By the DynaSis Team

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DynaSis Founder and President Dave Moorman has released the second article in his IT for the C-Suite series, a collection of articles that details how business leaders and other C-level executives can use technology to improve business agility, security and productivity—and power the organization’s success. “Technology Outcomes Every C-Level Executive Should Expect” details the three fundamental benefits of technology from Moorman’s perspective, and explores in detail why these benefits are so important.

Increasing Productivity: Maximizing the use of technology to enhance the business effort and foster great customer service.

Reducing Expense: Hosting and maintaining a modern, properly managed IT infrastructure to reduce technology overhead and potentially shrink the organization’s ownership and management footprint for both technology and physical space.

Minimizing Risk: Implementing a cloud-based model to make it statistically impossible for corporate assets to be destroyed or displaced by a single event business.

Moorman illustrates his point by briefly discussing some of the world’s great business success stories—entrepreneurs who created an incredibly successful business model by relying almost exclusively on technology.

Backed by credible statistics and reports, Moorman offers solid advice on how technology helps business leaders achieve these three goals, and why it is so essential for them to place appropriate emphasis on technology. He also helps them envision how they can start leveraging technology to realize the advantages discussed in the article.

All of his advice, in this article and beyond, is designed to help even the most traditional operation become innovative and extraordinary—not only enjoying success today, but establishing the competitive advantage that is vital to ongoing business development and value.

By following the advice in Moorman’s article, C-level executives can help transform their operations into what Moorman calls “the Modern Business”—One whose leadership “embraces and leverages technology to deliver targeted, advantageous outcomes in the organization.” As he notes in this article, Moorman views technology not merely as an enabler, but literally as the fulcrum that provides leverage for success.

It’s a great read, and we hope you enjoy it! To download the PDF, use the link above, or click here.

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visitwww.dynasis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

Every day, business leaders—or their employees or vendors—engage in a variety of activities to keep the business running. Does that mean every single one is beneficial? Before you answer, consider this.

There are plenty of activities, such as firing a problematic worker who wasn’t properly vetted or repairing a PC that was inadequately maintained, that keep a business running only because they fix problems that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place. In addition, vendors, employees and even business leaders all engage in activities that don’t really do anything but waste time or money.

So, how does a business evaluate whether activities are beneficial or not? We believe there are four key criteria that can determine whether or not an activity has merit within the organization:

• Lowering costs
• Increasing productivity
• Minimizing risk
• Driving growth

These are the “lowest common denominators” of business success. Any activity that is not doing one of these things may be keeping your business running, but it isn’t improving your operation or making it more competitive. At the end of the day, improvement, and not status quo, is what leads to long-term success.

The question then becomes, how can you evaluate your business activities and eliminate the ones that don’t provide one of these four benefits? Cutting away the dead wood and the fat is a process that takes time and reflection. It isn’t immediate, but it can really strengthen your business.

Ask key employees and stakeholders to look for activities or actions that aren’t providing one of these four benefits and then explore how they developed. If it’s a wasteful activity that slipped in unnoticed, stop it. If the activity became necessary due to another problem (like a PC repair caused by inadequate maintenance, in our example), making resolution of that issue a priority. Then, start looking again.

You’ll find areas to improve throughout the business, and we have a few to suggest for technology.

1. Implement virtualization (discussed in our last blog). You will reduce your server and desktop count, save money and energy, and reduce IT management and maintenance.
2. Put a secure, properly managed mobile device in the hands of every worker. It’s a proven fact that mobility increases productivity. There are other ways, as well, but that’s one of the fastest approaches.
3. Take a hard look at your business continuity/disaster recovery plans. It amazes us how many businesses discover they really need “flip the switch” data recovery only after they experience a major outage and lose business as a result. Don’t let your company be one of them.
4. Reduce IT complexity. One of the leading drivers of business growth is innovation, and one of the number one barriers to innovation is IT complexity. If your company is operating with a mashup of hardware, software, storage and other solutions, perhaps cobbled together into a pseudo-custom platform, you are likely engaged in an endless cycle of integration, configuration, tuning and testing. Resolve to untangle the web, now.

Last, don’t let your busy schedule prevent you from starting this initiative. In the time it took you to read this article, you could have identified the personnel that will help you in this task and gotten them started finding areas for improvement.

About DynaSis
DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

With a new year underway, companies large and small are making plans for the IT projects they believe will support their companies, their staffs and their business goals. Last year was definitely a watershed for technology, for everything from cyberattacks to cloud migration, making us wonder if these events and trends would have an impact on 2015 goals.

