP

If there’s one constant in business, it’s change.

Knowing what your business will look like in five or ten years is important, but your long-term goals should never detract from your short-term objectives. If you don’t have specific, measurable, action-oriented and—most importantly—realistic short-term objectives in place, your business may not have much of a future.

One technique that businesses can utilize when looking to the future is called “flash foresight.” This way of thinking allows businesses to look forward and unearth previously invisible opportunities, as well as transform their findings into a model that they can use to solve any problems. By knowing what to expect down the road, businesses can future-proof their technology and staffing needs accordingly, ensuring they’re prepared for any obstacles they may encounter.

Here are ten things you should consider when preparing to future-proof your business:

1. Outline your needs

Take a look at your business’s main functions and growth plans for the next few years. By doing this, you will reveal what your needs are and how your current technological priorities will line up with them.

2. Use hard trends to see what’s coming

Seeing trends before they happen can often be invaluable to your business. For instance, HP was able to foresee trends of accelerating smartphone usage amongst businesses and was able to successfully utilize that knowledge to create options like HP ePrint for most of their new printers. On the other hand, companies like GM failed to recognize certain trends like rising gas prices, resulting in the discontinuation of many of their larger automobiles.

Being able to differentiate between cyclical changes (stock market) and linear changes (population growth), and hard trends (aging baby boomers) and soft trends (not enough doctors to treat aging baby boomers), will help your company make accurate predictions.

3. Past strategies may fail to engage new customers

Has your business been around for more than five years? Do you still rely on print campaigns, direct mail, or newspaper and magazine advertising? Are you getting the same return on investment from these strategies? If so, it might be time to try something new. Don’t hesitate to put emerging technology like social media and mobile applications to use.

4. Use cloud-based services

Rather than purchasing expensive hardware and software that quickly becomes outdated, investigate cloud-based technology. By utilizing cloud computing, your company can get rid of bulky on-site servers and have virtual access to all types of documents. Employees can even access important files while on the road by using any computer or smartphone with an Internet connection.

5. Take advantage of new technology

Whether it’s a new PC or a smartphone, what you buy today can technically be obsolete tomorrow. For a long time businesses have just accepted this, but it is possible to avoid it altogether. Online systems incorporate all the major tools you need next year—not just today—for a fraction of the cost of replacing old PCs.

6. Don’t depend on one part of your business for complete success

What worked for you last year might not work for you this year. If you have a service or product that has been working for you over the last three to six months? Perhaps it’s time to shift your focus to that service or product to see what it can do for your business.

7. Go against the competition

Have you ever stopped to look at what your competition is doing? Have you ever thought about doing the exact opposite? Surprisingly, sometimes that’s the best thing to do.

8. Maintain service contracts

Think of your IT systems as the engine that runs your business. If you don’t maintain the engine, the business will stop running smoothly. That’s why it’s important to maintain all of your service contracts that cover your hardware, software, and peripheral devices. Oftentimes, these contracts can be renewed remotely, making it easy for businesses to reduce business disruption.

9. Ease into new strategies or marketing platforms

Are you implementing a strategy or service that is no longer making you money? Don’t do it anymore. The money and time you invest in something that isn’t producing results can be better spent elsewhere. Consider investing that time and money into an emerging platform such as mobile advertising and see what happens.

10. Undertake constant research and remain vigilant

Businesses are always being watched and copied by others who are interested in improving upon your ideas and techniques. Your business is not immune from this. It’s just a matter of time until someone with a cheaper or better product hits the market, and the only way to protect yourself is to remain constantly proactive.

Understanding what long-term goals mean to your business on a daily basis will help you establish your short-term objectives. Your company’s goals will only be effective if you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and how you want to do it.

used with permission from Microsoft at Work

Whenever you download a file—whether you open a spreadsheet attached to an email message, grab a cool little screensaver or mouse cursor from the web, or download music or video files from someone else’s computer—you could be putting your computer at risk.
You can take some basic steps to protect your PC and your company’s network:

• Set up your computer with security protection. When you upgrade to Windows 7 from Windows XP, you automatically get a lot of security protection built right into the system.
• Increase your awareness of attack methods so that you can be on the lookout for them.
• Use tools to remove unwanted software that has been downloaded to your computer (despite your best efforts to prevent it).

Here’s how:

1. Get ready: Strengthen your computer’s defenses

Start by checking with your system administrator to find out about your company’s security tools and policies. Read the articles Understanding security and safer computing and How to boost your malware defense and protect your PC to get an overview of the kinds of threats that exist and what you can do to defend against them. Because new threats are identified every day, remember to keep your security components—including those on the following list—up to date.

• Firewalls. These include hardware or software that checks information coming from the Internet and either turns it away or lets it pass. Firewalls are built into Windows XP Service Pack 2 and all later versions of the Windows operating system.
  
• Antivirus protection. Viruses, worms, and Trojan horses are programs that use the Internet to infect vulnerable computers. Microsoft Security Essentials offers free, real-time protection for your PC against malicious software. Or choose an antivirus program from a list of Microsoft partners who provide anti-malware software.
  
