Add transparency to your business – part 1

In our world transparency is the businesses ability to see the complete picture – and the ability to understand that picture and act on it accordingly.

You can achieve transparency by identifying key performance indicators or metrics, working with the premise that you cannot manage what you do not measure. Technology will help you measure these metrics; such as the number of widgets manufactured or the number of telephone calls that have been made.

Technology can also track the actions of your team, such as the emails they have sent and the telephone calls they have made. And whilst this is a very big brother use of technology, knowing the time spend on a proposal to the minute better enables you to understand detail such as the profit margin on a particular job.

The same information is also used within our business to measure and manage our operational efficiency. Did we deliver a project within budget? Did we respond to the client in a timely fashion? Have we got recurring issues that need to be looked at?

As technology experts our role does not end when the solutions have been applied to businesses to allow them to gain this knowledge – but continues to assist them in understanding it.

With the amount that can go on behind the scenes with IT one of our jobs is making sure our clients are aware of what their systems are up to and explaining it to them in words that can be understood!

On a 24x7x365 basis we are proactively monitoring hundreds of systems to make sure problems are spotted immediately. Having this transparency and quickly responding to the issues we uncover greatly affects the smooth running and efficiency of a business.

It may be that your non-paged pool is empty, or that you have a list of disk event 7 to contend with. Your HTTP error log may mean your server is actively refusing connections, or perhaps you are suffering from an unexpected 6008?

The team at Bespoke Computing Ltd understands the above but there is no reason why you should or even be able to. In the same way you use a mechanic to service your car or a doctor when you are ill – you should use an expert to manage your IT.

Technology is frequently misunderstood; it is a massive discipline that can be directly compared to law or medicine for its complexity. This does unfortunately mean that a lack of knowledge can be exploited to the advantage of others.

This is especially so in smaller organisations where the management of technology is often outsourced to external organisations, meaning that transparency over your technology operations is absolutely critical.

As a business that provides technology management to smaller organisations we frequently encounter situations where another individual or business has taken the lesser knowledge of the client for granted and to their benefit.

This means that we must be squeaky clean ourselves, and therefore every interaction with a client, every piece of technology we supply, install and configure – it is all recorded within a massive computer system that can also later be analysed.

You can read what we do with that information in a blog coming to you soon, however if you cannot wait until then and need transparency over your own business then please give us a call on 01952 303404 or request your business technology review.