Scanning the horizon, we found that IT leaders appear to be focusing on a number of core technologies. Per a sampling of more than 1,000 CIOs in the 2015 TechTarget IT Priorities Survey, some of the “hot” initiatives for 2015 are mobility (36%), virtualization (30%) and at the top of the list, data/data center consolidation (40%).

Another survey of nearly 3,000 CIOs, by research firm Gartner, indicated similar results. For this group, business intelligence/data analytics is the number one priority for 2015, with 50% of respondents ranking it first. Next in line are infrastructure (hardware platforms) and mobility, with cloud computing not far behind.

In the report, Gartner noted that these investments aren’t simply cyclical IT refreshes. Rather, based on survey comments Gartner predicted, “For at least the next decade, deep technology-driven innovation will be the new normal for market leaders.”

In other words, these tech executives are building out the platform solutions that will help their companies function in a world where technology isn’t merely a business enabler―it’s the chief cog in the business wheel, with all other functions revolving around it.

These IT executives have realized that their data is spread among too many storage locations, or that the manner in which employees are storing data isn’t efficient or well organized. They know that they can do more with the data they have, but they need to robust solutions to help them leverage and analyze it.

They also understand that mobility is paramount to productivity, but they know they cannot continue to allow ad-hoc connections and random mobile solutions on their networks. They want a dedicated platform that unites and manages everything.

In sum, these executives want to build strong, secure frameworks that facilitate productivity, mobility and meaningful use of and access to data.

This is an approach we have long espoused. Businesses needs productivity (which also means availability) as well as mobility and security, and they don’t derive much value from only having one or two of these elements in place. The best solutions are those that encompass all three.

At DynaSis, we recognize that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) need powerful IT platforms even more than their larger counterparts do. We have been helping our customers deploy and maintain comprehensive, end-to-end solutions for years, whether on-premise through Digital Veins, in the cloud with ITility by DynaSis, or as a hybrid that gives them both (Ascend).

This year promises to be both exciting and challenging in the IT world, with many new developments, good and bad, and DynaSis is ready for all of them. We look forward to helping SMBs harness technology for their benefit without becoming victims of those who would use it for evil. To learn more or get started, please give us a call.

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By the DynaSis Team

With the end of 2014 quickly approaching, many small and medium-sized business owners (SMBs) maybe already looking ahead to 2015 projects. However, in early December there is still time to take advantage of SMB incentive programs that confer significant tax advantages.

One of these is the Section 179 deduction. Although it is a mere shadow of its former self (at the present), it is still valid, with a 2014 deduction limit of $25,000 and a purchase limit of $200,000. That amount might not cover the cost of a new warehouse or other large capital facility or equipment purchase, but in the IT world it will stretch a long way.

Basically, all businesses that purchase, finance and/or lease less than $200,000 of new or used business equipment in 2014 should qualify for the Section 179 deduction. Furthermore, most tangible goods, including “off-the-shelf” software, qualify for the deduction, as does the labor to install and configure any purchases.

For example, let’s assume a business with 50 employees has to date purchased $100,000 worth of miscellaneous, covered equipment. Its IT systems are outdated―especially its desktops, which are too old to run current generation software.

The firm could lease 50 $1,500 desktops at a value of $75,000, and then spend another $25,000, outright, on software plus labor for installation and configuration of everything. The entire $25,000 the company expended in cash would be deductible. Or, a firm could lease all the IT improvements, with the cost of software purchases, installation and configuration included in the lease amount, and still deduct $25,000.

There is also a possibility that Congress may still reinstate during 2014 the $500,000 limit for Section 179 deduction purchases that ended in 2013. If this happens, companies should have a plan for purchasing additional equipment and other qualified items they can put into service before year-end.

DynaSis’ virtual CIOs (VCIOs) are IT analysis and planning experts with a wealth of experience helping SMBs plan capital IT expenses that align with and support their short- and long-term business goals. Additionally, our Ascend platform lets a company lease its entire IT infrastructure for a low monthly fee, including full support (proactive monitoring and management and Help Desk) and IT upgrades as needed. To learn more or discuss having an IT assessment to create a baseline for selecting the most cost-effective, productivity-boosting improvements, please give us a call.

