SAGE will be hosting webinars this Summer on a number of hot topics. These webinars are free and all are welcome to participate. Each webinar happens between Noon and 1 P.M. EDT, so please spend your lunch with us.

First up is our popular Metadata 101 webinar, "Your Documents, Your Undoing" (7/15) which discusses the risks from metadata and sensitive content in your documents. We discuss methods and strategies to mitigate those risks using tools like Workshare Protect and best practices.

Next is our webinar on Getting the Most From Your IT Budget (7/23). In it, we provide some benchmarks for what your IT budget should be, and how to stretch it to extend your capabilities. During the webinar, we discuss where IT provides maximum value to a firm and how to balance user support, projects, and regular maintenance.

MS Office is more than just spreadsheets and documents. In August, we debut a new webinar on Doing More with MS Office (8/19). For this webinar, we describe new uses for accounting, CRM, and HR from old standbys like Word, Excel, Access and Outlook, and illustrate what can be done with newcomers InfoPath, OneNote, and Groove.

Sign-up for SAGE Wisdom webinars on our web site. If you have any topics that you would like to learn more about, let us know in the comments or drop us a line.

Now that you have hung your shingle you are thinking about your IT needs. Not just the laptops and Internet connection for you and your partner or two, but a year or two down the road when the practice takes off. That was the topic that SAGE's fearless leader, George Nicholson, spoke about at the 2008 DC Judicial Bar and Conference last Friday, April 11, 2008. George's advice to small firms and those attorneys looking to strike out on their own: address as many IT requirements as possible with the resources you have available.

For any small firm, IT purchasing is a matter of walking the line between getting by with the IT that will work today, or buying IT for tomorrow's growth. The accounting and finance package that works great for three attorneys will fall apart when there are twenty. The cost to upgrade to the mid-market package includes the price of the software, plus the cost of converting the current data from the old system, training, consulting, and any impact on productivity and billable hours. Viewed from that perspective, does it make more sense to buy the mid-market package from the outset?

This calculus--part crystal ball, part gamble, part investment--is the balancing act that George spoke about as part of the panel discussion. Having a good technology partner becomes vital to help you come up with a calculus that is right for your firm. Come back because we will have more posts about this topic.

IT sometimes harkens back to 12th grade microeconomics class--namely, "opportunity costs." This post over at the Freakonomics's blog brings up the issue of lost time and productivity from a seemingly innocuous software update that cost the author an hour. The larger point that author makes is that the longer you wait to update, the more costs you can incur.

So are you asleep yet? Wake up!

The article highlights hidden costs in IT, where users wait for software updates or create time-consuming workarounds due to glitches, or little to no training. The longer one waits to resolve these issues, the higher the costs. Updates and patches that promise fixes or new features can often have unintended consequences that wreak havoc on your firm network or personal device. Testing, daily maintenance, prevention, and proper training are important to keep costs down, especially hidden costs.

Silence from users about IT is a sign of trouble rather than success. In a sense, IT should be invisible, where it fades into the background. But is the system really running great or are people just making do? Here are some probing questions to determine whether your IT system really is computing nirvana or a sleeping dragon.

Is your team actually preventing IT problems, or just more efficient at solving a recurring problem?  Kudos to the team for getting the firm back up and running quicker after that pesky outage that happens at least once a month, but what are you doing to prevent the outage from ever happening again? Sometimes in IT we get caught up in solving the problem, rather than preventing it in the first place.

What workarounds are users creating to deal with IT issues rather than complain? We had one client who was amazed at how fast their systems booted after an image refresh. Why had no users been complaining of a slow boot process?  For one, they didn't have a standard to compare against, so they just assumed it was normal. Also, they adjusted their work schedule to accommodate the quirks and failings of the system.  So before the image refresh, our client's employees started the login process and then went to the break room for 10 minutes for coffee and kibbutzing. When they returned, the computer would be booted up.

Are you asking them? Despite the many complaints that IT professionals hear, most people will silently bear minor inconveniences. They may not know how to explain the problem or think the time to solve it will be greater than the small dings on their productivity. They may not even see the cumulative costs of those productivity hits personally, but have tremendous effects when viewed from the firm's perspective.

