2 posts from September 2009

The main focus of our business is offering consultancy and support for Microsoft Dynamics AX and Infor Baan ERP LN. However, because we also offer support for all the IT for a business we are frequently approached to provide pure IT support too. A recent visit to a potential customer put me in mind of one of my favourite books and radio series; The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (I don’t rate the film much though). Among the many wonderful ideas was the ‘Peril Sensitive Sunglasses’. These are designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble they totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.

 I suspect the glasses the potential customer I was visiting was wearing are similar to those that become progressively darker the brighter the sun gets – or in this case darker the greater the danger.

Let me explain. This was quite a successful business that is providing a software product to a niche market. It has obviously performed very well as it has grown quite quickly and has a good number of customers and 40 odd employees. We had been called in to review their support arrangements after they had suffered a small disaster when a server went down. Being a software house full of people who work with computers for a living they managed to scramble through and restore their system but they realised that it wasn’t a core skill and that they should call in external resource to help them rationalise and care for their systems. I think they deserve a lot of credit for this because software houses with rooms full of techies (and I want you to know some of my best friends are techies) would naturally continue to try and do it all themselves. No, they had made the sensible decision to outsource this and concentrate on what they do best – develop software.

Anyway, we turned up on site to see how we could help. After introductions we took a tour around the facility. Whilst our guide was almost wholly focussed on the number of servers and the inconvenience they might cause if they stopped working I was dealing with the fact that there were, firstly, so many servers at all, and secondly that they were in a uniquely vulnerable situation.

The building is two storeys and had, to my mind, very little security. The windows were single glazed and top hinged allowing anyone who gained access to have plenty of space to pass the equipment through the window. Yes, it had an alarm system and CCTV, but all that would allow for is to be able to watch a grainy video on how efficient the burglars were before the police arrived.

Many of the servers were in full view and a simple walk around the building, at night, would have given anybody planning a break-in plenty of time to work out their plan of action.

The servers contained the development software of the company at different stages, and in a couple of cases were actually running a customers live e-commerce site!

The odd thing to me was that it was the first thing that I saw in terms of risk to the business – I felt very uncomfortable that a single break in could put them out of business for a least a week and could put one of their customers out of business too. It would be the sort of event that could actually lead to the business closing down and people losing their jobs.

Importantly, it was something that could be easily improved – simply moving the servers to the first floor, out of sight, would take the temptation away from any opportunistic thieves. I pointed out that this was perhaps the greatest danger that they faced right now and that losing a server to a technical fault would have a lesser impact.

It was as though the owner of the business had just taken off his ‘peril sensitive sunglasses’ and could suddenly see the risk he was running – it was just that it had sort of crept up on him.

Anyway, we proposed a number of ideas and solutions that would solve the problem anyway through our managed services, co-location and virtualisation offerings and in the meantime we have simply moved all the servers out of sight.

Because they got to where they were through steady growth and adding new servers here or there they just hadn’t seen the danger creeping up on them. I’d recommend on a regular basis that you take off your peril sensitive sunglasses and see what is creeping up on you.

I’m always wary of writing about experiences I’ve recently had in my business dealings for fear that I may offend someone and that an ongoing piece of work may be compromised.

However, I think on this occasion there is no danger that the person will read this blog, and even if they did, what they read wouldn’t bother them anyway.

I was asked by an old friend to have a meeting with the owner of a small successful company. She had looked at his business systems and suggested that he really needed to get an expert in to give him some advice as to what to do. My default position on business systems is to look at ERP first and then Best of Breed second – you’ll find a white paper about my views on ERP v BOB here.

Anyway, I sat down with the owner of the business and he told me about his current business system – he had developed it himself entirely in Microsoft Access. It soon became clear that he understood his business very well indeed and that the Access ‘business system’ he had written was entirely tailored to his needs. Except that his needs seemed to be changing every day. He is spending hours each day changing and tinkering with his system. He insisted to me that an ‘off the shelf’ package just wouldn’t suit his needs.  

Before I go any further I need to repeat some of the expressions that he used during our meeting;

“I get frustrated because no-one else here knows how to use the system”

“Every time someone needs a report I need to get into the system and write it – no one does it themselves”

It was clear that he didn’t have any user instructions – he didn’t have the time to write them, but it seems unfair to me that he blames other people for this!

His solution is to get a local VB programmer to take his Access application and turn it into ‘A proper system’. Recognising that I was perhaps not ever going to convince him to invest in a packaged solution I tried to give him some good advice (for free) on how best to approach this.

I suggested that rather than just hand over the Access database as it was he might be better to take some time to put together a requirements specification listing the functionality his business needed to run. Then he should consider turning this into a functional specification to give the programmers some insight as to what is required – a good business analyst would be able to help them produce this functional specification and also bring some external knowledge of how a business system generally works. Although this is the type of work that we do as a business I was reaching the conclusion that I wasn’t likely to be doing this with him.

The reason I came to this way of thinking was that he explained to me that he had tried on two previous occasions to have his business system ‘written properly’ and on both occasions (costing a sum of around £30,000) he had halted the project because the programmer ‘just didn’t understand what I needed’. I reiterated the importance of the approach I outlined but he wouldn’t take it on board at all – he insisted that handing over his database was specification enough.

Finally, I suggested that at the very least he should view a couple of packaged solutions – not because he should consider buying them but simply to see what they do, how they do it and why. This would, I suggested, give him some ideas on how his system should perform.

His response to this was that he just couldn’t sit through software demonstrations because he became bored with them and switched off after a few minutes.

So, in summary, he wouldn’t consider a packaged solution. He complained that no-one understood the solution he had written himself. He’d had two previous attempts to write the solution ‘professionally’ but had aborted them. He couldn’t be bothered to write any specifications. He couldn’t be bothered to look ‘for reference’ at any other business packages.

I occasionally you meet people that you just can’t help – this was genuinely one of them. I’d have been better banging my head against a brick wall.