Your business is leaking time and money

Your business is leaking time and money.

‘Time equals money’, we’re all aware of that. However, as a small business owner, you know that time is often most important. In today’s tough business conditions, speed and agility can give your business the edge it needs to prosper and beat bigger, slower competitors. Here’s how to plug the holes. In this eBook we’re going to look at the top reasons why businesses, which should be quick and agile, find themselves slowing down and losing their edge. We’ll also reveal the different ways in which you can overcome these problems - from simple process improvements to cultural changes.

Hole No.1 Meetings are essential for business communication and management. Good meetings are invaluable because they break down barriers, drive projects, set agendas, create new ideas and promote participation. As a result, meetings are often seen as the solution to any conceivable problem, meaning they become overused and poorly managed. Bad meetings meander aimlessly, waste both time and money, and can be demotivating to your employees. meetings I wish I was doing something more productive instead. Not another meeting! Is this meeting really necessary? Surely there’s a better way. This is going nowhere. I’m wasting my time here. I’m bored. This is as clear as mud! Five steps to better meetings 1. Make sure it’s necessary - before sending out a group invite, ask yourself if there is an alternative, more effective, less time-consuming way to achieve your goal. 2. Start the meeting with a clear objective - by defining your objective, you can plan and make use of time more effectively - your attendees will go away from the meeting feeling that something positive has been achieved. 3. Use time wisely - place a time limit on the meeting and stick to a pre-prepared agenda to avoid aimless tangents and further time wasting. Meetings don’t need to last a whole hour! 4. Circulate a post-meeting summary - in this way, everyone knows what their tasks are and will all stay on the same page. 5. Promote involvement and participation - Ask people to input on your agenda before the meeting. Encourage everyone to participate during the meeting and ask for their feedback after the meeting. Remember, when people feel that they’ve contributed, they’re more likely to feel responsibility. In a recent study, office workers estimated that they spent 4 hours a week in meetings, over half of which they felt was wasted!(1) And it’s not just a problem for employees; in a recent study, it was estimated that European managers every week, spend 5 hours planning meetings and 19 hours in meetings.(2) It’s unsurprising therefore, that a recent study found that 47% of office workers felt that meetings were the number one cause of wasted time.(3) The first thing that businesses can do to save valuable time is to make the meetings they do have more effective. 1,260 Days Wasted* In a business of 100 employees, if each office worker spent 4 hours a week in meetings(1) , half of which were wasted then that would be 10,080 wasted hours. ! *Based on 252 working days per year, 50.4 working weeks per year, 8 working hours per day.

Hole No.1 When not to have a meeting A culture of ‘let’s have a meeting’ is something that habitually creeps into every business. But often these meetings are superfluous. If this is the case, try and understand exactly what people are using meetings for, and encourage alternative ways of collaborating. Some of the common reasons for needless meetings can be: Document feedback - Meetings designed to gather feedback on documents or drafts can often be avoided if the correct sharing and collaboration tools are in place. Today’s office tools often include the ability to collaborate within documents, to meet, or not to meet? and things can be taken even further with web based collaboration tools or services. To reach a consensus - are people holding meetings in order to get approval for things that they should be able to decide upon themselves? Make sure that everyone is empowered to make his or her own decisions. Unnecessary meetings to seek unnecessary approval are not only extremely time consuming, but are also de-motivating for everyone involved. Project management - are your meetings a symptom of poor project management and a lack of organisation or process? If you already have the right processes in place to facilitate people working effectively together, then you should find that you need fewer meetings. Alternative places In order to discourage superfluous meetings it’s important that you can offer effective alternative ways for people to share and communicate thoughts and ideas: Take your meeting online – Todays VoIP and instant messaging services allow people to instantly see who’s available and connect with them using either text, audio or video. If required conversations can easily be moved into online meetings, using any number of the available web based meeting platforms. Creating spaces and places for discussion Today a range of services allow businesses to create ‘virtual workspaces’. Within these spaces notice boards enable a dialogue between team members, documents can be stored and easily found, and centralised calendars allow for key deadlines to be shared amongst everyone involved. Automate workflows - By automating common tasks and workflows using web based platforms people can work together on tasks more effectively and efficiently. Workflows can help teams fulfil their projects and avoid pointless meetings thereby improving productivity. that is the question. Yes! Yes!No! No!

