A CIO’s work, it seems, is never done. For that matter, neither is the worry associated with most of it. It’s a big job, and one that seems to get bigger just about every day: New technologies, new security threats, new business challenges, and new opportunities alike conspire to consume more of our attention and more hours of our waking lives (and at worst, keeping us up at night and intruding on sleep time as well). …
Excuse me if I seem a little bit proud at the moment. I am. Red Level has been named as Microsoft USB Champions Club Heartland Cloud Partner of the Year for 2016. Not for the first time, or the second, but for the third year running. In 2014, Red Level was named Partner of the Year and for the past two consecutive years, Cloud Partner of the Year. A true “hat trick”. What does that mean, you ask? Well, if you’re not in our line of work, that title might not mean a lot to you, but from where we stand it means a lot. In essence, it means that our company has been selected for outstanding performance when it comes to, in the Microsoft’s words, “arming the small business community with the right technology and services they need to be successful.” In practical terms, that means helping companies to ...
I recently participated in an interview program that gave me an opportunity to talk about Red Level - who we are, what we do, and why. It occurred to me that this was something that we didn't see often enough in business - straightforward answers to straightforward questions. When done right, an interview can give a clearer picture of what a person or business is all about. With that in mind, I thought it might be interesting to answer a few of those same questions here. A lot of IT companies that were around when Red Level started out have disappeared. Red Level has lasted for more than a decade now, and continues to grow. Why is that? I can think of three main reasons. Adaptability is vitally important; even technology companies can get stuck in routines. We are continuously learning, continuously changing, so that doesn't happen with us. We're strategic, and we ...
Jobs are important - everyone agrees about that. Since technology jobs tend to pay well, add to the tax base, and encourage the creation of even more technology jobs, government officials across the country have gone to some great lengths to attract them to their states or cities. Broadly speaking, there's nothing wrong with that; the investments politicians make in encouraging tech companies to set down roots pay off over time, and communities benefit over the long term as a result. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details - and sometimes the details make all the difference. What happens when an incentive package creates an unequal playing field, placing local business at a disadvantage? What happens when a new corporate arrival proves disruptive to the business ecosystem - say, by driving many existing businesses out of business? Or what if a particular incentive package is just perceived by the public as being ...
Rethink IT- and Really Put it to Work What does technology do for your business these days? Without a doubt, it does a good job handling a variety of essential, routine functions: record keeping, reporting, communicating. You might ask yourself, though, if it is fulfilling it's potential in actively working for your business-and getting it to do so might require a bit of rethink. Forrester Research has already done a lot of deep thinking about exactly that. They advocate for the title of "Business Technology" (BT) as a replacement for " Information Technology." The idea is that IT no longer simply supports business activities, it has become a vital business activity in itself, and has an essential role to play in winning, serving, and retaining customers. The Forrester "Business Technology Agenda" is Red Level's road map for successfully making that transition. Like all modern companies this requires a shift-from traditional IT infrastructure and services into ...
Happy Veterans Day to all that have served and continue to serve our country. We are especially proud of our own employees and family members who are celebrating this day!
We human beings are creatures of habit. Because something was a certain way yesterday, we expect it to be the same way today and tomorrow. But if you’re like most of us, technological changes in recent years have led you to rethink assumptions as familiar routines have fallen by the wayside: When was the last time you licked a stamp, used a payphone, or wrote a check at the supermarket? In my last blog post, I wrote in general about game-changing technologies that would radically transform the way we work with technology and conduct business. In this post and in weeks to come, I’ll provide some specific examples, beginning with another technological relic we can all say goodbye to soon: Passwords. Even though we’ve depended on them for decades, it’s clear that password protection provides only marginal security, at best. They’re easily lost, forgotten, and stolen. Worst of all, they ...
If you’ve been in the workplace for any considerable length of time, you’ve already seen how technological changes have had the power to rapidly and radically transform the way business is done. No matter your age, chances are a multitude of sweeping changes have already taken place in your lifetime. Some have been immediately and obviously significant and transformative – and others have taken place almost unnoticed. Think about it for a moment: Twenty years ago, fewer than a third of America’s small and medium-sized businesses had adopted email. Your “powerful” new desktop computer – if you had one - probably had eight megabytes of RAM and a 1-gigabyte hard drive. If you sent an email, you probably did it through a dialup connection to America Online or CompuServe. As primitive as these things sound now, they were game-changing technologies and they had enormous ramifications for business. If there’s anything ...
