The Savvy CIO

This is part 6 of a series on IT Self-Assessment for small businesses. We’re providing information and guidelines for a simple IT check, giving you the ability to gain free insights into how your technology can serve your  business better. Each post covers a critical area of technology.

Communications: Email & Collaboration

Function & Value

Email has become the central form of communication for business. Email is critical to your company in marketing, sales, customer service, operations and more.

A host of related functions have grown up around email: calendars, contact lists, task lists, instant messaging, etc. Collaboration technology takes these functions and connects them: you see not only your own calendar, but also your team members’. Contact lists, project tasks and more now become shared information. The effects on productivity are incredible.

Common Problems

(1) Lack of collaboration. Email is provided (often for free) by a website host, and is accessed through a basic webmail program or Outlook. This creates two major issues:

• Each employee’s information is on an “island”, with no ability to share schedules, contact information, or to-do lists. This is a massive time sink with significant cost to your business.
• All email and related information is stored on individual PCs. When a hard drive fails, all of that information is lost. This is a massive business risk with significant potential cost to your business.

Take an informal survey. Find out how much time staff is spending each week managing contacts and calendars, or making phone calls and emails to set up meetings. Multiply that out into annual salary to see what lack of collaboration is costing your business. (And that’s not even considering lost revenue from all that wasted time!)

(2) Overly complex and costly tools. The collaboration tools with the most brand recognition (Microsoft Exchange, Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes) were made for very large corporations. They work in economies of scale. 1,000 users utilizing a $10,000 investment makes a lot of sense. 25 users utilizing a $10,000 investment does not. These tools are too costly and complex to maintain for smaller businesses.

Best Practices

(1) Use collaboration tools. Your staff with thank you, and your general ledger will too. There is no other piece of general software that will have more impact on your staff’s productivity.

(2) Use a hosting provider to deliver the software as a service. Web based collaboration systems are the best solutions for small and medium size businesses. Zimbra Collaboration Suite is the current best-of-breed hosted solution. If you’re a Microsoft-only shop, you can get Exchange as a hosted solution through a provider.

Email & Collaboration Self-Assessment

Email provider: _____________________________________

Do you currently use collaboration tools?

Estimated annual staff hours spent on collaborative tasks (updating contacts, scheduling meetings, coordinating tasks): ________

Where is email and related information stored? Is it backed up?

Total cost of current solution: ___________ per year

(Be sure to include all hard and soft costs to calculate the total cost of ownership.)

Issues to be addressed:

1.

2.

3.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Email & Collaboration, IT Assessment, IT Support. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.