E-Week this week published their "Top 10 Disruptive Technologies Affecting the Data Center". The slideshow is a mix of heady, esoteric terms like "server fabrics" with more tenable concepts like "green IT", and closely parallels Gartner Research's top 10 strategic technologies of 2008. But what is a disruptive technology and how to respond to it?

"Disruptive Technology" is a fairly recent term coined to describe technologies that upset the current state of affairs--whether those are business models, industries, or workflow. Want some examples? The Internet has disrupted traditional media like newspapers and TV. Digital music and the iPod has disrupted the music industry. And Google is doing it to just about anything that touches the Web.

So how can you predict the next disruptive technology? Well, you can't. The fact that they come from "outside the box" means that there is little chance of seeing them coming. As this post points out, the next big thing is never a repeat. That is why disruptive technologies are unexpected and unpredictable.

So the best strategy is agility: responding quickly to this new phenomenon. This requires the ability to learn quickly and not stand on bureaucracy, parochialism, or convention. A capacity for reinvention will be a vital survival trait.

Want even more good news? The pace of change is accelerating. Look over the past ten years since e-mail went widespread: now we have Blackberries and iPhones with word processing, cameras and GPS. Imagine what the next ten years will bring. So industries once isolated or downstream of innovative industries will have to react quicker as disruptive technologies will sweep through like wildfires.

Submitted for your perusal is the sophistication of technology in a small to medium-sized businesses. Can one "tech guy" who comes in twice a month have the requisite knowledge and expertise to cover it all?

• Email and messaging (Exchange/Outlook, Blackberries and other mobile devices)
• Office software
• Printers/Scanners
• Remote access (Citrix, VPN, Terminal Services)
• Internet Access
• Firewall
• Storage
• Backup & Recovery (Tape, Disk, Online)
• Threat reduction (antivirus, spam filtering)
• Patch management
• Monitoring

Then throw in industry-specific and specialized applications like docketing, document management, accounting and finance, sales, CRM, and custom databases. Even more, on the horizon even small firms will have some form of server virtualization, online backup, and enhanced mobile communications.

Needless to say, this is too much for one person to handle. Best would be to have a medium-sized IT company managing your firm's IT. That company will assign an engineer representative for site visits and be the point of contact who intimately knows the client's system, but can call on specialists and experts whenever necessary.

Today brings black clouds for the IT department in the form of a new book by noted IT critic, Nicholas Carr.  Mr. Carr, who made his bones last year with an article contending that corporate IT departments don't provide any strategic advantage, has a new book where he predicts that future IT departments will be operated by one person sitting at a computer issuing commands to outsourced providers via the Internet. Alas, the lonely system administrator gets even less respect and will be the Maytag repairman for this century.

This seems to overlook the fact that software and systems have not evolved to be intuitive and easy to use for the end-user. So who will have the skills to help people with IT, freeing them do whatever it is they do best? As a managed service provider (in other words, outsourced IT provider) we know the value of having great technical staff directly aid our customers whether it is with a question about a word processing program or troubleshooting their messaging system. We provide site visits to facilitate interaction with our customers and build relationships of trust and mutual respect.

Now if that is the evolution of the IT department -- a greater focus on the end-user and better customer service -- we are all for it.

We are conducting a survey on IT and Litigation Support and would like your input!

In our experience, there are many ways that IT and Litigation Support can work together for the overall benefit of the firm. There are a variety of ways that they can learn from each other and share ideas that would benefit them both. This brief survey (10 questions) asks about IT and Litigation Support issues and a forum to discuss them.

We would value your input, whether you are IT, Litigation Support, or Administration.

Please follow this link to take the survey: Click Here to take survey

Thank you in advance for your feedback. We will post the results in about a week, so please check back soon.

Here is another episode from our series “The Devil is in the Details.” This time, our setting is online data backup, that may be part of the larger world of managed IT services. Whether looking at online backup vendors or when it is bundled as part of a managed IT service, here is an important feature you should insist upon: Real time view and access into your backed-up data.

You want the ability to view and manage your backup data without needing an intermediary. For instance, you want to see your files and restore a file without needing to place a support ticket that someone fulfills for you most likely in a manner not-described as “timely.” You have options in online backup, decide on the one that gives you the greatest flexibility for the price.

