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Out-Sourcing in the IT Industry |
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It is a no-brainer ! You own or manage an operation with 400,000 clients. You provide multiple types of server-hosting, web design, and marketing services. You have to employ qualified technical personnel (this means personnel with degrees and industry experience) to keep the “ship afloat”.
You have a billing department, large payroll, a customer service department, and HR department, holiday pay, asset upkeep. The list goes on and on. The IT owner is overwhelmed. The general business owner needs to understand the make-up of the current generation of IT owners.
Almost to a person, these people sprouted up from the dot com era of the ’90’s. They are/were not from corporate America. They could not adhere to the discipline! Their education may include junior college or maybe “a few business courses”. Higher educated technical engineers are a threat to them, so they hire personnel at their education level or lower.
Your hosting company is awash with high school and college dropouts. Notice they can’t spell ? Overwhelmed with success, the IT owner has to look for an outlet for responsibility. Enter the concept of Outsourcing. The IT owner farms out tech support, web design, marketing, and billing. The direct employee numbers fall. There goes HR. The outsourcing companies are responsible for customer service. There goes the concept of customer service.
The IT owner markets hosting services within his smaller operation, with no responsibility for the backend service structure. The IT owner loses focus of managing the whole operation. Turnover in most large companies is presently above 300 percent. The IT owner maximizes his profits, and the client, in this case the business owner is left to talk to a plethora of foreign personnel whose best talent is filling out trouble tickets. |
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AIG and Employment Contracts |
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With the payout of bonuses to AIG executives using bailout money, there has been a lot of discussion in the news lately about employment contracts. We as taxpayers may not like it, but, an employment contract is a legally binding agreement between the employee and the employer.
AIG aside, there are certain provisions of any employment contract that are intended to protect each party, i.e.
· The compensation package, including any bonuses, stock options or grants, ensures that the employee that meets the terms of the agreement will receive a set level of income.
· The non-compete portion of the contract is the employers attempt to ensure that an employee who has knowledge of company operations, products, or customers, and leaves the company, will not use that information to the detriment of his/her previous employer.
The tricky part of employment contracts is that they are difficult and costly to enforce and in the past courts have been reluctant to tackle the non-compete portions. The general view is that an employee with a certain body of knowledge applicable to a certain field has the right to work in his field. As with any contract, read and understand the provisions of the contract before you sign it. |
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Unique Backyard Accessories |
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The Bird Motel announces unique, handcrafted bird houses, and feeders and other accessories. Our bird houses and bird feeders are designed to create a backyard habitat for your feathered friends. We will show you how to make this an entertaining project. See their site at: http://www.thebirdmotel.com. |
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You signed up with your hosting company. You asked what is you up time guarantee? They told you, “4-9’s”. What does that mean ? Please ask your shared hosting representative. Then ask their supervisor. Then ask their manager. After that, ask to speak to the Quality Manager.
From a Graduate in Business Statistics, it is reported that to get to 4-9’s, one has to look at 5-9’s, namely 99.9997 % acceptance rate. This means the defect rate or rate of failures in a given system is no more than 3.4 events per million(defects per million opportunities, or DPMO) of the statistical population.
To understand the significance of these numbers, we look to the US Airline industry. They operate at 6.4 sigma. Your server is down every week…every month. Add to this email problems…being down, etc. You are getting 4-9’s. You called 4 times and was put on hold for 90 minutes !
As a business owner/manager if you set a down-time parameter of being no more than 5 minutes per event…if your hosting company contractually guaranteed 99.99 uptime…you would see a one defect every ten year DPMO. Ask your shared host Operations VP for data that proves his DPMO. Chances are there isn’t a VP.
The business owner/manager should know that shared hosting is a quality scam. The average cost of a hosting account is $0.72 per month. Your shared hosting company is betting you will barely use the server capacity your are promised. They want your money, and that is all. That is why you have technical and billing contacts you cannot understand.
Your hosting company is driving cost instead of customer service. As another example, none of them have the capability to monitor your actual monthly bandwidth. They may tell you are approaching your limit. With 1000 clients on one server, if they could keep track of that, they could certainly keep your email working for ten years, right ? And unlimited hard drive space? Give that a try. So the business owner’s up time guarantee is an untruth. |
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The World of Shared Hosting |
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You are a growing business. You have entrusted your economic income of your web design to a shared hosting company. You notice your business site that had a professional web site design is down every week…your email is intermittent…your customers are complaining and revenue is down.
As a business owner you are wondering where the business IT support is at this shared vendor.
Unfortunately you are in a classic situation that businesses find themselves in dealing with shared hosting companies. Your web design that you spent hard-earned company funds on putting a professional web site design together is faltering. You have not been told you on a server with up to 1000 other “neighbors”. Some of these are upstanding businesses…others are spammers, and adolescents of all ages just playing and using up the bandwidth of the server. You may have even been told by your hosting firm has load or demand balancing as a managed services solution. You are moved from one server to another when there is a problem.
So if your site is slow, down, or has spotty email, the whole server environment also known as the server farm is in trouble. Your host company has inferior IT asset management, the tier three techs you interface with are barely intelligible, and your are told a trouble ticket has been issued, and “we’ll be in touch by email”. This happens because the call center managers edict call time. The person on the phone, no matter what accent, have a short amount time to solve your problem. This is phone time, chat time, etc. This is why you have probably been hung up on. The agent on the phone has no managed services solution for you, he is out of time. His screen says he is going to get dinged by his manager for long call time, so out of frustration, he hangs up. In call centers, agents are rewarded for short call time, whether business IT support has been offered or not. There is no call follow-up. At these firms, there is no customer service mentality.
To check on your current firm’s performance, check with your local Better Business Bureau. Look at the total number of complaints vs. the number closed. Two of the top five firms can be searched at http://central-northern-western-arizona.bbb.org/WWWRoot/. Click on “Check out a Business or Charity”.
So for your business growth’s sake look to a safe haven. Dedicated managed servers will give your business expansive freedom, with the ability to maximize revenue. A SEO site design using SEO technology will bring volume inquiries to your site, and with IT asset management, continued growth will be managed successfully.
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Ranking Your Shared Hosting Company |
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So here you are with hosting problems, tech support problems, billing personnel that will not solve your immediate problem, but instead offer other products that cost you more money with no guarantee.How did you get into this ? You saw the surveys. Ranking you choice in the top five. What could be the problem ?
First: see real rankings from the Better Business Bureau. For example in Arizona, go to the Central Arizona Chapter of the Better Business Bureau at : http://central-northern-western-arizona.bbb.org/Find-Business-Reviews/#middle-result.
Second: From here you can enter (for example IPower, or godaddy) and see the complaints. Weight this against the “rankings”.
Third: Use you state’s Better Business Bureau statistics to shed light on “the real story”.
For complete client satisfaction see: http://www.zenithmanagedit.com/index.php?/Table/Testimonials/ |
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Success Associates Introduces New Services, New Seminars |
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Success Associates has the first and only succession planning total solution that combines content, process and software. It is also unique in its practical “how to” get results focus. See the company site at www.successassociates.com Technorati Profile |
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