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By the DynaSis Team

Have you heard of “The Internet of Things,” and if so, do you know what it is? This term is being bandied about in the media a lot recently, but it is certainly not self-explanatory, and we suspected that many business owners – not to mention their employees – do not understand precisely what it is or what it means for them. According to a survey, released last week by CompTIA, a leading IT industry trade association, we were right.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a term that describes a global, interconnected network of objects that can transfer data over a network to other objects/entities without the need for a human or computer to propel the transfer. It is similar to the “smart grid” approach being used by utility providers to interconnect buildings and other facilities powered by electricity. However, with the IoT, network nodes are connected via a wireless data transfer network (like the Internet), instead.

A considerable percentage of science and technology experts predict that it is the future of our world. Per Pew Research, 83% of technology experts and engaged Internet users believe that the dynamic web created by the IoT, the cloud, and embedded/wearable devices will have widespread and beneficial effects by 2025. Furthermore, research firms predict that by 2020, between 26 billion devices (per Gartner) and 30 billion devices (per ABI Research) will be wirelessly connected.  Already, a lot of them are.

In other words, it won’t be long before most businesses and individuals will be connected in some way to the IoT, whether by the watch a company president wears, the smart thermostat installed in a corporate office, or the medical monitoring device that an employee has implanted inside his or her body after a heart attack or stroke. So, what does this mean for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), and do their owners need to be concerned with it, now?

The CompTIA survey referenced earlier found that 34 percent of SMBs in the United States haven’t reviewed their service or product portfolios to take advantage of the rise of the Internet of things (IoT) and 31 percent have no plans to change their offerings in order to do so. Interestingly, 49 percent of American SMBs think the IoT will help their organizations make more money.

Here at DynaSis, we are highly cognizant of the IoT, not only the benefits it can bring SMBs but also of the risks it may generate. Already, security experts are warning that without proper precautions, a cyber-strike against the IoT could wreak incredible havoc, not only on companies and citizens but also on global infrastructure. They point out that when the majority of “things” can communicate without human or computer intervention, there will be fewer opportunities for a person or a system to detect an attack as it crosses various nodes. This scenario will make robust defenses at the corporate level even more important.

We believe that SMBs should be at least familiarizing themselves with the IoT, now, and should be preparing for the impacts (both good and bad) it may have on their businesses. If you would like to learn more about it or discuss how it might affect you, please give us a call.

By the DynaSis Team

The results of a survey, conducted this year at an IT support conference, indicates that corporate IT departments are stretched way too thin and at the same time constricted by lack of budget (36 percent), resources (24 percent) or team skills (20 percent). Furthermore, 44 percent of IT managers polled for the survey said lack of technological awareness at the executive management level has created a divide between the board room and the IT department, in terms of priorities.

If you are an IT professional reading this, you are probably nodding your head in agreement. If you are a small or medium-sized business (SMB) owner, you are probably thinking, “That doesn’t apply to my firm.”  This disconnect is precisely where the problem lies.

According to the survey, if given free reign over IT decision-making, 58 percent of IT professionals would prioritize long-term, back-end infrastructure investment. Another 24 percent would pursue virtualization, and 18 percent would add more storage. Yet, according to survey respondents, none of these long-term investments topped the priority list at the upper management level. The executive priority most often cited by survey respondents (20%) was upgrading productivity software―such as Microsoft Office.

We’re not discouraging anyone from upgrading their productivity software. In fact, DynaSis is behind Office 365 (Microsoft’s new subscription-based licensing model for Office) 100 percent. We even offer a solution package for this product that includes planning, migration and support.

We are suggesting that the ability of many companies to operate effectively and competitively is being hampered because overtaxed IT professionals are trying unsuccessfully to run shoe-string operations with stressed out, often insufficient or inadequately skilled IT teams. In some cases, they’re trying to do everything themselves.

Technology is simply too important―and too much of a productivity builder―for executive leaders not to listen to their IT managers and work towards giving them the budget and resources to do their jobs. This doesn’t mean that organizations have to hire and train more workers or make major directional shifts.

At DynaSis, we have long assisted companies in a “back-up” capacity―coordinating closely with IT managers and taking over important tasks, such as help desk support or hardware installation, that they do not have time to manage effectively. In doing so, we give them the “breathing room” they need to focus on planning, coordination and strategic initiatives.

Of course, at some point business owners also must increase their budgets and give their IT managers some measure of control over decision-making to achieve the best outcomes. Frequently, we find that once business leaders stop and really look at the bottom-line benefits that more technology can bring them, they find those increases aren’t as painful as they expected.

If you are a business owner (with or without an IT manager), we would be happy to sit down and talk with you about what your next step should be. If you are a frustrated IT manager, we can help pull together the metrics you need to persuade executive leadership to see things your way. We can also back you up, wherever and whenever you need help. For more information, fill out our inquiry form or give us a call at (770) 569-4600.

