January '06

Welcome to January 2006. In our ever-endless shift from a technology-based management company to a technology-enabled management company, it's a continuous re-organizing of priorities and time allocations. When it used to be allowable for our technical staffers to take that extra time to flush out their projects to 100% completion (as they defined it), our time is now spent getting the projects and solutions that our customers need and letting that extra 5% that the techies want to do fall to the 'to be done if there's free time later' list.

Needless to say, it's caused some furour among the masses.

As part of our ongoing marketing campaigns, we are re-positioning ourselves from a geo-centric service provider to a web-centric one. Upon review, we spend only a small fraction of our monthly time actually at customers sites, and as our customer base increases, it is more efficient for them to have meetings and dialogs with us over the 'net via vid. conference, instant message, etc, versus the the traditional 'we'll steup a meeting next Thursday.' This is a change in the small retail marketplace, as 2 years ago, most retailers with whom we'd worked and met, would not have been open to such new communication mores.
Is it a 're-positioning' or a natural evolution when you're reading the customer trends and responding to them? The MBA Question of the Day.

One of our ongoing goals is to continue to reduce the weekly time spent 'burping the baby'--this means everything from rebooting hardware to managing what should be automated details about customer accounts. The more time spent on billable hours is less dead overhead. To that end, I'm ready to throw a set of our VPN routers out the window.

Hope your New Year is going well and remember: less than 5 weeks before pitchers and catchers report!