While Litigation Support is a very technology intensive discipline, they don’t always see eye-to-eye with the IT department. The reasons are many: Litigation Support is often created and budgeted outside of IT and the practitioners largely come from the paralegal, attorney or administrative ranks. Although you would believe these two entities would find common ground, often their relationship is more noted for misunderstandings, misperceptions, and differing agendas.

IT and Litigation Support departments are tasked very differently. IT must provide quality, predictable service on a budget, whereas Litigation Support is tasked by the attorneys with getting the job done at all costs. For this and other reasons, Litigation Support and IT are separate entities in many firms, large and small. Litigation support is steeped in data. Their job is collecting, searching, and re-purposing data, that requires tremendous storage capacity, fast networking, and a wide variety of tools to search, extract, catalog, redact and “produce” that data. These demands sometimes run counter to IT’s mandate to provide stable, predictable, high-quality service for the entire firm. Large amounts of data on its servers or coursing through its wires can negatively affect performance. IT also has concerns about staffing a help desk that must know a couple dozen esoteric litigation support tools.

These are just some examples of the differences between IT and Litigation Support. Over the coming weeks, we will be exploring how to improve this relationship to realize the synergies and benefits of a close working relationship between the two.

Growth happens, sometimes in spite of all our actions! Many small firms rely on individual IT consultants or large IT companies specializing in small firms. So what are the signs you are outgrowing your current IT provider? We list the indicators below, focusing on moving from one person IT consultants to larger IT consulting firms with a broader array of services. In a future post we will discuss the decision to bring IT in-house.

One obvious indicator is that they can’t keep up with your demands for services and support. Your growth places increasing demands on them that they may not be able to meet. In the case of large IT companies catering to small firms, you may simply outgrow their targeted services. A growing firm’s technology also becomes more sophisticated, broader, and more specialized all at the same time. A wider array of services in litigation support, message, VOIP, DMS, web sites, and enterprise level applications are required. At the same time, law firms have very focused software applications that require careful setup and support. Larger IT firms with engineers, application specialists, and programmers can provide the breadth and depth of expertise to meet these demands.

Finally, a surefire giveaway that it is time to move on is if you as a firm manager or administrator are leading your IT firm or bringing trends to their attention. If so, time to start looking for a partner knowledgeable in the latest trends in IT like mobile computing, virtualization, online services and others.

This blog post over at 37 Signals about the preoccupation with the number of features in software development made us think of the flip side: the allure of a multitude of features in purchasing software for a firm. Rather than focusing on benefits to the users, we are guilty of tallying up the features added since the last release. Other pitfalls include:

Different features appeal to different constituencies. When looking at putting software on everyone’s desk or expensive enterprise applications, justifying the large expenditure means getting majorities on management committees to sign off. So we play to our audience, touting different features to different principals to get them to sign-off on the purchase.

Even incredibly smart people fall for the “more is better” argument. Quantity is viewed as value when the price is similar. That value is completely lost if the software becomes too complex or confusing to use. Microsoft’s latest release of Office is notable for its rethinking of the interface after market testing found that users were requesting “new features” that were already in the software but hidden behind menus.

The devil is in the details. Next to lawyers and politicians, sales people are great parsers—saying less to portray the product as delivering much more. Once in users hands, features that looked great on the spec sheet and the tightly scripted demo do not work as promised or their benefits are not as great as expected.

The end result is usually confusion and never-ending calls to the help desk. As consultants, administrators and IT managers, we have to manage the purchasing decision much better. We must frame the purchasing discussion around critical features, not an accounting of a myriad nice-to-have ones. Software purchasing decisions should focus on benefits to the firm rather than appealing to building coalitions through feature-“pork.”

This Tuesday, we spoke to the Small Firm Management section of the ALA Capital Chapter on IT trends for small firms. What we encounter is that small firms have many of the same IT challenges of large law firms, just not on the same scale.

Both small and large firms alike are paying close attention to these IT trends:

Getting more for your money – Everyone is looking to stretch their IT dollars, so small firms are looking to managed IT services and large firms look to outsource basic tasks like daily server checks and monitoring. Firms are also looking at application services providers (Internet providers) for critical systems like time & billing, backup, e-mail and spam filtering.

