Backups are a common subject in IT and in business alike. You can think of them like your spare key or the spare tire, where they are the emergency fix for when you do something silly or something unexpected comes along. But with business, the stakes are higher, and when your company’s data is at risk, a simple backup approach—unlike the spare key or spare tire—is not going to be enough.
Relocating your office is a major milestone, but treating your IT infrastructure like just another box of supplies is a recipe for a Monday morning meltdown. The difference between a seamless transition and a week of lost productivity often comes down to early planning. If your company is eyeing a new space in the next six-to-12 months, avoid leaving your technology to chance.
We’re sure that even your most talented employees have tasks on their plate that make them feel like expensive data-entry clerks. This is known as the “tedium tax,” and it can have a very real impact on small businesses (especially when employees wear multiple hats). When you have multiple tools that don’t speak well with each other, and you’re forced to resort to manual data entry, your team starts to act like a “human bridge,” connecting these isolated apps themselves—and wasting a lot of time in the process.
In storytelling, there’s a structure that the vast majority of stories follow, regardless of the format: introduction, rising action, conflict, falling action, resolution. The rising action and the conflict are what give the story its appeal—they’re the source of all the tension that keeps things moving forward. They’re where the stress and the drama live; they keep the story interesting.
That said, when it comes to your business (and its IT in particular), you want its story to break this format. You want things to be, for lack of a better term, boring.
“Persuasion.” “Percussive Maintenance.” Whatever you call hitting your computer to make it work, we get it. We’ve all been there. Your Wi-Fi router drops the signal for the third time during a meeting, or your TV remote decides to go on strike. In a fit of frustration, you give it a firm slap; and miraculously, it starts working again.
