Please Insert 25 Cents

Do you remember life before cell phones?  When you had to go home to listen to your messages?  When you carried change for a pay phone?

I confess -- I was a late adopter of the cell phone, skipping the brick entirely.  I also missed the early flip phones -- so small they fit right in a pocket … of a large backpack or fanny pack (yikes!).

Work demanded that I carry the phone after being one of the last with a beeper.   They were no longer willing to tolerate the guy running the website having a 10 minute search for a phone after being paged.

Once I had the phone, everything changed.  It was so convenient, being able to contact people quickly.  Calling ahead for reservations, or talking with family.  Getting directions without pulling over at a gas station.

The cell phone changed our lives, changed them to the point of it being difficult to remember when we didn’t have them.

Cloud computing is doing the same.  Services like Apple’s iCloud are making us forget how cumbersome it was copying music, pictures, and other files between our devices.  The loss of a hard drive is no longer catastrophic, provided you use a cloud backup system like Carbonite.

For business, software like NetSuite makes it easy to get real-time access your business system and eliminates the headaches associated with servers and IT upgrades.  Google and others provide email and office productivity (documents, spreadsheets, chat, calendar, etc.).    There are many more services, covering everything you need to move your business to the cloud.

Like the cell phone, cloud computing is changing everything.   We will quickly forget the time before cloud computing because it just makes things so much more convenient.

If you are a late adopter like me, give us a call and we can help your business take advantage of the cloud.  But please… don’t call from a pay phone.

Sorry. 1 year. $2 Million.

Carnac the Magnificent was a Johnny Carson character (here is a refresher).  He gave the answers first, and then revealed the questions.  

Unfortunately Carnac is alive and well in businesses everywhere, where the not so funny joke in the IT organization to the answers “Sorry. 1 year. $2 Million,” address the questions:

• Can our current systems do this important thing?
• How long will it take to change the systems?
• How much money will it cost?

Earlier in my career I worked with a Fortune 500 company.  The company wanted to add additional currencies to their systems to purchase from some European vendors.   The answers I had to deliver to the CEO were “Sorry. 1 year. $2 Million.”

Our Canadian company was required to have a website with French Canadian translations.  The answers I gave to the Canadian company President were “Sorry. 1 year. $2 Million.”

We in the IT Department knew our systems were holding the company back.  We knew the business needed to be more nimble.  But knowing did not make the underlying problem go away.

Sure there were cases where we could be nimble and efficient.  There were also occasions where the systems could easily perform certain new tasks.   Far too often, however, the answers resulted in too much time and too much money.

Since we started TrueCloud in 2008, one of the most refreshing results is that we no longer say “Sorry. 1 year. $2 Million.”
   

A client called recently with a need for additional currencies.  He asked the standard questions of can it be done, how long it would take and how much it would cost.

My answers: “Yes. Do you have 10 minutes now for me to talk you through it? We don’t charge clients for this small of a job.” 

To the client needing a multi-language website, the answers were “Yes. It will take a few hours to import the translations. Your biggest cost will be having someone translate your content.”

Many companies, big and small, are still trapped with stifling IT systems.  If you company is among them, please take the time to look at some cloud computing alternatives.  In the cloud, the answers are usually:

“Yes. A few hours.  An affordable amount.”