Hole No.2 Whilst the upfront costs of laptops and computers may be falling, the real costs are in the time it takes to support and manage them. Not only does this include buying and configuring all these new devices, but addressing user problems and staying up to date with the constant stream of patches and updates that the users require. These challenges are further exacerbated by two of today’s key trends: 1. Mobile working can mean having to support both computers and users who are away from the office. This obviously makes things significantly harder and more time consuming With Microsoft Windows 8 making an appearance, many small businesses are likely to be considering a mass purchase of new notebooks and PCs - to the delight of their staff. A recent survey by Spiceworks highlights that 48% of SMEs expect desktops and laptops to be the top focus for their IT budgets in 2013.(4) 2. Today’s employees want to use consumer- oriented computers and devices in the office (Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD). It’s an attractive premise, as people are more motivated and productive when using devices they’re habitually comfortable with. However, trying to support devices that IT doesn’t have complete control of can be difficult. Securing sensitive data that resides on personal hardware is also a challenge. So what’s the answer? Is there a way of keeping everyone happy as well as spending less time managing multiple desktops? In short, yes. ! 63 Days Wasted* If each IT person spends just two hours per day managing and maintaing desktop computers, then that’s 504 hours a year. *Based on 252 working days per year, 50.4 working weeks per year, 8 working hours per day.

Hole No.2 Simplifying management with virtual desktops Virtual desktops run your local desktop and applications on a central server, rather than on your PC. This means that all of the updates and administration that would normally be carried out on each PC, now only need to be carried out once on a central server. This vastly simplifies the process of managing users and desktops, as well as significantly reducing security risks. Because the hard work is being carried out on the server, there’s much less need to upgrade memory, hard drives or processors on individual PCs. What’s more, users can access their desktop from any connected device (from iPads to notebooks) and because all your important data is held centrally, there are no longer any security risks associated with lost or stolen devices. But what’s the effect on users? Users won’t notice any difference at all. They simply log onto their desktop, from any connected device, and immediately have access to all of the applications that they normally use everyday. Hardware and software Operations Administration End user management time

! 31 Days Wasted* 21 hours a month are wasted managing software and hardware updates.(5) Hole No.3 A structured approach to server management Server management consumes the IT department’s time in many ways. But taking a structured approach to the way that servers are managed can save time in the short term as well as preventing problems further down the line. Here are the key steps that you should be planning for when you’re managing your servers: 1. Deployment - this requires a total understanding of your requirements in terms of users, performance and capacity before purchasing and configuring your servers. 2. Updates - maintaining servers are a regular and essential task. From security patches to bios updates, staying on top of these tasks is vital. 3. Monitoring - it’s essential to keep checking your server’s state and capacity, so as to quickly deal with problems and anticipate future upgrade needs, as usage and storage requirements rise. 4. Maintenance - the software as well as the hardware. From hard drives to memory, parts do, and always will, wear out. Better and faster in the Cloud All of these challenges can be avoided by embracing Cloud hosting. From web servers to file and application servers, your Cloud service provider will take care of the entire server lifecycle - from set up to decommissioning. This will free up valuable time for your IT department to focus on more valuable and strategic initiatives. Not only will you save time on managing your infrastructure, a Cloud-based approach to server management can also make you faster and more agile through: • Scalability on demand - additional server resources or applications can be expanded or contracted instantaneously to meet your unique requirements. • Application roll out - if you need to deploy new business applications quickly, you can. It’s as simple as that – no matter what operating system or platform works best for you or your situation. There’ll be no more waiting for hardware and manually installing and setting up new servers, ever. How much time do your IT staff spend maintaining your on-site servers and hardware? Recent research has revealed that companies spend 21 hours a month managing software and hardware updates alone.(5) This isn’t hugely surprising when you consider that the average European small business has 6 different servers!(6) Servers are time-consuming and expensive to maintain, simply because they need continuous monitoring along with periodical upgrades and all kinds of other maintenance and upkeep. And this problem only appears to be getting worse - in a survey of medium sized businesses in 2009, 58% of respondents described server management as a problem. By 2012 this figure had grown to 79%.(7) < Main tain < Mon itor OSDeployment Configure Discovery Re-provision R em ediate ReplaceParts Power Perform ance Alerts/Health Driver Firm w are BIOS Dep loy > Up date > *Based on 252 working days per year, 50.4 working weeks per year, 8 working hours per day.