Virtualization of desktops and servers – flexibility and ability to recover from disasters quickly makes this one of the hottest trends to watch.

Data vaulting – whether the firm administrator is tired of bringing back-up tapes home every night or an integral part of a disaster recovery plan, data vaulting—online backups—are the way to go.

Mobility – Including remote access, laptop and handheld computing, staying in the office is so last century.

Security – While constant struggle against malware rages on, now everyone should also pay attention to stopping data breaches that can cost your firm both money and its reputation.

What are the IT trends where small firms are sitting on the sidelines? WANs; desktop management and software deployment; and Storage Area Networks (SANs).

A common question our clients ask about IT in law firms is how much they should be spending and on what? While the specific answer varies greatly by firm, at the very least you should be spending 3-6% of gross revenue on your IT needs. Then we talk about getting maximum value for that money based on their business goals. For many companies, managed IT services can be a way to get more in the way of service, support, and productivity while spending the same amount.

We put together our thoughts in a white paper called "Getting More from Your IT Budget." It discusses where IT provides the most value to the firm and whether managed services are the right fit for your organization. In it, we cover the many different ways managed services are provided, and what it means to manage your IT provider. Throughout are tips and ideas on how to maximize your IT dollar.

Download the sample, or get your complimentary copy of the complete white paper, a 25 page, full-color PDF.

Here is an idea to think about and discuss. This isn’t an endorsement. Hopefully, it is the start of a conversation.

Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired Magazine and the main who coined the them “the Long Tail” has an interesting post about dual IT networks—one official, the other not—at Wired’s offices. One is the corporate network that is locked down and heavily managed to protect its core functions like accounting/finance, file storage, backup and Exchange. The second is an “open” Internet connection, providing full access to Skype, instant messaging clients, and Facebook.

Now Wired magazine is about living on the digital edge, and law firms and professional services firms are not. Law firms especially need to protect data because the professional and financial ramifications of not doing so are devastating. But innovation is required in any industry, and we have touted the many advantages of new Web applications and services like RSS, social bookmarking, wikis, and more. Giving employees a playground to experiment could lead to a better way to provide client service or an innovative approach to services via these new Internet technologies.

As Anderson mentions in his blog, many corporate CIOs are implementing or seriously considering this dual networking strategy, either with physically separate networks or virtual networks. Time will tell, however, what problems could arise from this intriguing approach. At the person and workstation level those networks converge, causing potential headaches like lost productivity to fantasy sports leagues; malware pickup up from risky web sites and apps, and random questions about obscure web applications into the help desk.

Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Sure, the Annual ILTA Conference is the premier legal tech event on the calendar, but we don't blame you for avoiding the August heat in Central Florida (not near a beach). We sent our rep to seek out knowledge and air conditioning, but with blogging, you don't have to.

Inside Legal Opinions and LexBlog have the rundown of people blogging from the conference. Thanks to these intrepid folks, you can get the latest news and ideas from the conference while sipping your coffee while wearing that comfy, ratty t-shirt in your home office after the kids are in bed.

Here is a quick update on where you can find SAGE experts speaking on IT topics of interest to the legal and professional services communities.

A Mighty Outlook and PowerPoint 2007 – September 19, 2007 at Noon: SAGE’s Dave Carns and Tony Buffkin wrap up our three part series on Office 2007 for the Information Services and Technology Section of the ALA Capital Chapter. The focus this time is on the latest version of PowerPoint and whether Outlook 2007 is up to the daunting task of managing our email, information, and contacts.

IT Solutions for Small Law Firms – September 25, 2007 at Noon. The Small Firm Management Section of the ALA Capital Chapter is hosting this event. The question for small firms is always how to do more with less? Outsourcing, web services, and mobility provide exciting opportunities for small firms, letting them act big while still maintaining their agility. We will look at these opportunities in detail while also discussing “bread-and-butter” issues like Windows Vista and Office 2007.

We are also firming up speaking engagements on disaster recovery and other topics in October and beyond.

Your document management, accounting and finance, and CRM applications are probably using SQL Server for their internal database, making it one of the most common enterprise applications that you completely forget about. Until something goes wrong, and you are painfully aware of its presence.

