Why small companies are smarter than big ones: Jobs

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Why small companies are smarter than big ones

By Rafe Needleman, Special to ZDNet
September 07, 2004
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/jobs/soa/Why-small-companies-are-smarter-than-big-ones/0,139023216,139158441,00.htm

There are two ways to manage technology at work: The big company way and the small company way.

Do you have a staff of people dedicated to taking care of your computing needs? If you work in a large company, you probably do. But most people don't work in large firms. Most work in small businesses, without any special tech-support staff. If their PC goes wonky, they do what a home user does: They call the PC vendor or the geek down the hall.

I'll wager that for a lot of readers of this column, that geek down the hall is you. In fact, if you run your own small business, it's almost certainly you. You're responsible for the company, the office, and the machines you and your employees use to get your jobs done. So how do you handle day-to-day technology issues, as well as occasional crises, and still have time to get your real job done?

Early in my career, it was my job to handle IT issues for a small engineering company. But we did things the big-company way: we had a locked-down computing policy that gave us ultimate control over all the PCs and workstations.

To all the employees of this company, I say now to you: I'm sorry. It was wrong to treat people at this small, family-oriented shop like they were cogs in a machine. It's wrong to treat anybody that way. That's one of the main things I learned in trying to solve support issues by forcing big-company IT into a small company. Here are some others.

Problem: variability

It takes longer to fix a product when you don't know the landscape. Big PC vendors often reply to consumer tech-support issues by suggesting the customer reformat their hard drive. That gives the tech a known battlefield to work on. But it's no real help for the user.

The big-company solution
Squash variability with a controlled setup. Don't let users install their own hardware or software. If they want to use a product you don't know about, insist that it go through a formal IT acceptance process. See how many requests evaporate.

The small-company way
Leave the PC environment wide open. If users want to buy and install their own applications, let them. To a certain extent, they should be able to support themselves--after all, if they installed it, they should be able to uninstall it.

But keep a bailout plan in effect. Be sure your users are backing up their data regularly, and admonish them all to run a backup whenever they're about to tinker with their setup.

Problem: security

Today, not only do you have to worry about viruses, spyware, and Trojans, all of which can siphon data from your PCs, but most industries (and customers) also have regulations that require that you ensure confidential data doesn't leave your business.

The big-company solution
Lockdown! I once worked for a company that locked up its laptops to an absurd extent. Not only could users not install useful applications on their systems, they couldn't even connect these machines to public Web sites without going through the poky corporate VPN (virtual private network). And dial-up users had to use the company-supported modem pool, which was unbelievably slow--I often thought there was somebody in a room somewhere approving each Web page request before my pages loaded.

It was, in a nutshell, impossible to do any work aside from editing Microsoft Office files or e-mailing people through the corporate Exchange server. I eventually took to carrying my own personal laptop with me just so that I could use my personal e-mail account when on the road. But none of the data on the corporate laptop ever left the company.

The small-company way
Education is everything. Be sure your employees are invested in keeping bad data out of your company and good data in. Also, make sure your users keep their Windows installations up to date, and be sure antivirus and antispyware applications are installed on PCs and that users know how to use them. Just don't try to lock users out of their own machines. Doing so annoys them and encourages the use of workarounds that may cause more problems than you can foresee.

Problem: cost control

How do you keep PC costs under control? You can set a budget for each user or each job type in your company, then configure your PCs to meet it. But good hardware and software cost controls are only part of the story. Supporting users and keeping them educated can be much more expensive than paying for equipment; likewise, productivity gains and losses will impact your bottom line much more than any hardware could.

The big-company solution
The corporate way to control expenses is to take the checkbook out of the hands of the users. Give each user a PC from your approved fleet. And make sure you order machines with long product life cycles so that any parts your IT team has on hand can be used on the maximum number of PCs. And remember: Cutting-edge technology is bad since it costs more and you won't know how to fix it. Also, centralise as much software and networking as possible, to pull the expensive products and services into a locked "glass house" that's under control of budget-minded technology professionals.

The small-company way
Allow users to spec out their machines the way they like, within budgets. You'll probably want to limit their choices to a certain vendor or two or even to a model line. But by letting users configure their own systems, you'll ensure they'll get what they need for their jobs, from desktops with screaming CPUs to ultralight laptops. Why force everyone into the same box?

After reading this, it should be no surprise that I think it's usually best to rely on the individual--that putting control of work spaces into the hands of the people is the best way to ensure happy workers and high productivity.

Such freedom does, of course, have costs. You can't expect everybody to be as smart about technology as you are, and many people won't be able to make good--or any--decisions about their technology. So the real solution requires a lot of sensitivity and balance, and it may require an up-front outlay for user education. But reacting to problems, and potential problems, by locking up your information technology is counterproductive.