Hole No.4 Part of the reason for this is that many organisations are highly reliant on technology to carry out their day-to-day tasks - meaning that any downtime has severe repercussions on people’s ability to perform their jobs. Despite this reliance, many smaller businesses are just not equipped with a truly robust IT infrastructure to cope with downtime. For example, in a recent survey of European businesses, 23% of companies with 24 or fewer employees operated dedicated server rooms and 63% of all European SMEs had experienced server overheating. (6) Here are some of the common reasons why businesses suffer more downtime than is necessary: 1. Backup strategies that don’t consider how long systems will take to restore. 26% of European small businesses are still reliant on tape backup solutions.(6) This may sound like an effective procedure, but consider experiencing a major failure. How long would it take you to receive the tapes from where they’re stored? How long would it then take to procure a new server? And then rebuild the server and reload all of the data? In reality this becomes not hours of downtime, but days and days - and few growing businesses can afford that. 2. Poor understanding of which applications really drive revenue and which applications are popular with the most staff. Understanding these factors can help to prioritise which applications are vital parts of your infrastructure and, should therefore, be the focus for your business recovery efforts. 3. Infrastructure design. Solutions such as virtualised or clustered servers can vastly increase the reliability of your most important data assets and infrastructure. Saving time and reducing risk by moving to the Cloud By embracing Cloud services, as opposed to locally run or managed servers and applications, businesses can benefit from reduced downtime in a number of ways: 1. Resiliency - cloud service providers offer guaranteed levels of availability and uptime for all the services that they provide. By using Enterprise-class data centres with multiple levels of redundancy, it’s possible to provide levels of data availability that far exceed those that most small businesses could ever dream of achieving. 2. Online backup - whilst critical applications and servers may be hosted in the Cloud, many organisations will still find themselves with significant amounts of information residing on local PCs. By taking advantage According to research conducted in 2011, European organisations with over 50 employees are collectively losing more than 37 million hours each year through IT downtime and data recovery. Which means, on average, each company is losing 552 hours every year.(8) Aside from loss of time and productivity, there are other potentially serious impacts of downtime: • Damage to your reputation and a risk to loyalty of your customers • Regulatory and compliance impacts can range from penalties associated with breach of SLAs to fines for breaching regulatory requirements • The cost of repairs and catching up with, and replacing, lost work. of online backup services individual devices can be continuously backed up to the Cloud. This not only simplifies the backup process per say, but also means that data can be restored instantly in the event of any problems. 3. Virtual desktops - by moving people onto virtual desktops, data is no longer kept on individuals’ local PCs. Users log onto a desktop, in which all of their data and applications are stored, in the Cloud. This means that if their computer crashes, is broken or even lost, they can log in from another PC and begin work exactly where they left off - with the absolute minimum of downtime. Overall, in Europe, when business- critical systems are compromised, staff can only work at less than two thirds (63%) of their usual level.(8) ! 69 Days Lost* On average, companies with over 50 employees are losing 552 hours every year to downtime.(8) *Based on 252 working days per year, 50.4 working weeks per year, 8 working hours per day.