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 By the DynaSis Team

 If you follow our blogs, you know that we talk frequently about the value of technology for driving better business results. For many business owners, the question, then, becomes: “How can I ensure it makes a difference at my company? How can I quantify its benefit?”

To be honest, a lot of technology is notoriously hard to quantify, in terms of overall financial benefit. Small improvements and upgrades are easy to quantify. If, for example, your order processing clerk’s PC crashes and you replace it, you can fairly easily quantify the value of the orders that might have been lost had they not gotten processed on a timely basis.

Even on a larger scale, you can quantify the hard dollars of specific improvements. For example, if you implement a new inventory management solution, it might reduce inventory costs in a way that you can actually see, on paper. A new teleconferencing system could reduce hard travel costs. So far so good.

The crux of the problem, for the ROI equation, is that technology benefit is not a simple dollar for dollar equation. For example, if you upgrade your infrastructure to a faster, more stable platform and give your employees better access to information, it will likely improve your customer service. Your customers will likely think more highly of you, because they will perceive you as being “on top of your game.” Try to put a price tag on that.

On the flip side, if you make a dramatic change without having the proper framework in place, it won’t deliver the results you expect and you could negatively impact customer service or employee productivity. That’s what makes the “intangible” benefits of technology so elusive.

Business owners hear horror stories of companies that spent millions of dollars and reaped very little benefit―tangible or intangible. That makes them hesitant to engage in technology upgrades unless they can see a bottom line number that indicates the improvement will pay for itself in hard dollars.

We encourage you not to think that way. In reality, when a firm spends a fortune on technology with very little benefit, generally either the solution was the wrong one or they implemented it prematurely or unwisely.

Technology is like a house. If you don’t have a good foundation, no amount of bells and whistles are going to result in a quality product. In the example of the inventory solution we mentioned above, if a company deployed a major platform like that without having the appropriate infrastructure in place to integrate it with the rest of company operations, they likely wouldn’t achieve the benefits they sought. The new system might actually reduce the efficiency of their inventory management and delivery mechanisms.

To resolve this conundrum, firms should evaluate their existing technology thoroughly and then plan improvements and upgrades from the bottom up―the foundation. Above all else, you must achieve stability, performance, availability and security in your corporate technology platforms. That alone will result in a huge improvement in productivity, and can foster better customer service and faster delivery. Then you can add the rest of the layers to build something that’s really stellar.

Such an approach requires a roadmap that looks one, three or even five years into the future. If you don’t have a strategic technology roadmap that steers every decision, you may luck into the right combinations of solutions, but you won’t be able to quantify their benefits. You won’t know where you were or how far you have come.

Don’t get us wrong―solutions that promote mobility, better data management and other important functions are vital to the success of most businesses today, but they pieces of a puzzle, not the answer on their own.

We invite you to fill out our inquiry form or give us a call at (770) 569-4600 to discuss what you want to accomplish and how you will need to prepare for it. Optionally, if you want faster results, we can show you ready-made, cloud-based solutions where someone else has already laid the proper foundation.

By the DynaSis Team
[featured_image]Across the board, IT experts recommend that organizations conduct quarterly business reviews (QBRs). Whether these transpire with internal IT staff and key company stakeholders or between third-party IT providers and those same stakeholders, they are crucial to keeping an IT plan on track.

Why is this? To be most effective and help a company drive productivity and ROI, firms need their IT plans to be proactive, not reactive. IT plans need to reflect what is on the company’s horizon―and where leadership wants the business to go. With this information, IT staff and consultants can help a company make better decisions during budgeting, or when unexpected purchasing opportunities (such as a hardware failure or expiring software license) arise.

QBRs are also a time for company stakeholders and their IT staff and/or vendors to reevaluate priorities, and reflect on how emerging trends or interesting new developments might change the trajectory of the firm and its IT plans.

So, how do they work? For DynaSis’ customers, Quarterly Business Reviews take place with their Technical Account Manager (TAM). During the QBR, the TAM asks about the firm’s current and future business initiatives to determine how DynaSis (and technology, overall) can best support them. At the conclusion of the event, the TAM has collected enough information to ensure DynaSis is up to speed on your business goals and can help the firm align its IT programs and plans with those goals.

QBRs are not a forum to discuss upcoming projects, or ticket resolution or any other detail of your service plan. And they are certainly not a time when a vendor should try to sell a firm on purchasing more products or services.

