Everyone that has been exposed to technology understands certain technologies die or become commodities. It is the way of progress, the way of humankind, to better ourselves and our experience.

For those of you regular readers, you all know I work for a company specializing in helping customers solve business challenges revolving around their documents. This wasn’t always the case. In the not so distant past, we sold typewriters, calculators, and duplicators (the predecessor to the copier). We even had service technicians that would repair calculators - if you can believe that!

Well, much like the typewriter before it, the traditional copier is standing on its last legs; if not soon to become extinct, then surely on its way to becoming a commodity.

With the advent of word processing technology and printing on demand, the need for duplicating documents has moved to a model of replicating the original from an electronic copy.

Well, Greg Walters has captured the essence of this in his blog entitled The Death of the Copier. Greg’s bio reads:

With over 20 years of providing business to business technology solutions I have had many opportunities to help my clients save money. From the 5.25 HD floppy, to Outdoor Wireless Mesh; from Corporate Identity Systems to Industrial Video production, I have been in nearly every type of business environment. It is my intent to always work with my clients as a partner, as an advisor and to do what is in my clients’ best interests. Managed Print Services is a “new” issue for most I.T. professionals when it comes to output devices yet MPS represents one of the most “revenue drains” in today’s business. This site is a place for me to share information and views relating to Managed Print Services, the impact of print systems in the organization, and Professional Selling as an Agent of Change.

An “Agent of Change”… that’s what I like to hear, and in reading Greg’s blog he is indeed that. An instigator of betterment, applying himself as a resource to help his clients improve their perspective on the business model so many cling to…

Take a moment, and check out Greg’s blog. There is also a link in the side bar.

Ed Crowley and the gang over at The Photizo Group has relaunched their website, Managed Print Services Resource Center, to include a cleaner look and easier navigation. I had a chance to catch up with Ed and Mike in an interview and these guys seem to have their finger on the pulse of Managed Print Services (MPS).

For all of you that don’t know much about this topic, MPS is an exploding new services vector to outsource the management of output fleets: traditionally printers, network attached copiers (MFD’s), faxes, scanners, and any accompanying software solutions.

The Photizo Group is launching their comprehensive study of the MPS space, much akin to what you might find Gartner doing in general. The Photizo Group positions themselves as consultants with an intimate knowledge of the document output industry (see image below). 

For those in the business of servicing output fleets, this is a promising source of valuable information. For those that have fleets to manage, this is resource you will want to strongly consider for education on how to grade potential partners.

Stay Tuned:

Coming soon, a series on managed print services and the 3 T’s: the Theory, the Tools, and the Targets.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Another guest post by a good friend and author, Corey Smith, mastermind behind the business and technology blog, masterthebusiness.com. In his spare time, Corey has also founded several companies to include Resumango and TributeMedia as well as being the Chief Web Architect for Dealer Marketing Systems and Editor-in-Chief at Office Product News. I do hope you enjoy reading this post as much as I did.

I have spent a little time thinking about the questions we ask to uncover problems in our businesses, but “why” seems to be the question we always forget.

I have been talking a bit about identifying and solving business problems. One of my first posts was The two most important questions sales people never ask.

When we are working to understand business problems, it becomes even more important to ask the question why. If we don’t understand why we do something, we may never be able to figure out how to change.

If you identify that an employee walks across the building four times a day to hand deliver a report, you may say, “You know, if you email the report, you don’t need to walk every day.” When you ask why, you might find that the answer is, “The person at the other end doesn’t have a computer because of the nature of that person’s job.” In that case, another solution may be considered.

You never know what the answer to the question ‘why’ might bring. Sure, you run the risk of sounding like a seven year old, but it will help you develop the right solution for the right problem.

 Corey Smith’s business and technology blog provides a common sense approach to running your business. He also maintains a news feed service for the copier, printer and document management industries.

Do you hate where you work? Many people would have 1 of 2 sage pieces of wisdom:

1) “Suck it up, cupcake!”

2) “Take this job and shove it!”

Well, those might work. However, many of us don’t have the luxury of these finite options, do we? What about the single mother raising 2 children? What about the sole-source provider, a father with a wife and 3 children?

Economically, many families are in a situation where both family members are required to work simply to exist at a comfortable life style. Not only is this a travesty, but can lead to all sorts of other problems like declining health and souring relationships - all due to increased stress over having to work.

Take Inventory:

My suggestion is fairly straight-forward. You have to look around and assess the situation. Take stock of your assets and liabilities. Generally we find that our education does not permit us to change careers or some obstacle in life attempts to prevent us from reaching our goals.

Obstacles not Barriers:

People face adversity all of the time. Life is hard folks! However, many people allow obstacles to become excuses for “why not”. After you take inventory, you have some choices to make. When I was 21, I was faced with the prospect of doing something I was settling for - living half of a life.

What was my answer to that?

I gave up 4 years of my life and joined the military.

This may not be feasible?

After I left the military, I spent 5 years going to night school to get a degree.