Hole No.5 No matter what size your business is, you need to be confident that you have the correct security in place. The challenge for many smaller businesses is that this can quickly and easily become time- consuming. The biggest challenge is that security requires skills and expertise in a range of different areas – a cost in time and money that few smaller businesses can readily justify. Re-imaging infected machines is a drain on IT resources, taking up 20 hours per month on average(5)  Managing anti-virus definition file updates takes an average of 19 hours per month(5) The DIY approach to IT IT as a service Physical security Servers should be kept in a locked and secure environment Your servers are kept in secure data centres offering high levels of physical security. Anti-virus and anti-malware Virus definitions and software need to be continually updated in order to be effective. All the time consuming management of definitions and updates will all be taken care of for you. Intrusion defence Firewalls need to be monitored and managed in order to be truly effective at preventing intruders. Firewalls are set up, monitored and managed by network security experts - ensuring that any attempted intrusions are rapidly identified and dealt with. Access controls Accounts for people who leave the organisation need to be locked and secured. It’s also wise to make sure that passwords are regularly refreshed. The creation of new accounts and passwords, as well as the deletion of expired ones can all be taken care of by your service provider. Segmentation If all your applications are on one server and it crashes, then you’ll really be in trouble. Running them on different servers helps, but it’s very costly for a small business. Services such as email and business applications are always stored completely separately, to infinitely reduce security risks. On top of that, it’s so simple and cost- effective to run new virtual servers, that you can enjoy more separation of resources and applications than might otherwise be practical. Device hardening Ensuring that devices have old software removed and any vulnerabilities managed is vital to keeping all your systems secure Virtual desktops allow you to easily manage and enforce policies about what applications people can install and use ! 58 Days Wasted* Businesses are spending on average 39 hours per month dealing with virus infections and infected machines.(5) *Based on 252 working days per year, 50.4 working weeks per year, 8 working hours per day.

Hole No.6 Across the EU there is umbrella data protection legislation spanning all member countries, in the form of the European Union Data Protection and e-Privacy directives. However complying can be complicated, as individual member states have interpreted the legislation very differently. Developing an IT infrastructure that can meet all of the criteria specific to your industry and location, can be a lengthy process. Small and medium sized businesses are arguably at greater risk than larger companies when it comes to compliance, simply because they often don’t have the IT personnel or expertise to deal with compliance requirements. Claiming ignorance, however, is not a defence and smaller businesses are given no more leniency than big enterprises when it comes to the law. Here are just some of the ways in which compliance traditionally takes up time and resources: • Data identification - data that may be needed in legal discovery must be identified in order for it to be appropriately dealt with. • Safe storage - data that your organisation holds must be protected both physically and digitally and, in some regions, must not leave the country of origin. • Retrieval - processes must be developed and put in place to ensure the quick retrieval of information for any of the relevant authorities. Small businesses can spend a lot of time complying with local laws relating to the protection, storage and retrieval of data. Meeting complicated and constantly changing compliance requirements may be one of the biggest benefits of moving to the Cloud. Most compliance and regulatory requirements deal with data and the process of security and control. By moving to the Cloud many of these factors are taken care of: • Always on - guaranteed high levels of availability and secure connections ensure data can be made available to authorities whenever it’s needed. • Security- secure data centres ensure your data is protected from physical and digital threats. Your Cloud provider should be able to provide you with any necessary compliance certifications. • Full audit trail - cloud service providers can maintain full audit trails, so that if data is requested its provenance can be assured and it can be readily made available. • Country specific compliance - often Cloud service providers provide pre- defined templates for country and industry-specific requirements. This saves significant time and delivers peace of mind to businesses that need to meet local requirements. Enjoy peace of mind by moving to the cloud ! 1,575 Days Wasted* If your employees spend 30 mins a day on compliance related issues, in a company of 100, that’s 12,600 hours lost every year! *Based on 252 working days per year, 50.4 working weeks per year, 8 working hours per day.

Hole No.7 The problem of escalating data storage isn’t just something that’s experienced by large organisations. 63% of Europe’s smaller businesses store more than one terabyte of data on their servers. As the sheer volume of data that we produce grows, so the problem of finding what we want, when we want it also grows. It’s been estimated that the average worker spends just under 7 hours a week filing and organising documents and 9 hours a week searching for them!(10) As the focus on collaboration grows and people want to access content from different locations and on different devices, we need to find better ways to store and recover relevant information quicker. Using a cloud service for your file hosting will enable your people to access any file from anywhere. But accessing the relevant file is only part of the problem; the real challenge is immediately finding the specific information that they need. Here are our tips on bringing some order to your file storage: 1. Designate a workspace coordinator - One key person, such as the office manager or a project manager, who will control the general administrative needs of the storage space. 2. Develop a filing plan - This should fit the users’ needs and the business processes. Create a single structure for all documents, regardless of their type or where they are stored. 3. Establish naming conventions - It’s important to base names on some type of commonly agreed and controlled vocabulary. Try to keep these names short and ensure that consistency is maintained. 4. Clear out regularly. As we’ve already discussed, data growth is exponential. So it’s important that you have an archiving policy and procedure that’s well managed and maintained. A faster way of searching When it comes to file storage, relying on simple directories and folders, as a way to file and store documents, is always going to be problematic. Today’s web based document storage services allow for richer indexing and simpler searching for documents. Documents can be organised and searched for in more natural ways and in many cases these services also take care of ‘versioning’, so removing the need to wade through multiple versions of a document. searching A faster way of By 2020, globally stored data will grow by 4300% from 2009 levels.(9) ! 10,080 Days Lost* Individuals spend 16 hours a week, filing and searching for documents.(10) In a business of 100 employees that adds up to 80,640 hours a year.