SQL Server is a very stable and robust program, but that is no excuse to let it go neglected. Pop quiz: how many licenses/copies of SQL Server exist in your firm? Be sure to count those licenses for enterprise applications that use it to store their data. And while you are at it, where are the databases located? Are there maintenance plans in place and are the databases being backed up? What is their current size and rate of change?

These are just a few items you should know about your SQL databases. Becoming reacquainted with your SQL Server installations is the first step. Scheduled check-ups and a full audit will ensure that the rest of the firm can remain blissfully ignorant that one application plays such a large role.

As you may know, yesterday we did a couple of short presentations on the many flavors of managed IT services at the ALA Capital Chapter’s Spring Expo. Well, before we could talk about the variations, we made the case for how managed IT services like SAGE OnSight provide more value for your IT budget dollar. In fact, we have a chart that illustrates the case.

The chart compares the functions typically performed in a small to medium sized firm against what a managed IT solution like OnSight provides. The chart depicts a real world scenario, where preventive measures like daily server checks, patch testing and monthly maintenance aren’t performed, usually because of special projects that eat into time that should be devoted to operations. With a managed IT service, you also get the preventative measures, strategic direction and access to expert resources.

Now keep in mind that we are talking about working with the same IT budget. And it’s not a situation where you have to fire your current IT staff. Often managed services complement existing staff. Taking all of the above into account, managed IT services provide tremendous value. We just needed to make the chart to really drive home the point to ourselves as well!

A good rule of thumb is that IT spending in law firms should be 3-6 percent of gross revenue. IT budgets in that range should provide a reasonable level of service and stability for the firm and its staff. To make the budget go farther, consider going with a managed IT service provider that can provide additional resources and high quality service. Managed IT solutions typically exceed the level of service that in-house resources alone can provide on a regular basis.

There are many different flavors to managed IT Services, however. This will be the topic of discussion during SAGE’s Learning Pavilion Sessions at Thursday’s ALA Capital Chapter Spring Educational Forum and Expo. It is important for each organization to find the service that best fits its needs. Subtle variations in service and support can mean the difference between having the service be the right fit or a disastrous and expensive foray. SAGE consultants with experience on both sides--provider and client---will discuss various factors beyond the "spec" sheet that firms often overlook, but should really be at the forefront of their decision making.

Please join SAGE for either the 11:30 a.m. or 3:00 p.m. session in the Learning Pavilion at the ALA Capital Chapter Educational Forum and Expo, and stop by the SAGE booth to learn even more.

Across the pond, a study of IT claims that UK businesses lose 31 days from poor IT management. Of course, that’s the attention grabbing headline [it works, doesn’t it?], and the findings are not nearly so catastrophic. The lesson learned is that IT is a great asset, but like any asset in an organization, it requires time and money for maintenance and upkeep. Failure to do so has dire consequences, like diverting resources and lowering productivity.

The culprit is not the hardware or software, but management and maintenance. In fact, any gains in productivity, efficiency, or quality degrade over time because of poor upkeep. In the survey, 77 percent cited that insufficient upkeep wasted an estimated 13 percent of their investment in IT.

Why? Projects are high profile while operations are considered monotonous and ho-hum. Smaller firms offer divert resources from operations for projects, and service suffers and gains aren’t fully realized. Operations, however, are what keep people productive and work going out the door.

So besides giving operations its due, split IT staff along projects and operations responsibilities if your organization is large enough, or call on outside help for projects when necessary.

Firms looking to be more secure with their data both internally and with their mobile devices should focus first on the cultural barriers to greater security within their firm. Attorneys and professionals who don’t want to be inconvenienced by enhanced security like multi-factor authentication need to be persuaded that the risks far outweigh the inconvenience. Loss of client confidence, professional liability, and the potential for restitution damages are very dire consequences from not securing company, employee or customer data. Making busy professionals understand the trade-offs required for a more secure environment will lay the cultural groundwork that can lead to the introduction of heightened security measures like passwords on handhelds, encrypted drives, and SSLVPN connections for remote access.

To be truly successful, your approach to security must be balanced and reasonable. Completely securing data is cost prohibitive and would hobble productivity. If firm leadership and attorneys realize security measures are prudent and reasonable, they are less likely to resist. Also, start at the top with the executive or management committee. Once they have bought-into the new more secure regime, the rest of the firm will follow. Now if you can just get them to remember not to leave that USB key in the conference center laptop after a presentation!

