I’m always looking to improve our service offering at IT Partners, so I recently took myself off for week-long course at Harvard Business School.
The program was entitled Leading Professional Service Firms and attracted 163 participants from all over the world – mostly from Europe.
The Professors - Ashish Nanda and Thomas Delong (ex Morgan Stanley) - were absolutely outstanding. Humorous, insightful, working a tiered lecture theatre, and sharing their vast real world experiences, all without notes, for 2 hours without a break. To get some sense of their knowledge and charisma, view one of the segments here (requires Internet Explorer).
Harvard is famous for its case study method and the analyses of firms like McKinsey, Bain & Company, Watchtell Lipton Rosen & Katz, Linklaters and Morgan Stanley highlighted that as managers we all face the same issues – regardless of geography, culture and size.
I returned to Hamilton highly motivated and with a huge list of ideas for improving IT Partners - for both employees and clients. See if you can spot the difference!
Hamilton’s newest ISP – IT Partners
Hamiton has a new Internet Service Provider – IT Partners. Earlier this year we connected to the Velocity Metro Fibre network, and chose FX networks for our national and international connectivity. We are stoked to announce that this relationship has extended into us becoming a fully fledged ISP. We are also proud to say that we have our first client - King St Advertising. Watch this space for more news about our extension into the ISP space.
IT Training Budgets
Someone once told me a story about Thomas Watson Jr, IBM’s legendary CEO. He was asked how much it cost Big Blue to fight the Anti-Trust (monopoly) case in the late 60s and early 70s and apparently he said, “Well, I gave them an unlimited budget. And they exceeded it.” I adopt a similar approach with my training budget at IT Partners*.
I believe one of our key differentiators is our long term investment in people. My team is free to choose the courses they attend, and the delivery methods (e-learning, classroom or study leave) - as long as they fulfil our vendor certification – (e.g. We are a Microsoft Gold Partner - one of only three in the Waikato, and the longest standing).
The investment pays dividends when we are faced with a complex technology issue. Invariably the IT Partners team is able to solve problems that others can’t.
* I actually do have a set training budget - I just don’t tell anyone what the number is!
Often I am asked what type of systems we use internally, and my response is: exactly what we provide to our clients. A major part of our core infrastructure is the IBM Servers and Storage, running Citrix XenServer virtualised operating systems.
For a good start at understanding virtualisation have a look at Wikipedia.org
We were an early adopter of Xen (since brought out by Citrix) and started virtualising machines early last year. The early benefit of our virtualisation implementations was that of resource use – we were able to run many “machines” on one physical server – a great saving when it came to capital expenditure.
Internally we run Windows Server 2003, and Linux (Debian and Ubuntu) server operating systems. We have both production and development machines - virtualisation has been fantastic for creating test environments.
Virtulising individual machines is great, but we wanted to go to the next step – virtualisation of both servers and storage to give us more flexibility and resilience.
One of our current projects is moving to a new IBM Blade S chassis along with DS3300 iSCSI storage for our production based systems. Blade Systems come in all sizes have a look at this.
Other benefits we are planning on achieving through these system changes are less power consumption – through less heat output that needs to be cooled and more energy efficient operation of our servers. We can also deploy some better tools to manage and report on how efficient we are.
New phone system
The high availability that the systems described above have, is particularly important as we move to a new Voice over IP phone system, based on Asterisk (using: trixbox).
Greig McGill has led the effort to deploy the new phone system (and done a fantastic job) – major capex savings over deploying alternate systems, and ongoing savings in terms of access and toll costs – more about this soon!
We are using phones from both Polycomm and Linksys in our internal deployment.
Being a big phone use one of the features I am really enjoying is having Outlook dial the phone numbers – a saving of only a few seconds and one more opportunity to fit more into the day – like viewing one of my favourite all time adverts from Apple: click here to go to you tube
New Premises – same location!
We are expanding – not only have we added staff, but our premises are about to double in size, more room for the engineers, a demo room and a purpose built server room are included in stage 1.
Productivity
I’ve been reading some interesting articles on productivity and doing business in New Zealand – see OECD link and World Bank Report. Given the importance of lifting our productivity, I wanted to highlight two very practical tips.
The first is an obvious one if you’ve been to our office – dual monitors. The ability to have multiple documents, spreadsheets or emails open at once – and for the computer to treat the physical screens as one is hugely beneficial to knowledge workers. We’ve combined our screens onto monitor arms by Ergotron.
The second is the use of our internal Wiki – we now use this for much more than documenting our clients’ systems. We use a knowledge base (how-to articles), internal procedures, meeting agendas and minutes, and a way of tracking items or issues.
Reading
I’m still trying to catch-up on the reading list from my course but I have completed one book that I’d recommend: Aligning the Stars: How to succeed when professionals drive results – Jay W. Lorsch and Thomas J. Tierney. I’ve made some notes on some of the key points – email me if you want a copy.
Of course it’s so easy to get distracted, especially with the second season of Burn Notice, the new season of Spooks and You Tube video from The Gruen Transfer – see the NZ Invasion examples version 1 and version 2 (I especially like the 100% NZ takeoff).
For those of you interested in some business related blogs:
Harvard Business Blogs
The Economist Blogs
Our New Premises
We’ve moved – well across to the other side of the building at 11 London St (so no changes to our address). With an expanded team - soon to be nine in total – it’s great to have the extra space.
The contractors led by John Clark of John Clark Construction were fantastic – and if you are considering a move or renovations to your premises I’d highly recommend them. The team included: CommSolutions – network cabling, McAra Air conditioning – Aircon, and Hassall Electrical – electrical work.
The new fit out, layout and investment in new equipment has brought about a raft of savings which collectively add up to a significant sum – these include: server room having inverter air-conditioning, Power Over Ethernet for some of our phones, and using Voice over IP for our phone and fax.