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!