We recently presented to ALISM on the topic of securing mobile data. Please talk to us if you have questions or concerns on this topic. We might be able to help.

Sure, we like to think some relationships will last forever, but they are really the exception to the rule. People change. Companies change. Industries change. Things, umm, change. When SAGE got into the managed IT services arena with OnSight, we recognized change as a given. That is why we built in quarterly technology reviews, for instance, but we also made it easy for clients to quit if circumstances changed and the relationship no longer worked.

OnSight doesn’t lock in clients the way other managed IT services do. Clients own their own equipment and infrastructure, so if they decide to go in another direction they don’t face sticker shock of “rebuilding” the network from the E-mail server to the Citrix box. And while we work with lawyers, we didn’t get a team of our own to write draconian contracts that lock in clients for long periods of time. If OnSight isn’t providing the right service for a client, than a document should not be the only glue binding us together.

One pitfall people and companies fall into is: if I do something one way, I assume other people do it the same way. Much of the frustration we feel with interfaces, workflows, products, and services result from this faulty underlying assumption. Fact is, different people learn differently. They also approach problems with vastly different strategies.

Let’s focus on learning. Basically, people learn in three ways: audio, visual and kinetic.

• Audio people learn best by listening to people;
• Visual people learn best by looking at something such as diagrams, text, instructions, etc.; and
• Kinetic people learn best by doing something, such as taking notes or doing exercises.

So how do people’s learning methods get incorporated in the real world? Part of our OnSight service includes the Support Center (Help Desk), staffed by Specialists who—in addition to having saintly patience—will tune their learning approach to the individual. Some calls come over the phone where speaking and listening are important, but if the person needs a visual demonstration, we can remote to their machine and show them how to resolve the issue. The Support Center specialists spend a lot of time at client sites, where if someone needs to learn through doing, our specialist can watch over their shoulder as they do it and learn.

Being aware of these differences and tuning your approach to them will result in better training and processes.

Unless you are sell hardware or software, if you are in IT, you work for someone. Worse yet, IT is viewed as cost center. IT folk acting like they forgot these facts are the reasons for cartoons like this. IT exists for a purpose: to make people better at their jobs and more productive. IT doesn’t shine if the employees don’t shine.

[Rant ends].

No More XP on New Computers in 2008. News is filtering through blogosphere that Microsoft will end OEM sales of Windows XP come January 2008. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, as Microsoft is in the business of selling software. Developing it is just a step in the process. What it means to law and professional firms who tend to be behind the tech curve, is to start thinking about transitioning to Vista in the next couple of years. New equipment will only come with Vista, and soon licenses and then support will disappear. The X Factor in this equation is Exchange 12 and Office 2007, which take advantage of many Vista features.

Law.com Starts Its Quest. Google got into the legal research game in a tangential way with Patents and Trademarks search, now Law.com gets into the legal search arena with Quest (via Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites) Quest searches Law.com's own extensive network of web sites, publications, and blogs, and adds in a number of law firm web sites and other legal blogs.  If anything, it provides a more narrow scope to a search, but we will wait for the reviews to see if it has value for practitioners or just a way to bolster Law.com's advertising revenue.

Lessons from the Eye of the Storm. Since it's Friday the 13th, of course we come across a disaster recovery story. This article has some practical business continuity advice from law firms that have faced hurricanes in Miami. Their formula: a bunker(!), lots of laptops, and satellite office space for lawyers. Also on display is both sides of human nature, from managers instructed to call employees and ask them what they need in the wake of disaster, to clients who call to inquire about the condition of their documents without care for the attorneys or staff.

We like to pride ourselves on our integrity here at SAGE, but we can't blame you for thinking that touting the advantages of managed IT services seems a little self-serving. (SAGE OnSight is our take on managed IT, one that seems to work great for our clients).

So don't take our word for it.  PC Magazine has a complete rundown on what constitutes Managed IT Services and what small and medium business can expect.  Points the article covers are:

• What to expect in terms of service and capabilities;
  
• The advantages in terms of improved operations, technical expertise, and allowing the company to focus on their business;
• Whether your small and medium sized company is a candidate for managed IT services; and
• Tips on implementing managed services

Well worth a read if you are considering testing the waters or just learning about it.