Hole No.8 Even small companies will deal with a large number of suppliers and providers. These include: • Hardware suppliers • Software suppliers • Telephony systems providers • Voice telecoms suppliers • Data network suppliers • Tape backup/archiving suppliers • IT support companies • Software support providers • Compliance regulators Managing and coordinating a wide range of suppliers can lead to a number of challenges, such as a duplicated work or a lack of ownership and responsibility. Below we’ve outlined six different steps that businesses should take to improve the way that they manage suppliers and enjoy the maximum value for the minimum fuss. Improving supplier management. 1. Choose a quality service. Review exactly which professional bodies your suppliers are members of. Also look for quality accreditations such as ISOs. 2. Understand your own needs. What’s most important to you? Service? Features? Value? Or all of them? It’s important that In today’s stringent economic climate, supplier management is most critical when it comes to controlling your costs and maximising the value of every single transaction. However, it’s also important to reduce the amount of time that your business spends dealing with and managing different suppliers. you begin by understanding clearly where any supplier can really add value for you. 3. Develop a relationship. Meet the people that you’ll be dealing with on a day-to-day basis, and ensure that you make time to regularly review their changing offers and explain your changing needs. 4. Payment on time. This builds trust, goodwill and good relationships. It also puts you in a stronger position as far as future negotiations are concerned. 5. Service level agreements. Be clear about the service levels that you expect from your suppliers. This should include when services are delivered, legal responsibilities, monitoring processes, dispute resolution and termination conditions. 6. Performance review - Schedule regular reviews of your suppliers’ performance. All too often relationships can turn bad because of a lack of understanding and a breakdown in communication. Consolidation in the Cloud By moving to a comprehensive service provider, you can consolidate all your different suppliers into one. Moving away from an approach that forces you to manage your own independent infrastructure, means you can take an approach that’s solely focused on delivering the services that your business needs. suppliers ! 63 Days Wasted* If each IT person spends two hours per day managing suppliers, then that’s 504 hours a year wasted! *Based on 252 working days per year, 50.4 working weeks per year, 8 working hours per day.

