Proactively Ensure Technology Stability

In the tech world, stability is defined by two questions: How often do our computers break (fail, crash, have problems, screw up, pick your favorite term)? When they do break, how fast does it take to fix them and get our employees back to work?

To ensure maximum technology ROI, your mission is as follows: Minimize problems and the “solution time” to fix problems that do arise, without compromising any security and as little system performance as possible. This is done by evaluating stability using three key factors.

1. Regulations required by your industry or by the government. This is not a big issue for most organizations, but must be addressed. Are you required by the government to have two servers in case one crashes? For most businesses probably not, but make sure your chosen level of stability is in incompliance.

2. Importance of computer data to your overall business operation. If you lost the last month of memos you sent to your assistant, and couldn’t get them back, would you be in a world of hurt? It would be a inconvenience, but you’d probably be fine. Thus, the stability of that system would be important, but not extraordinary. Now let’s say you have lost your entire general ledger for the last two years, and it’s gone forever. Now you’re sweating profusely. The stability of your accounting data is quite important, client data perhaps even more so. You must gauge the importance of stability in relation to the importance of the data in question; it’s as simple as that.

3. Your Budget. Yes, you could pay your IT staff to check every single computer in the company every single day, but that would be overly expensive, and thus damage your ROI. Yet, having those three or four redundant hard drives in your server that would keep things running in the event of a crash might be well worth it, even if it adds $2000 on to the cost of your server. Your available budget will obviously effect the amount of stability you can place in your computer system, but don’t scrimp on this! Paying $2000 now to save $15,000 later is painful, but necessary for high long-term ROI. Realize that when the computers don’t work you are paying for the computer guy to fix it and paying for your employee to twiddle their thumbs and paying for the lost productivity of employees waiting on the first employee who’s computer isn’t working. Along with automation, stability is the best investment you can make in your technology strategy.

Once you’ve covered the stability needs of your organization, now you can implement. Increasing stability of a computer system is done in five basic categories, all of which I have written about extensively elsewhere, but here’s a quick overview. The categories are: complexity layer management, employee policies, regular maintenance, staying current, documentation, and backup.

The most important aspect of technology stability is the number of layers of complexity the system relies upon to function correctly. The more layers, the higher probability of problems exist. If you need to run three different programs just to print a particular report from your accounting system, you shouldn’t be surprised if you have frequent printing issues. If your users need to go through four different programs with three different passwords just to check their email while on the road, you shouldn’t be surprised if your other employees are constantly helping these people over the telephone. Force yourself to be critical and evaluate the number of layers in all of your key systems. Can they be reduced?

Another critical component of stability is documented computer usage policy. Companies that have and enforce clear policies on the use of their computers always have less people-caused technology problems than companies that don’t. Be sure that there are clear policies in your organization such as installing foreign software on company computers, internet usage, laptop usage, and other such items. By the way, violations to these policies must actually be enforced. Just having them on page 24 of the employee handbook is not enough.

Regular preventative maintenance is also crucial to long term computer stability. In the computer world, this would include items such as defragmenting hard drives, deleting temporary files, managing startup programs, uninstalling old software, and verifying anti-virus operation. Other equally important maintenance implementations address the computer hardware itself, like proper office temperature, level of dust in the building, regular internal cleaning of computers, distance of the computer chassis fans from the carpet, and other such aspects.

The act of simply staying current with the times will also ensure that your computers are more stable. Those who still use six-year-old software on seven-year-old computers should not be confused as to why they are constantly plagued with computer problems and compatibility issues.

The level of documentation in your computer system directly influences how fast computer problems are resolved. If your IT staff has to spend 20 minutes figuring out how your employee’s computer is set up before he even begins to fix the problem, you’re organization is losing money and adding needless employee stress. Items such as user names, passwords, mapped drives, email addresses and passwords, hardware configurations, and other such items should all be documented, updated regularly, and easily accessible by those who require the information.

The last line of defense in your stability planning is a good backup system. Again, it’s time to ask questions. Are we backing up our critical data regularly? How do I know? How do I know the backup is good? How do I know the backup is current? Is a copy being stored off site? Do I have all the software and hardware necessary to actually restore the backup in case of a fire, natural disaster, or a robbery? Asking the tough questions now will prevent you from asking the tough questions in the midst of a crisis when it’s already too late.

The stability of your technology is critical if return on investment is important to you! If you follow this system, it will not be money wasted.

Caleb Jones www.calebjones.com >Click to Email Caleb< 888.646.TECH Please download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader if you don't have it installed on your computer. The Adobe Acrobat Reader will allow you to view, and print all of our documents, across all major computing platforms.