The newest engineer to join the crack troops here at SAGE is Colin Marks, who as a certified Cisco Network Engineer brings a wealth of networking and WAN experience. One appliance he has found that can help large firms is PacketShaper. It allows companies to easily manage their bandwidth to maximize performance and ensure quality of service. PacketShaper and other like applications let you prioritize, segregate, and otherwise manage your bandwidth. For example, dedicate a certain percentage for the VOIP system and give priority to Citrix applications over web surfing, especially on draft days for fantasy sports.

Another advantage to this class of network appliance is the easy management, bypassing the arduous task of manually configuring your routers. A GUI (Graphical user Interface) to set priorities or limits, monitor performance and get reports makes optimizing performance a much easier endeavor.

There are many different flavors to managed IT Services. SAGE OnSight falls into the category, but managed IT services come in many flavors and it is important for each organization to find the service that best fits its needs. Following are some more subtle points to consider when looking at managed IT service providers.

Personal Factor. Trust and confidence in your IT provider is vital in managed environments. You want someone on the other end of the line who is not only knowledgeable, but also responsive and trustworthy. It’s also nice to see them in person too.

Lock In—or Barriers to Exit. These can be contractual or monetary. Contracts can range from a few months to three years or more, and according to many lawyers we know, some are rather ironclad. Good service providers will require only a one month termination notice if the relationship is not working out after the initial contract period. Also consider the cost of creating a network if you decide to separate from a provider that completely outsources your IT. The infrastructure you once had now has to be rebuilt, from the E-mail server to the Citrix box, and it all comes with a price tag.

Speed and Responsiveness. While the Internet is great for working over great distances, network latency can affect the speed and responsiveness of your systems. Slow systems mean frustrated users.

Turnaround Times. How quickly will the service provider turn around new user accounts or have workstations set up for new employees? Good service providers know your time is valuable and people need to be productive as quickly as possible.

Control Issues. Many administrators who once lorded over the domain are sometimes locked out when the outsourced IT provider takes over. Instead of rolling up the sleeves and figuring out the problem, you are sending a service request. Many service providers monitor your systems and often know of a problem before you do, but you want prompt service if you are no longer in the driver’s seat. Also, having eyes into the system only increases your confidence if you can verify what the service provider is telling you.

Posting a title like that invites the cynical among us to insert terms like “cost” and “expense.” But let’s look beyond the budget line to the business value of IT. This post at ZDNet’s Between The Lines gives a few measures and ideas for defining, calculating, and getting the maximum value of IT. We couldn’t agree with the post more when they state that there is “no such thing as an IT project. They are all business projects.”

IT Projects should not be defined by whether something was simply installed, or deployed, but whether the installed application or system creates leverage that creates efficiencies or opportunities. Value comes from impact: are processes faster and smoother because of the IT project, saving time and money; or does it generate value for the customers which translates into sales or fees?

How do you know? Use metrics such as cost reductions and increased revenue. Time savings is often a gold standard in law and professional services since it invariably directly equates to billable hours or overhead. You will have to be creative in finding metrics for returns because the generated value aren’t easily quantified, unlike the upfront investments that are measured in cold, hard cash.

They also echoed something we have mentioned many times before, the value of marketing your successes. So while every project may be a “business project,” blame for poor projects becomes easily assignable. “Every time it’s wrong it’s and IT project.”

We're happy to announce that EMP Global/EMP Africa have choosen our SAGE OnSight service to manage their IT needs here in Washington, DC and their offices throughout the world. We welcome them into the fold and look forward to providing them world calss service along with our other OnSight clients.

More information can be found on the SAGE web site.

This Wednesday's SAGE Wisdom Webinar is about improving network performance through proactive maintenance, namely daily server checks.  A tool we developed, SAGE Sentinel, can cut the time spent on daily server checks in half, as well as provide accountability and network monitoring through an easy dashboard. To learn more about Sentinel and how to keep your network running at peak performance, please join us this Wednesday afternoon at 2:00 pm EDT.

If you are interested,  sign-up online here.

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