Hole No.9 In most big cities, rush-hour congestion lasts up to 3 hours in the morning and evening – the ‘rush hour’ is time that’s often wasted and of little value to employers. Embracing remote working and giving people the flexibility to work from home, when necessary, can give them extra time in the working day and improve their productivity. However, it’s not something that businesses should just rush into. In order to get the most out of working hours there are a few factors that organisations need to consider: Embracing effective remote working in your business Training - Make sure there is a training programme in place to give employees the knowledge and skills that they need to successfully work remotely. Take into account practical matters, such as how they connect to the tools and services that they need to do their jobs. Also consider how remote working will affect their working practices; be clear about the behavioural rules you expect to be adhered to. Applications and data – Give thorough consideration to how easily remote workers are able to access the applications that they need to work. There are several different ways in which businesses can provide access to all- important applications: 1. VPN Access – This is a connection between your employee’s home PC and your office or data centre. The VPN will perform in a For reasons ranging from adverse traffic and weather conditions to lack of sleep, the daily commute means many of us arrive late for work on a regular basis. In a recent survey 16% of workers claimed that they arrived late for work at least once a week, while 27% stated they arrived late for work at least once a month.(11) Even when everything does go smoothly, the effects on stress levels of a hectic commute does little for employee productivity similar way to your office LAN, providing access to your applications. • Pros – Minimal change is required if you host applications yourself. • Cons – The VPN needs to be managed and maintained. If the VPN fails people will not be able to work. Desktop support will need to be delivered remotely. Plus, you will still need to manage the applications and infrastructure from your office. 2. Cloud services – Applications and email are delivered through the cloud, allowing users access from anywhere. • Pros – No infrastructure to manage. Guaranteed service levels. Maximum flexibility. • Cons – Users still need remote desktop support. 3. Virtual desktop – In this situation, not only are applications and email hosted remotely, the user’s desktop is hosted remotely too. • Pros – Users can log onto their desktop from any device or location (enabling you to work from home, on the road or even your local cafe). Maximum security and control for the business. No infrastructure at the office or the employee’s home to manage. • Cons – If users can’t connect to the Internet then they wont be able to log into their desktop. Communication - Assess the communication tools and platforms that you have in your business and make sure they are suitable to support remote working. It’s important that just because people are working remotely, they shouldn’t feel separated or distant from their team and colleagues within the organisation. Solutions such as VoIP and desktop video conferencing allow remote workers to keep constantly involved. They’ll be able to add value and collaborate with other team members, partners or customers just as easily as they would from their desk. Unified messaging gives your mobile workforce fast access to messaging and communication tools such as voicemail through email and entire company directories via a number of different mobile devices, helping to increase responsiveness and decision making in your business. Support – When people are working remotely they will need different types and levels of support. Using Virtual Desktops will allow IT to easily manage and troubleshoot users’ desktops, no matter where they are working. Health and safety – If people are to be regularly working from home then businesses will need to consider the Health and Safety requirements that apply in their particular country. Contact your local Health and Safety Authority for the relevant guidelines and checklists. ! 20 Days Lost In a business of 100 employees, if 27% are 30 mins late, once a month then 18 days a year are lost.(11) *Based on 252 working days per year, 50.4 working weeks per year, 8 working hours per day.

Hole No.10 Email has long been seen as the primary communication tool in business. And why wouldn’t it be? It’s convenient and everyone uses it. A global survey of email usage highlights that by 2011 there were a colossal 3.1 billion email accounts in existence. This figure is expected to rise to nearly 4.1 billion by the end of 2015, with Europe alone accounting for 22% of those.(12) But whilst email has clearly become a central part of everyone’s working life, it can also be the cause of a significant amount of wasted time and effort. So why do we have such a love-hate relationship with email? • Volume - With the average employee needing to deal with over 100 emails a day(12) it’s easy to see how emails can move from being part of the job, to being the job itself! • Bad practice - We’ve all seen those email threads preceded by endless ‘RE:’s or ‘FYI’s. The problem gets worse when too many people are copied in to these emails. Often, the original topic of discussion gets lost, people get drowned out and it becomes a confusing free-for-all. • Spam - According to a Symantec report in December 2012, spam makes up 70% of global email.(13) If it takes an employee 4 seconds to open, identify and delete a spam email, then a company with 300 employees that receive 10 spam messages each per day will lose 102 working days every year! • Distractions - On average, it takes 16 minutes to refocus after reading an incoming email. Notification systems exacerbate this by distracting us when more pressing work needs to be done.(14) So how can individuals and businesses start to address this? Here’s our quick guide to taming your inboxes and reclaiming valuable time: Tips on managing your inbox 1. Strictly budget the time you spend reading and responding to emails. Allocate specific time lengths to different types of email tasks, such as reading newsletters, quick response emails or mail that require longer amounts of attention. 2. Turn off notifications to reduce the effect of interruptions to your workflow and train of thought. 3. Use subject lines strategically, for a more effective way of filing and searching. 4. File your emails into specific folder categories for ease of search; this will also keep your inbox uncluttered. 5. Use the ‘rules’ functionality to automatically sort your emails into folders. You can set the parameters of the rules to your specific needs. 6. Improve the productivity of employees (who would otherwise spend valuable time de-cluttering their inboxes every day). Cloud solutions can offer advanced junk mail filtering, as well as protection against viruses, malware, phishing scams, and trojans. Talk and chat As VoIP reduces the cost of phone calls, businesses should try encouraging employees to get back to using the phone rather than instinctively reaching for email. Even Instant Messaging solutions such as Skype or Microsoft Lync can help reduce the email burden and get faster answers to those burning questions. ! 38 Days Wasted* In a business of 100 employees, if every worker receives 10 spam messages per day, and each takes 4 seconds to deal with, that’s 306 hours wasted a year! *Based on 252 working days per year, 50.4 working weeks per year, 8 working hours per day.

