Scaling it down to the small business

Hi Everyone-- I'm excited about this group. I am a consultant to small professional service firms(typically 5-25 ee's) to help them to work smarter by maximizing their use of technology. The issues relevant to larger enterprises such as information and document management are also important to these business. However, it is tough to sort out and scale down information and solutions to fit. Anyone else out their with the same issues? For instance, how does the small firm handle email management, email archiving, and to what extent are they (or should they be) concerned with e-discovery? Any thoughts?-- Ava

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Permalink Reply by Alani Kuye on January 13, 2010 at 1:09pm: Hi Ava,
Welcome! The most important step before engaging technology at any level is to take full inventory of what you have. In essence your clients must know what they have an addition to understanding the value of their data. This includes email, files / data (which believe it or not falls under part of their intellectual property), hardware, software, business process, clients, prospects, work flow, and human resource (staff). This provides metrics upon which you can identify gaps in their business process and design laser sharp solutions to solve their pain points. Many a time we look at a client from a single point of failure when the underlying issue usually stems from their workflow / business process. A typical example is storage where most businesses simply add more storage to house emails when they really should have a retention schedule to purge old emails, spam, filters, files not used in 12 months or older, etc. Do they have a standard adopted across the board for data management, user storage, security, backup, etc? I could go on but I wouldn't want to bore ya :-).

Alani Kuye
Phantom Data Systems Inc.
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