Free Brand Awareness – here’s how…

on May 14, 2012 in Blog, Brand Awareness, Cloud, CRM, Empire Avenue, Employees, Employers, IT Management, Knowledge, Management, Marketing, Social Media, Staff Incentive, Twitter by Steven Ward | 2 Comments »
In the dark days, before social media, I once had an idea that all companies should issue their staff with free car stickers, like the sort that say Child on board, or, Dad’s taxi. Without realising it, most people are driving round, advertising various brands already. 1. The car manufacturer – obvious I know but it’s true 2. The company you bought it from – round here, every other car has an Arnold Clark sticker on it 3. The company who service the car – take your car to Car Clinic and you’ll drive away with their sticker on your rear window 4. The tyre company – going to buy replacement tyres you check what’s on already and you’re looking at the brand, especially if they’re OEM, and thinking – sure, I’ll get the... Read More

Get Marketing Right for IT Services

on Apr 02, 2012 in Customer Service, Employees, IT Management, IT Services, Knowledge, Management, Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized by Steven Ward | 1 Comment »
Just put in a great new IT system and want to make sure everyone buys in to it? Marketing internal services you provide to your organisation well, is vital to the success of both your own efforts and those of the organisation as a whole. From an IT department’s perspective, a lot of changes introduced are for technical reasons such as version updates, a change of supplier, or hardware replacement – in other words, ones which have low impact on users. Others can be major shifts in operation and involve a great deal of process change for people. Either way, what matters is that you consistently put out strong messages that engages users and makes any change you introduce as effective as possible. 1.       Get the right message across FREE COSTA COFFEE IN THE CANTEEN... Read More

Ask not what your supplier can do for you….

on Mar 01, 2012 in Customer Service, Social Media, Supply Chain Management, SupplyChain by Steven Ward | No Comments »
The relationship between a customer and its suppliers can take many forms.  Sometimes it’s a harmonious arrangement where both parties are happy to work with each other and sometimes it’s founded on mutual hate. It is worth remembering that quite often a customer needs its suppliers as much as they need them and supporting such a symbiotic relationship brings benefits to both parties.   How helping your suppliers helps you Speaking to a company I’d not had dealings with for a while reminded me of this and that to some extent it’s a philosophy I’ve had for some time. This company provides a subscription service which allows buyers of IT and office equipment to see the reseller channel stock and pricing. This simple idea means that when you get in quotes for new kit,... Read More

IT’s Time to Meet the Stars of our Show…

on Nov 28, 2011 in Employeers, Employees, IT Management, Management, Social Media by Steven Ward | No Comments »
Has anyone else noticed the trend in company web-sites to showcase their staff. Having been looking (and fortunately finding) a new role in the last couple of weeks, I saw an increasing number of web-site where not only where the merits of the company displayed but so were those of the people working there. In some instances it’s just a list of names and positions, whereas with some, individual photos or even videos of staff are displayed with a biography and details of the past times, names of family members etc. I find this an odd thing in some ways, and maybe that’s a cultural thing – the great British reserve I suppose. I know in the past when I’ve been involved in getting pictures of people for SharePoint profiles they’ve baulked at it or just refused... Read More

Do IT Managers need management training? (Hint: YES!!!!)

on Nov 16, 2011 in Customer Service, Employeers, Employees, IT Management, Management by Steven Ward | No Comments »
Following on from a LinkedIn discussion I was involved in,  I thought I’d add this to my blog. The discussion related around whether or not IT managers had any formal management training, or whether as often is the case they were just techies who’d been promoted on merit of the technical ability. This issue is far from only an IT related one. I’ve seen specialists in many fields end up with management responsibilities and find that either they’re neither suited to managemnet not enjoy it. After all people who aim to become managers study appropriately at university to do so – surely. In general management breaks down to 3 areas: 1. People  – by far the most important to getting results and supporting those around you 2. Budgets – by far the most... Read More

…now you XeeMe…

on Oct 31, 2011 in Blog, Empire Avenue, Social Media, Twitter, XeeMe by Steven Ward | No Comments »
It’s odd where one Tweet can lead you. A comment about Klout scores dropping by Andy Fields (@PainPont) had a link to his Empire Avenue account. Having no idea what this was, I clicked on it to find a whole world of people trading the social media value in a game format for a virtual currency called Eaves. You start with a set amount of share, a low share value and a set amount of Eaves. You then have to invest in others, earn dividends from these investments and raise your own share price by making yourself a good investment. To do this you have to be active on all the main sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. (You also get Eaves through unlocking ‘achivements’ – which is a cute way to stop you running out of Eaves too quickly). Without getting in to a... Read More

Placement Students – Investing in the Next Generation

on Oct 20, 2011 in Uncategorized by Steven Ward | 1 Comment »
It’s October again, and time to get in touch with the local university to discuss taking on another placement student from the BSc networking course. Over that last few years we’ve had five now and been lucky that they’ve all had a successful time with us, and from what I know, all gone on to good jobs. I had originally suggested we take placement students on, having gone through the process myself some years ago with Dunlop Tyres in a factory producing half a million tyres a year. At the time my course was primarily a programming one, and the opportunity at Dunlop, working in the engineering department, provided a great wealth of experience in terms of projects. These ranged from first-in-first-out (FIFO) stock rotation systems, to processing the time-clock readings to... Read More

Even ‘Future-proof’ is obsolete

on Oct 04, 2011 in Cloud, Customer Service, IT Management, Management by Steven Ward | 2 Comments »
At one time, everything you bought in IT was advertised as future-proof (FP). Even kit you already had could be future-proofed by simply buying more kit to add to it. Not anymore though. No one would dare utter the phrase for fear of ridicule. For something to be FP it surely must be able to continue to operate in the way you need it to forever and a day. However, the term was bandied about in the days before the internet, and salesmen of the world soon realised that most of the FP’d kit they’d sold was done so for a future that didn’t involve the need to be downloading and storing large amounts of data for example, or run programs that needed more than a couple of MB or RAM, and the thought of a hard drive storing GB’s of data was just folly. Now though FP... Read More

Do you add to your company’s Gene Pool of Knowledge?

on Oct 03, 2011 in Employees, Knowledge, Management by Steven Ward | No Comments »
I’ve worked in a number of different industries, and one of things you invariably get asked at interview is how you’d manage working in a new industry of which you have no experience or knowledge. Obviously, the correct answer is to outline how your existing knowledge is process based, and that all industries use similar processes in their supply and delivery chains and you would only have to learn semantics. This can be gleaned from talking to various key people within an orgnaisation, and so in theory you’ll fit in very nicely….when do I start? But there more to it than this. If you create an analogy between what you bring to an organisation and genetics then you can start to see that employing people from exactly the same industry isn’t always the best... Read More

Inventive incentives work better than cash

on Apr 20, 2011 in Customer Service, IT Management, Reporting Services, SharePoint, SQL, Staff Incentive by Steven Ward | No Comments »
At the moment we have a particular focus on one KPI, namely cash collection. It’s been on-going for a couple of months, and it will be for some time. I’ve created a series of divisional reports which, through the wonders of SQL Reporting Services and SharePoint, run and email themselves around the divisional managers at the end of each day. They show, daily cash collected by customer; daily totals for the month so far; the monthly target that’s been set, and the remaining figure to be collected. It also has a graphical represenation of these data sets for instant impact. One of the discussions we had at the start of the process was how to create a sense of importance and urgency on the tasks required to collect and post the cash to the ledgers, making sure that all... Read More
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