Hole No.11 In today’s climate businesses don’t tend to stand still for very long. Capitalising on new opportunities as well as combating cyber threats requires quick reactions. Research into European SMEs has identified small businesses believe their ability to quickly make decisions (62%) and tailor services (57%) is crucial to maintaining market share against larger competitors.(15) If you have a traditional in-house IT infrastructure, making changes to staffing levels, deploying new applications, setting up new offices or supporting new ventures can all take a significant amount of time. Here are our suggestions for how your business could manage changes more effectively: 1. Define a policy. Be clear about how people should submit a change request. Shoudl it be via a form, an email or even a dedicated ticketing system? Ensure that people understand what authorisations are required and exactly when they can expect any changes to be carried out. 2. Centralised responsibility. Try to make one person the sole contact for all requests. This person should be responsible for checking the request and then coordinating the activities that are needed to implement the changes. This person should also communicate the status of the task back to the requester. 3. Document technical procedures. For each task that needs to be carried out ensure that there is a documented process. This not only avoids errors but also ensures that should people leave, you still know how to make any required changes. 4. User acceptance testing. After the changes have been made, ensure that everything is working to the users expectations. dealing with

References 1 Centre for Economics and Business Research and Epson, 2012. 2 Doodle ‘The Way We Meet Today’ study, 2009. 3 ‘Wasting Time at Work’ Salary.com, 2012. 4 Spiceworks ‘Voice of IT’ 2012 worldwide h. 5 Webroot IT Decision maker research 2011. (http://www.webroot.co.uk/En_GB/ about-press-room-press-releases-cloud- mobile-web-security-190411.html) 6 Managing your Changing IT Needs’, Dell and Vanson Bourne, 2012. 7 ‘Cloud Reality Check’, Rackspace, 2012. 8 CA, The Avoidable Cost of Downtime, The impact of IT downtime on employee productivity JANUARY 2011. 9 ‘The rapid growth of online data’, CSC. 10 ‘The hidden cost of information work’, IDC. 11 Harris Interactive Survey for CareerBuilder, Nov-Dec, 2011. 12 Radicati Email Statistics Report 2011. (http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp- content/uploads/2011/05/Email-Statistics- Report-2011-2015-Executive-Summary.pdf) 13 Symantec Intelligence Report: December 2012. 14 Disruption and Recovery of Computing Tasks: Field Study, Analysis, and Directions. Shamsi T. Iqbal and Eric Horvitz, 2007. 15 “Working smarter to succeed” Vodafone Business Services, 2011. Summary Colt Ceano is a new way for businesses to purchase and use communications and IT services quickly and easily through a single management platform. While we can’t do anything about the length of your commute, or help you keep meetings on-topic, we can help your business plug the holes through which you may be wasting time and money. Colt Ceano offers you the chance to: Collaborate • Microsoft SharePoint helps your teams to work together more effectively, creating team workspaces, intranets and places to collaborate. • Soonr Workplace goes further, letting you create project workspaces for your team, partners and clients with access via PCs and mobile devices. Communicate • Exchange 2010 hosted email services mean you only pay for what you use. • Microsoft Lync connects your team everywhere for presence, instant messaging, voice, video and online meetings. Create • Virtual Servers and Infrastructure allow you to build a highly secure and scalable infrastructure for your own digital products and services. Work • Hosted Virtual Desktops offer your employees the ability to access their desktop from any connected device - PC, Mac or tablet. Protect • Managed Virtual Firewalls and Web Security filters protect your local network from any threats. • Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery services will safeguard your valuable data. Connect • Fixed Internet access services give you business-quality connectivity with service level agreements (SLAs). • Mobile Internet access enables everyone in your team to work securely wherever they are. • Voice-over-IP (VoIP), allows your team to feel like they’re in the office, even when they aren’t. It can also offer significant call cost savings. If you’re interested in talking to us about Colt Ceano, or any of the individual products above, contact us on [email protected] or phone us on +44 (0)20 7390 3900.

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Your business is leaking time and money

by Colt Technology Services on Jul 04, 2013

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Your business is leaking time and money Presentation Transcript