What does it take for a company to
scale up fast? It takes good people
committed to meeting productivity gains through the smart use of technology.
Small to mid-size companies need
increasingly sophisticated world-class
enterprise technology solutions. Unlike
their behemoth corporate counterparts
with staffs in numerous specialties, the
smaller business owners’ strengths usually
rest only in one or a few functional areas.
Planning the IT effort to deliver productivity gains at a lower cost is often not among
their skill sets.
Pitted against giant firms with their retinue of in-house staff and paid consultants,
smaller firms lose out on experiencing
faster returns on investment and the far
lower operating costs that result from a
smartly integrated technology platform.
“Small and mid-size companies need
solutions that increase IT performance,
security and business processes while
improving the bottom line,” says Omar
Yakar, CEO and co-founder of Agile360, a
technology consultant and engineering
firm.
Smart Business spoke with Yakar about
how smaller companies can level the playing field, allowing them to compete with
large players with their powerhouse-computing infrastructure and seamless flow of
information, yet with the agility inherent in
a small and nimble player.
How do better access strategies help a business grow?
First, you need to define the term ‘access’
within an IT context. Access refers to how
you get to the information on your hardware and software. The question then
becomes, who is capable of accessing the
applications and what data ought to be
available to them, regardless of the location? Can your constituencies retrieve the
information they need from a variety of
locations?
A good adviser can consolidate all your
different applications, whether they are
Windows applications that must reside on
a local desktop, Web-based, client/server
or a mainframe application into one simplified, common-access strategy.
The result: the right people — whether
they are your employees or business partners — can view information deigned for
their eyes only, wherever they may be
located.
In many cases, must the way an IT department interacts with users be redefined?
In a way, yes. A firm’s IT department will
put together a network of computers with
a reasonable understanding of the costs of
building and maintaining the data center,
but it often does not understand the cost
savings that a centralized access delivery
strategy will provide.
While it’s convenient for a user to access
an application from anywhere, you must
also have a handle on who is trying to
retrieve information and for what lengths
of time. This is critical to an efficient operation. You need to know the speed and the
effectiveness of how information is delivered. Such information influences how
much you will spend buying and maintaining servers, storage space and a network.
If the benefits of a desktop refresh can be
realized in 10 percent of the time and at
one-third the cost, imagine the impact that
can have on the economy at large.
How important is it to be able to control
access?
A case in point is the damage caused
when an employee’s PC with valuable personal information, such as customers’
Social Security numbers, is lost or stolen.
Should such information be stored in a PC,
or would it be better to access the data
from a centralized system where the data
will sit? Or — if it must be stored on a PC
— can we encrypt the data so that it cannot
be compromised?
Today, government auditors increasingly
ask businesses whether their vendors have
implemented security efforts that prevent
the unwarranted release of information.
The tight regulatory constraints that big
firms face now have trickled down, forcing
smaller operations to adopt industry-standard security mechanisms.
What should companies look for in an IT
adviser?
One option is to look for a holistic
approach. That is, how existing technology
affects your productivity.
Also, look for thoroughness. A good
adviser will come in with project management discipline; provide a methodology, or
a plan of action; and offer documentation
that illustrates how a system is configured
and how to keep it running.
The adviser should be affordable.
Gartner Research claims that the industry
average for deployed application access
per desktop costs about $3,500. That is
more than three times what it might cost
— $1,100 — for a company like us to do a
centralized application delivery.
Make sure the adviser will get in and out
quickly. There should be no need to keep
the adviser under contract for extended
periods, other than requested assistance
with ongoing maintenance and support.
Finally, look for a company that is empathetic to your needs to accelerate your
business agility.
OMAR YAKAR is the co-founder and CEO of Irvine-headquartered Agile360. Reach him at [email protected] or (949)
253-4106.