I can’t afford a degree.

Start networking. You may have to take a job making less money, but at least you will be working in the field you enjoy.

The list could go on and on… Don’t allow obstacles to become barriers.

The Merry-Go-Round:

Think about a merry-go-round. As you start it, it takes a good bit of energy. However, as it takes off it requires an ever decreasing amount of energy to propel it faster and faster. And to maintain a speed is even easier.

As we progress in life, if we make choices that move us closer to our dreams we find our life becomes easier and easier. However, the converse is true if we allow ourselves to move farther away from our dreams. The energy to keep the merry-go-round going becomes increasingly harder simply because our other responsibilities take focus away from our original vision of keeping it spinning.

The Bottom Line:

Take your life into your own hands. As we move forward in life, there are a declining number of choices. Don’t bemoan your position in life; believe you can overcome your obstacles.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

So what’s so great about all of these social media platforms like FriendFeed, Twitter, etc.? Back at the beginning of April, I signed up for a FriendFeed account (ChangeForge). I decided to join the experiment first hand to see what’s it’s all about.

Well, to be truthful, it seems like I’ve been subscribed much longer than just 2 months.

Scoble wrote a post about news v. noise (link). The premise was a simple question of whether you enjoy information from 1 of 2 sources: 

1) news, an organized stream of information from “reputable sources”, or

2) noise, the chatter in the blogosphere.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I enjoy the former more than the latter, BUT I have come to learn that social media sites and meta-aggregators are wonderful ways to find new content that I would never have found otherwise.

Think of it… you are 1 person trying to find things interesting through traditional media outlets, various e-mails, or you might even be using some sights like MySpace or FaceBook already.

So what would something like FriendFeed or Twitter bring to the table?

Think of this… you now have dozens or hundreds of individuals combing the Internet for things you enjoy and posting links back to their source. This is the beautiful thing I have come to love about FriendFeed or Twitter.

These sites do not give you that 1-on-1 feel like an Instant Messaging client might, but you can gain some wonderful links to new information, and that branch can take you to many other sources of information. It’s almost as if you are becoming part of the root system of a large tree seeking more and more sources of minerals and water.

Social Media is not without its issues; it does tend to be a little “high school” in that users tend to become incensed at the drop of the hat, it seems. It is also my opinion you need a program like AlertThingy, TWhirl, or Feedalizer to keep a little more interactive feel.

Nonetheless, it is a bold new frontier I have not regretted becoming part of. I am still refining who I follow, but this practice is, and should be, part of any evolution. Give it a try, and dive in.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Change is a transition. If you are like me, you can recall times of change in your life; that time when you knew the rest of your life would be different. Maybe it was an instant change, dramatic and full of senses. Others might experience change over time, like the ocean tide rolling across an exposed rock peaking out of the sand.

Change can be uncomfortable for many. Each of us feels change differently, and likens it to something we can perceive. In order to cope with the change, we look around us and inside of us to find thoughts, feelings or experiences we can relate to the change.

I have always experienced change through the roads I travel, stretches of highways or scenic routes meandering on to some end. I suppose it is the physical manifestation of leaving one life and meeting another, or perhaps the long distance between these two points allowing me an extended time of reflection.

My changes are marked by the blurring of trees rushing to meet me as I look out the side window, and simply washing over me as if I were laying in that ocean tide on the beach. In that time of transition, I reflect upon things to this point and onwardly imagine what life might be in my ‘new life’. It is never the same as my imagination, I know this, but it passes the time and calms my nerves.

As I approach my final destination, a lump climbs up from the pit of my stomach. I step out, and taste the weather - sometimes cold and crisp on the tip of my tounge; sometimes thick and heady, as the summers of the south often are. My senses are accute, rolling over everthing within distance.

Change has come to settle here, it bristles around me. A stiff nod of the head, a shake of the hand, an exchange of some words… I am here. It is time to embrace where I am and put away where I was. Change has come, not with a roar, but as the whispering of rubber on asphalt.

I will leave you with one of my favorite poems, The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost:

Corey Smith got me thinking about process and procedure. I thought about this a while and this is what I came up with in summary. Short, sweet, and to the point.

I suppose procedure was intended to franchise process, but as we all know franchises have never been credited with creativity - just pure productivity.

So which do you prefer, procedure or process? Creativity or productivity?

Justin Foster posted a great article on change over at his blog, BrandMilitia, entitled ‘The Bubble‘. This is a great commentary on how we all tend to become myopic in our focus in life.

You have to get out of your bubble to see and embrace change.  This is true with people and companies.  Seth Godin refers to it as the fundamentalist v. the curious. 

Too many people involved in marketing live in a bubble where they have no one challenging them; no one introducing new ideas.  Everyone is sniffing their own fumes … and either getting high or suffocating. 

Marketing use to be the realm of curiosity, but too many people are simply playing it safe.  They are trading a false sense of control for the reality that their brand belongs to the customer.

