Frustrated, you send that e-mail to the CEO to get some attention on something that should have been fixed a decade ago. Interestingly, this touches off a pattern of waste that is repeated daily in organizations everywhere. Allowing  pedestrian problems to ignite into full-blown all-hands-on-deck emergencies is completely avoidable.  Sadly, it’s more the norm than the exception.

Even worse, real emergencies often go unrecognized while extraordinary effort is expended for ordinary gain.

If this happens frequently in your organization, isn’t it time to look beyond the fire fighting?

1. Do you have chronic issues that are never completely resolved?
2. Do the same people make the same mistakes unable to turn a lesson learned into a lesson remembered?
3. Are resources stretched so thin that a satisfactory root cause analysis is omitted in order to fight the next fire?
4. Is Executive Management seemingly oblivious to the perils since they often benefit from extraordinary effort exercises?

Breaking your organization’s dependency on fire-fighting as a normal reaction is not a quick-fix proposition. Finding a way to measure and report the cost of extraordinary efforts and contrasting them against the underwhelming, ordinary results they produce is a good first step.

Getting someone to act on that data is the real trick.

Nothing Concentrates the Mind Like a Hanging

A sense of urgency is often missing in IT projects. Milestones are missed with regularity and it’s often unclear who is responsible for deliverables. The expectation that a Google search will yield the technical recipe often substitutes for seeking out experienced help.

It’s not uncommon to hear some imaginative reasoning for why a project missed a deadline or failed to accomplish the objective. Most of these reasons are just fabrications. Sometimes the simple steps such as having clear consequences (the hanging) and an immovable deadline (at dawn) are not sufficient to provoke any meaningful results.

Now what?

It’s no secret that most people inherently avoid conflicts. They know what they should do, but inexplicably can not confront the situation before them. It’s no different with a technology project but there is a twist. You may not be able to overcome the imaginative technical fabrications in addition to confronting the individuals involved.

It’s time to seek out a peer review of the project and place a technical expert in direct conflict with your in-house resources.

What happens next will be the real test of your own leadership.

• Travel Expenses
• Invoices
• Project Tracking
• Orders and Quotes
• Sales Prospects
• Workflow Checklists
• Vendor Management

The issues with spreadsheets manifest almost immediately and typically when there are more than three employees.

• Who has the current spreadsheet when multiple copies are sent via e-mail and stored in various places on the file server?
• Only one person can update at a time and often changes are overwritten when multiple employees are working on the same sheet.
• There’s no auditing and no way to tell who made what change.

The proliferation of spreadsheets is often a symptom of a business that needs to establish procedures and implement systems that can enforce the desired work flow.

If you recognize these issues in your business, what can you do to improve your efficiency?

The simple answer is that you need to assess your business processes and implement the appropriate technology to change those processes. The practical answer is that life and business is not that simple. Almost every business process change is resisted by employees who are comfortable with the legacy methods of running the business with spreadsheets. Perhaps they invented those clever sheets and feel some separation anxiety?

And that’s where spreadsheets are killing your business. You can’t move forward chained to a legacy method that doesn’t scale as your business grows.

Here’s a quick list of solutions that can help with some of your needs:

• Timesheet and Expense Management
  • Automate Time and Expense Approvals with Electronic Submission
  • Reporting for Billing and Invoicing
  • Ability to Assign Time to Projects and Tasks
  • Web based to support a Mobile and Distributed Workforce
  • Ability to Assign Users to Approvers and Delegate Approvers
  • Full Expense Management including Travel, Mileage, and Employee Reimbursements

• Order Management System
• Customer Service Management
• Customer Relationship Management

Kill the management by spreadsheet before it kills your business.

See Rich Tehrani’s post on the topic for details.

1. Does Vista work with your VPN solution? (Specifically, does your VPN software even support Vista and did they test it?)
2. Does your Vista machine still print correctly to all of your printers? (You know the drill…did it actually get tested?)
3. What’s the roll-back plan? (No excuses for not imaging user machines in case a roll-back to XP is necessary).

Every business can use more effective marketing across all channels (not just online).

The paradox is that when you are small you need the most help when you can least afford it. When you are large and flush with cash, you can afford to chase all the wrong wisdom…kind of like betting on every horse on the track.

Even before the dawn of RSS, I was subscribed to far to many listservs, newsletters, and blogs. One thing I noticed among the marketing/copy writing/effective selling crowd was how quickly untested claims became Conventional Wisdom. Entire campaigns are created at light speed and you can track the cross-promotion, undisclosed relationships, insider clubs, and even some insider dissension as the experts race to exploit the very businesses who need the most help.

I don’t personally know Charlie Cook or Marcia Yudkin and certainly don’t make a nickel from any cross promotion with anyone (we move datacenters). Both of these individuals have free marketing tips and unique perspectives that are worth a visit in your quest to improve your results.

However, for the cases I’ve inspected, I’ve observed that there is no injection attempt and there is no spam message to send nor are there any offending links to post (the kind you get with trackback spam). Some of the e-mail addresses, however, do appear to be legitimate. So what’s going on?

Could this be an attempt to poison black hole databases using automation? The vulnerable web form then sends the opt-in notice to an unsuspecting real e-mail user who in turn may report the offender. Maybe.

Or is this just a version of on-line graffiti where your e-mail opt-in database gets filled up with nonsense and you unsuspectingly use that list in subsequent campaigns?

Whatever the reason, if you have an e-mail web sign-up or opt-in form, it’s time to protect it from automated fill-in before you have to manually prune your e-mail list database.

Captchas (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha ) are a common way to protect your web sign-up form.

2. Are they brilliant or clueless?

3. Who is next?

4. Who does this threaten? Who does this help?

I’m enjoying the TechChrunch speculation from readers where you can decide which dots you’d like to connect to understand the deal.
My take is that Cisco has a history of acquisitions and the track record is mixed on their brilliance and valuation of the companies. Today, they bought a great brand name. Let’s wait and see what they do with that purchase or if it becomes yet another tombstone in their acquisition graveyard.

Before deploying a NAC solution, ask yourself some questions to determine if you’ve even picked the low hanging security fruit:
1. Does your organization classify its information so the appropriate protection can be applied? (Policy)

2. Do you have a firewall and is it properly configured? (Perimeter Security)

3. Do you have an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and is it properly configured? (Alarm System for Threats)

4. Do you have up-to-date virus scanning on all of your machines? (Local Threat Detection)

5. Do you practice Separation of Duties in your Information Technology (IT) Security Practices as an internal control? (Audit Control Procedures)

6. Do you actively budget for Information Security protection? (IT Budget Item)

Finally, what security problem are you trying to solve with NAC?

Because NAC has been with us two short years, test your NAC solution against that question.