Signal to Noise

Growth infrastructure?  What’s that?

Well, put simply, a growth infrastructure means being prepared for, and embracing, the factors that affect change in an organization’s technological competitiveness.  These are factors such as the competitive climate of a particular industry, the trends and curves of I.T. best practices, and the cost-value ratio of technological investments.  There are four elements to a growth infrastructure, and every SMB needs to cover these four elements in their I.T. strategy:

1. A “value over cost” attitude.

2. Pro-active network maintenance.

3. An effective telecommunications approach.

4. Utilizing specialization effectively.

That first one is a big one–how are I.T. organizations to remain competitive when the defining element in their view of investments is cost and cost alone?  I see this all the time, and I’m very sensitive to the need to do business cost-effectively. After all, I’m a business owner, too.  But the time-cost and long-term effect of a poor attitude about cost ultimately burn the organization and cost it more.

Let me give you an example. Let’s take equipment replacement.  PCs have a lifespan of three years on the coasts and probably five years in the midwest.  At a cost of a thousand bucks per PC, you really have to argue that the two year disparity is worth the $400 savings you reap by holding on to your PCs an extra 2 years is really equitable to the lost productivity, maintenance costs, and OEM software discounts you lose by doing so, rather than just replacing the PC on a normal timetable.   I can assure that it costs more than $400 per two years to support an outdated PC. Indeed, if you replace one power supply and upgrade memory one time, you’ve just spent close to the original cost of the PC, accounting for replacement parts and installation time.

That’s probably the purest and simplest example of how a lax attitude about the cost and value of I.T. investments incurs costs over time on an organization. And it also sums up the position of many business managers in the midwest.  Doing business in Cleveland, I see it all the time. Consultants who work for my company have conditioned our customers to adopt a more progressive attitude about vigilant I.T. investment. We train our customers to look beyond one-time capital expenditures and dig deeper into the ongoing cost of managing a network.  Looking at these investments in terms of value and benefit justifies costs and ultimately saves our clients money–and realization of investment benefits is the cornerstone of an I.T. growth infrastructure.

Another element of the growth infrastructure phenomenon is the notion of pro-active maintenance.  Most of our customers are small businesses with fewer than 200 nodes on their networks.  Typically, our customers don’t have I.T. staff, but there’s a threshold where customers feel they must employ I.T. people in order to meet their internal support needs. Unfortunately, this threshold is far lower in their minds than it is in mine.  An unstable I.T. atmosphere demands constant attention, but a proactively maintained network environment requires far less attention and absorbs far less capital.

How many I.T. people in the SMB space are pro-actively performing tasks such as consistency-checking their active directory databases?  Defragmenting their Exchange information stores?  Taking diagnostic readings on storage systems on a weekly or monthly basis?  Measuring network speeds and thruputs on a regular basis?  Performing scheduled test restores from backup media?  Scavenging user accounts on Windows servers and other devices? Researching KB Windows Update patches for potential compatibility issues before installing them?

Fact is, nobody is doing this stuff, because in-house people tend to be too busy with trouble tickets to have enough to pay attention to this stuff. Ironically, these proactive activities reduce trouble tickets and contribute to a more stable environment. Heck, even checking the timestamp on your server’s virus definitions is probably something you never do.  Why? Because you don’t have the time.  Yet these activities are the second hallmark of a growth infrastructure. By proactively maintaining a network, it’s much easier to say “yes” to new technological initiatives, because proactive maintenance breeds familiarity and readiness.

The third item in a growth infrastructure strategy is an effective telecommunications approach. This is a difficult one in the midwest, and in rural parts of the U.S., where inconsistent deregulation has made a mess of price consistency, and inexpensive fiber is practically non-existent outside of “skyscraper islands” where it costs the phone company almost nothing to off it.  Keep in mind, this isn’t lower Manhattan. This is the suburband midwest. Fiber just doesn’t exist out here.

So what is one to do about metro-area and wide-area connectivity? The only answer is to treat high-speed private connectivity as a cost of doing business and adopt it anyway, despite its high cost.  Regionally, midwestern cities and towns have fallen behind the coastal cities and tech super-centers (San Francisco, New York, Chicago, San Diego, and so on) in this area because they refuse to “adopt down” the cost of good telecom.  And the result is that they become less effective competitors in their industries.

The last item in a growth infrastructure is specialization.  SMBs, this is crucial: why would you take your full-time I.T. staffer and throw him on a server upgrade project that’s going to take him two weeks to complete?   Sure, it’s his job right?   Consider that your in-house I.T. staff does one, two, or three server upgrade projects per year while balancing his other support duties.  Also consider that there are I.T. consultants who do two or three hundred server ugprade projects per year and have no other tasks competing for their time when they’re on your project.  Now, comparing your in-house I.T. guy versus a contracted consultant on a server upgrade project, who do you think is going to get that server upgrade more effectively and quickly?  The guy who does it all the time and has nothing else to do, or the guy who rarely does it and has a full plate?

If you’ve got that idea that an effective growth infrastructure is all about attitude, you’re right.  Midwest SMBs, it’s time to adopt a new attitude.