We have discovered that when DynaSis stays informed about its clients’ long-term plans and objectives―and when we learn, early on, about any shifts in their business directions―we can better help them plan for that future. This often includes preventing IT missteps or making advance decisions that avert unnecessary downtime and expenditures.

If you are not conducting QBRs, we urge you to incorporate them into your IT calendars. And, if you are a DynaSis customer, when your TAM calls to request your next QBR, we hope you will look forward to the discussion and be excited about scheduling a meeting.

To learn more about QBRs (or to initiate a meeting if you already work with us), please fill out our inquiry form or give us a call at 678.218.1769.

By the DynaSis Team

[featured_image]You may have noticed us alluding to a new term: Modern Officing, rather than talking about the Modern Office, which is often defined as an office environment not constrained by time or place, where technology powers the anytime-anywhere concept. That concept has now morphed into a verb, and folks are talking about Modern Officing.

This is the practice of enabling your employees to achieve anytime-anywhere productivity. It might incorporate letting personnel come into your physical office only occasionally―if at all. Of course, the core of this practice is technology―especially mobile and network technologies.

However, companies that succeed in this effort are judicious in how they weave other technologies into the solution. The idea is not to allow technology to expand organically, with everyone bringing their favorite solutions to the table. Rather, companies should strategically plan and deploy the right technologies, implemented security but accessibly. Not only should companies avoid too many solutions (especially if they overlap), but those solutions should not be too permissive or unrestrained. So, let’s look at a few of the technologies you likely use, and how your approach to them can be “just right” for the modern office.

These are just a few examples of dozens of technologies where right-sizing is beneficial to your company, its personnel and its bottom line. If your technology environment is insufficient or outdated, not only can your employees not achieve their missions, but customers to your physical space will perceive your firm as dated. Too many solutions, too much capacity, or an approach that is too unrestrained, and you could be throwing money, productivity and security away.

DynaSis has strategic planning experts that can help you pinpoint what improvements make sense for your firm, and which ones are unnecessary or unwise. To get started, fill out our inquiry form or give us a call.

By the DynaSis Team

[featured_image]In 2013, the CEB (Corporate Executive Board), the world’s leading member-based advisory company, published its 2013–2014 IT Budget Benchmark study, developed from the responses of 165 member organizations. The study found that CIOs are not increasing their spending on innovation, whereas HR, operations, finance and marketing are spending sizeable portions of their budgets on innovative IT projects. (HR departments alone are spending between 6-9% of their budgets on IT innovations, per the study.)

The CEB concluded that these findings indicate IT departments are no longer driving technology innovation to other parts of the business.  For the CEB the question then became, "Why are IT departments not budgeting for and controlling these projects?"

The CEB postulated (and we concur) that this shift has occurred because nearly 70% of IT budgets (per the study) are being consumed by maintenance and mandatory (e.g. regulatory) expenses. This "cash crunch" is encouraging already territorial IT departments to reject other departments' pet projects.

While it warms our IT-oriented hearts to learn that marketing, HR and other departments are willing to cannibalize their budgets to implement IT innovations, from iPads to cloud services, this behavior also concerns us. The CEB called the revenue consumed by these expenditures "shadow IT budgets" and estimates that such unapproved projects increase corporate IT expenditures by as much as 40%.

The CEB also determined that some 50% of these expenditures are what it called "unhealthy spending." Unhealthy spending results when projects are not properly evaluated and vetted against a business' overall growth strategy and objectives and/or the risk/reward analysis for the project is inadequate. We've seen unhealthy IT spending among some of our clients that, if not caught in time, could literally have jeopardized the company's trajectory, in terms of priorities and focus.

So, how much "unhealthy spending" are your departments engaging in? How many initiatives have they undertaken without the knowledge and approval of your IT chief?  No matter what you think the number is, we're willing to bet it's higher.

To curb shadow (and especially unhealthy) IT spending, our virtual CIOs can perform "project discovery" and help you map all recent and future projects against your business goals and needs. If you bring everyone to the table for a conversation, we can help vet the ideas of your HR, marketing, finance and other departments and quantify the impact of the good ones for IT and executive management.  We may also be able to help you reduce maintenance and mandatory expenditures through solid IT practices, freeing up budgets for innovation.

Only when you address shadow IT spending—and accept that these efforts are well-intentioned and can be quite valuable when handled properly—will you reap maximum reward from your technology initiatives and move expenditures out of the shadows and onto the balance sheet.

To learn more, fill out our inquiry form or give us a call.