• Spyware protection. Spyware can display ads and pop-ups, collect information, and change your computer settings or default home page without you knowing about it. Use Windows Defender, which is available as a free download for Windows XP Service Pack 2 and is built into later versions of Windows. Or install your own antispyware program.
  
• Software updates. Regular updates to Windows help protect your computer against new viruses and other security threats. Be sure you’re using the latest version of your web browser, and turn on the browser’s security features.
  
• Email spam filters. Microsoft Outlook includes a junk email filter, as do many other email programs, along with additional features that can help block unwanted messages, disable links, and warn you about threatening content.

2. Download with caution: Think first. Click later.

With your computer’s defenses strengthened, the rest is up to you. Here’s what you can do to protect your computer.

• Beware of fraudulent email messages. Don’t click links or open attachments unless you’re sure of the source. In pop-up messages or warnings, click the (close box) instead of OK or Agree to get rid of the box.
  
• Only download from reputable sites. Be cautious about downloading from unknown sources and from sites containing objectionable material or too-good-to be-true offers. Microsoft Download Center, for example, is the best, safest source for Microsoft products. Bookmark it in your browser’s favorites, and check it out to find the most popular downloads, free trials, and newest software available from us.
  
• Install and use file-sharing programs cautiously. When you use file-sharing programs to trade music, video, or other files on the web, you make some of your files—or even your entire hard disk drive—available to others using similar software.
  
• Save files for safer downloads. If you’ve decided to download a file from the Internet, save the file first to your hard drive. Then, when you attempt to open the file, your antivirus software can check the file and delete it if it detects potentially damaging code. To do this, in the File Download dialog box, click the Save button instead of the Run or Open button.

3. Remove malicious software

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, you may download a program you don’t want. If this happens to you, here are some ways to get rid of it:

• Run antispyware tools. Windows Defender, which is built into Windows Vista and Windows 7, reduces the likelihood of downloading spyware in the first place. If you are using another antispyware program, make sure it is up to date and then scan your system, following the instructions for removing suspicious software.
  
• Run the malicious software removal tool. Users of earlier versions of Windows who suspect that malware is causing their computers to slow down or fail can use the Malicious Software Removal Tool to remove the malware.
  
• Disable add-ons. Web browser add-ons can display things like toolbars and stock tickers but can also install spyware or other malicious software. In Internet Explorer, you can disable add-ons from the Tools menu. Click Manage Add-ons, select the one you want to disable, and then click Disable.

Due to the changing nature of potential attacks, preventing malicious software from damaging your computer takes continuous vigilance. However, by installing and updating protection tools and by using caution when you work, you can help minimize the risk.

Disasters happen. Is your business ready?

Preparing for an emergency is a key factor to business continuity after a disaster. Wherever the threat comes from – whether it’s physical, virtual, network failure or cybercrime-related – it’s important your business is equipped to deal with the problem.

In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates over 40 per cent of businesses never reopen following a disaster. And when we consider these potential consequences, it’s important you have a disaster preparedness plan ready. In creating such a plan Cindy Bates, Microsoft US SMB Vice President, recommends you consider the following:

Communication strategy – Make a plan about how you will communicate any disaster and its affects to your internal and external audiences – 40 % of businesses will never reopen following a disaster.

Financial management – Ensure you can still access your company accounts, pay bills on time and make the payroll.

Data backup – Keep your company information safe by backing up assets and storing a copy offsite on a regular basis.

Cloud-based software – Move software to cloud-based versions of the programs you use today. This acts as a great alternative to data backup and lets employees have access to email, important documents, contacts and calendars – anytime from virtually anywhere.

Technology updates – Maintain vigilance when it comes to keeping your technology updated with security patches to safeguard your network against the latest threats.

Discover how Microsoft Office 365, Online Services, Windows Server and Windows Small Business Server 2011 can help you prepare for disaster recovery. Find out more by contacting us today.

Used with permission from Microsoft.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software delivery method that provides access to software and its functions remotely as a Web-based service. SaaS allows you to access business functionality for less than paying for licensed applications.

Benefits

• Save Money
  Since SaaS pricing is based on a monthly fee, it becomes just another operational expense rather than a large capital expense. Because the software is hosted remotely, you don’t need to invest in additional hardware. Software as a Service removes the need for you to handle the installation, setup, and daily upkeep and maintenance.
  
• Save Time
  Because you eliminate many of the typical implementation tasks associated with licensed software and because the software is already up and running on the SaaS vendor’s data center, deployment time tends to be much shorter with a SaaS application than a traditional one.
  
• Gain Immediate Access to the Latest Innovations
  With traditional licensed software, you generally have to wait for the next release to benefit from the latest innovations or to move to a new operating system. Given the cost of moving to a new version, it may not even be feasible to upgrade each time a new release becomes available. With a SaaS subscription, you benefit from innovations on an on-going basis. As soon as a new or improved feature appears in the application, you can begin using it.

If you are interested in how you can get your business the new software it needs in a convenient way by working with a SaaS provider, please contact us.