Tag: cloud computing

Cloud computing and Small Business September Digital Day

How can online tools help grow your business?

As part of the NSW state government’s Small Business September Digital Day for Startups and Growth Businesses, we’ll be looking at exactly what cloud computing is and how it can help businesses.

Some of the services we discuss in the presentation are listed in the Netsmart’s web post on the 5 essential cloud computing tools for business. Although there’s many more we’ll mention that can help organisations of all sizes.

Given the time constraints and the event’s focus is on the specific social media and cloud computing tools available to small business, much of the background information to the Online Tools to Turbocharge Your Business session is available in the previous series of posts about cloud computing previously done for the 2011 City of Sydney Let’s Talk Business series.

Detailed information from that presentation can be found on the following pages;

The networked business Part 1: What is cloud computing?
The networked business Part 2: The benefits of cloud computing
The networked business Part 3: Managing risk in the cloud
The networked business Part 4: The business case for cloud computing

All of the tools discussed in the Small Business September presentations are available in our ebook, Online Business Essentials which is available for all subscribers to our newsletter.

If you’d like to see the presentations themselves, both The Networked Business and Online Tools to Turbocharge your Business are available through the Slideshare service.

Seats are still available for both of the Digital Day presentations at the Telstra Experience Centre, Level 4, 300 George Street, Sydney. The Start Up session begins at 8.00am and the presentations for growth businesses begins at 1.00pm.

Come along if you’d like to learn how social media and cloud computing can help your business improve productivity while building an online brand.

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The quiet revolution

Productivity gains of the 1990s were based on accessible computer technology, are we about to see a cloud computing revolution in our workplaces?

Earlier this weekPricewaterhouseCoopers released their Productivity Scorecard, which showed Australia’s business efficiency isn’t improving as fast at it once was and the country’s relative performance is steadily slipping down international tables.

One of the notable things in the PwC report is the massive growth of productivity in the 1990s, a point emphasised by the accompanying paper on business productivity in a presentation by economist Saul Eslake last month to the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Economists attribute most of this late 20th Century growth to deregulation and privatisation by governments in the 1980s and 90s but the driving force was really computerisation that allowed most businesses to do much more with less.

Immediately noticeable for an Australian walking into a British, European or Japanese office during the early 1990s was the lack of desktop computers.

Australian businesses adopted technology a lot quicker than their counterparts outside of North America and this alone was probably responsible for the country’s relatively good productivity growth in that decade.

The arrival of computers – followed by desktop printers and Internet access – suddenly gave small businesses access the means to do jobs that even the biggest corporations had struggled to do previously and drove a rapid reorganisation of most offices.

Everybody from secretaries to architects and graphic designers to lawyers – even economists – suddenly found they had the tools at their fingertips to do work they could have only dreamed of prior to 1990. This drove massive productivity gains in businesses of all sizes.

From 2000 onwards, things became tougher as the easy gains had been made and the incremental improvements in technology, such as smartphones, cloud computing and web publishing didn’t have the same substantive effect the early PCs delivered with spreadsheets, word processing and desktop publishing.

The real challenge we now face in business – and government – is to start harnessing cloud computing driven online services that promise to deliver similar productivity gains to what we saw twenty years ago.

We have the tools; online office apps, Customer Relation Management services (CRM) and sharing platforms all deliver major improvements in the way we work within our businesses and with external partners like contractors, suppliers and event clients.

One of the most powerful aspects of cloud computing services is reduced capital cost meaning reduced barriers to entry into markets we previously may have thought were safe.

This easy access into established sectors is one of reasons the retail industry’s giants are now struggling as online competitors can setup cheaply and quickly while offering better prices and service.

Retail is only one of the more obvious sectors being changed by these technologies and as the decade continues we’re going to close to every industry be radically changed by low cost computers accessing the Internet.

As business owners and managers we need to look at our own processes and systems with an eye on how we can improve workflows and customer service within our organisations.

Those of us who manage to get these new technologies are going to reap the benefit of the next productivity wave, those who don’t are going to go the way that many uncompetitive and slow to respond industries did in the 1980s.

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Online tools to turbocharge your business

Flying Solo’s Independents Day looked at how the web can help business productivity.

Flying Solo’s 2011 Independents Day conference featured our Online Tools to Turbocharge your Business.

We looked at some of the most popular cloud computing, social media, productivity and collaboration tools that can help a business make more money and grow faster.

Most importantly, it shows how business owners can free up some of their most valuable asset – their time.

Some of the tools we discussed include the popular social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and how they can be used for customer service and market intelligence on top of being marketing services.

We also looked at how collaborative and cloud computing services can help small businesses work together and improve the ways consultants can work with big business clients. In many ways, collaborative tools like Google Apps, Zoho and Dropbox help build team and deliver projects more effectively.

The Online Tools to Turbocharge Your Business presentation itself is available on Slideshare and if you subscribe to our newsletter, you’ll receive a free copy of the accompanying Online Business Essentials e-book.

Online Tools to Turbocharge your Business

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The Networked Business

The first of the City Of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business looked at how business can use the cloud

The first of the City Of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business workshops looked at how business can use cloud computing services to help improve the marketing, operations and profitability.

My presentation, Business In The Cloud covered the definition of cloud computing, the benefits for business, the risks and the case for getting on the cloud.

The text of the presentation, shown here has been broken into four segments each addressing the individual points.

What is the cloud?

The opening section looked at what cloud computing is, the underlying definitions and how it works. We discussed how the underlying concepts of cloud computing are nothing new and how the concepts of shared resources across a reliable and robust network are part of the very reason for the Internet itself.

The benefits of cloud computing

Having defined cloud computing we look at the benefits of these services, focusing on the flexibility online software delivers and how businesses can use these tools to quickly seize opportunities in our fast changing society.

Risky business

Every new technology has its risks and cloud computing is no different. In our third presentation we look at some of the online traps and how to manage them.

The business case for cloud computing

Concluding the presentation is a summary of the business case, balancing the benefits and the risks and concluding with how businesses might use cloud services.

Further information

Illustrating how businesses can use online tools, we have a list of some of popular business cloud services that can help your organisation use the web to be more flexible and innovative.

The presentation was part of the Let’s Talk Business series of workshops run by the City of Sydney and held at the Customs House. There’s three more events in the 2011 series covering the new consumer, mobile internet and business leadership.

If you’ve been along to the Lets Talk Business events, or have some ideas on how business can use cloud services, we’d love to hear your comments.

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Other peoples’ platforms

The risks in the privately owned web range from obscure terms of service to arbitrary payment problems. This is why you need to control as much of your business’ online presence as possible.

“We have successfully established an online business, but we have run into problems with Ebay (indefinite suspension – unfairly I might add)” wrote Ralph*, an old client.

“We are pretty desperate, as this is now our sole business and we are now without an income.”

The Privately Owned Web

Ralph’s problem is typical of thousands of businesses that rely on one Internet service. Some months back we looked at “Nipplegate”, the story of a Sydney jeweller who had her Facebook page closed down because of her anatomically correct dolls.

All of these services are privately owned with their own terms and conditions along with their own corporate objectives. If you choose to use their product, you have to follow their rules – just like a shopping mall management can order you off their premises because they don’t like the colour of your socks.

The most glaring example of this is Wikileaks where Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard and Visa all threw the whistleblower site off their services for allegedly breaching their terms of services in various obscure ways.

The Terms of Service Trap

A business’ Terms of Service usually feature clauses wide enough to catch even the most honest and diligent business, this is by design as it gives management the excuse to throw anyone who makes their lives difficult, which is exactly what has happened with Wikileaks.

While Ralph’s problem is nothing like the scale of Julian Assange’s, all of these stories illustrate the dangers of relying on one service for your livelihood. Should that service change the way it operates, then any business that relies on that could be broke in hours, as many businesses that rely on Google search results have found.

Most of the Internet is not a public space, almost all of it is privately run along similar lines to that shopping mall or a walled estate.

Ralph and Julian Assange have shown us the limitations and risks of the privately operated web. As citizens and business owners we have to understand these corporations’ objectives are not always the same as ours and make judgements on how we live with the risk of finding ourselves in breach of a Term of Service in our business or personal lives.

We’re still in relatively early days of the net and all of us are still learning. One lesson is clear though, we can’t allow our livelihoods to be held hostage by a small number of big technology companies. Make sure you have alternatives to your online channels.

*Ralph is not his real name

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Why cloud computing isn’t just about savings

Looking for massive cost savings should not the sole reason for choosing a new product.

“Billions of IT savings in the Clouds” trumpeted the Australian Financial Review last week in a front page article on cloud computing that claimed moving services online could “slash technology costs by up to 80 percent”.

If nothing else, those lines lead any IT industry veteran to rise a wry eyebrow; a business that adopts a new platform, technology or vendor solely on the claim of massive cost savings is in for a world of pain, disappointment and heartbreak.

There’s no doubt that cloud computing and software as a service are the IT industry’s growth areas and there are many benefits for the businesses that adopt these technologies. Reduced costs is one of the attractions, but it isn’t the only factor a businesses should consider.

Other aspects are the flexibility of not locking yourself into specific hardware and technology platforms, reduced capital and labour commitments along with improved security, reliability and data protection.

This last point is probably the killer reason why you shouldn’t be looking for 80 percent cost savings with any product. As we discussed a while back, to go onto the cloud you have to trust your supplier has the utmost competence and integrity. A provider who offers nothing but slashed costs will struggle to provide peace of mind.

It’s likely in a few years time only the biggest of the biggest companies will have inhouse IT staff and servers as most business IT operations will run over the internet and through web browsers. Most businesses will think having IT staff on the payroll is as unusual as employing a full time plumber or electrician in the office.

Although we probably won’t get to bank those savings — as we’ve found with the roll out of IT services in the last 20 years, new industries will develop that will soak up the labour and create new cost centres. While today’s services may be 80% percent cheaper, just as today’s computers and mobile phone are 80% cheaper than those of 20 years ago, we’ll be using other services and the price of those will soak up a lot of those savings.

A bigger concern is for the cloud and software as a service industries themselves. If online services are identified as merely a cost cutting product, then these markets are going to be rapidly commoditised with a race to the bottom not dissimilar to what we’ve seen in the PC industry. Which will perversely mean security and reliability conscious businesses will keep their IT in house rather than risk it to a cheap charlie data service.

History’s shown that selling and buying cheap in technology is a mug’s game. So don’t get seduced by claims of ridiculous savings with any technology; be it cloud computing, telecoms services or any other line item. All too often that cheap price or massive saving hides some nasty traps.

Because of the compelling benefits cloud computing is the way businesses will go over the next few years but those who choose a platform simply because it appears 80% cheaper probably won’t be around to tell us about it.

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