The bubble gives you false data; unrealistic viewpoints.

In the bubble, your shiny new TV ad sounds and looks great.  In reality, nobody saw it.

In the bubble, your brochures perfectly outline your value proposition.  In reality, nobody read it.

In the bubble, your employees have memorized your mission statement.  In reality, nobody cares.

So … get out of the bubble.  Listen to your people and your customers.  In fact, don’t get out of the bubble, break it so that no one else is in it.  The worse thing to do?  Paint the inside of the bubble so that you can’t see out.  Then you are in a shell …

Justin has been posting some really thought provoking articles. You should be sure to check out his blog. His link is included above and in the sidebar.

Just what’s in a checkbox? That is the question I was asking myself after 6+ hours and 5 engineers finally figured out 1 little checkbox needed to be unchecked for an entire phone system to start working.

The Backstory:

I was working on consolidating some call center queues last night to merge 2 of our call groups together. This involved running some Windows updates on the voicemail server.

Well, I started noticing some strange behavior like phones couldn’t download the configuration when rebooted and our call manager software on our workstations were flaking out - badly.

The Discovery:

It went from bad to worse Monday morning when I started by calling our partner’s technical support. Within about an hour we were bumping up to vendor support, and the vendor then bumped up to tier 3 support.

We had about 5 engineers and support personnel working on the issue, and our poor office staff trying to field calls from customers stating they couldn’t leave voicemails and were getting dropped.

The Find:

After looking at everything from just about every angle, the tier 3 support engineer asked why we were getting this Windows login prompt when trying to access a web portal to manage the phone system. At this point, we were at the point of curtly replying, “It’s your phone system, why don’t you tell us…”

Needless to say, I decided to take the reigns and look in Internet Information Services (IIS). For those of you who are not as familiar with Microsoft’s offering, there are a few different levels of security. I noticed 2 of the 3 were checked, which just didn’t look right.

I decided to wing it, because what did I have to lose? I unchecked integrated authentication in favor of anonymous and did an IISreset command. The thought was the phone web-management interface had its own security, so we didn’t need another layer.

The Fix:

Magically, everyone started being able to use their voicemail and call manager software. It was as if someone had opened a door and information just started flowing. I really couldn’t believe it.

Of course the vendor blamed us - or me more specifically for checking the box in the first place because there was just no way any Microsoft patch could’ve done that.

The Lessons:

1. Don’t underestimate the power of the small things in life.
2. If you are going to build your systems on top of other systems, you better know both.
3. Don’t tell me I can’t run Windows updates because then you are underwriting not patching security vulnerabilities. How about keeping up (refer to rule number 2.
4. Next time, try pulling the thumb instead of pointing the finger.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

I was listening to a few podcasts on TWiT where Paul T. and Jason C. were talking on various points of usability. The big ideas that stuck with me were 1) Paul stated that Microsoft had underestimated the ability of end-users to learn a new interface (speaking on Windows Mobile), and 2) Jason was debating on why so many websites and portals looked so much alike (speaking on the likenesses between AOL and Yahoo!).

I had simply filed those in the back of my filing cabinet to chew on, and then Dan posted an article over at BizTechTalk speaking on the interface and “findability”.

This really got me thinking again.

You see, I have really adopted the notion that a major metric of project management is end-user adoption. Overall, I can do everything right and if the culture or customer doesn’t adopt it - it’s a flop!

However, does this mean we can just throw up what the crowd wants regardless of quality? If the mob likes the product it’s a success?

The answer of course is, “No.” However, it is easy to become so focused on either form or function that we begin to sacrifice the overall vision of what it is we are trying to accomplish.

Jason, during the podcast, mentioned that many websites are now using the L.S.N. format for their portals, indicating a Logo, Search, News layout (from top to bottom respectively). He further goes on to state that it takes time and energy to retrain our minds to think a different way. In other words, we have grown accustomed to a sandwich being 2 pieces of bread, meat, lettuce, tomato, and some mayo or mustard.

What if I don’t like my sandwich this way? Well, that’s what’s being served, so eat it anyway?

In my humble opinion, the beauty of technology is it is so malleable. That is, it can be shaped, and re-shaped, to fit the situation. Is there now a huge trend in media consumption to provide a plethora of channels of choice for consumers to feast upon?

On the other hand, if I can’t “find” what I need, or something is not where I expect it to be, statistics show a large majority of consumers will move on in search of what they want, impatient and disatisfied.

Hmmm… is form or function the more important choice?

Google is a great example of function. I think all would agree the interface is spartan, but do you generally find what you need quickly? In other words, Google understands its mission is to provide a clear egress to another source; in other words, don’t get in the way of what I am looking for - enable me!

Most endpoints will be a little more rich in form. However, beauty for its own sake is a cardinal sin - at least in UI development.

For instance, YouTube’s homepage, I would argue, is on the edge of being too busy. However, it has some similar features a consumer might be used to such as a few navigation links at the top right, some tabs, and some general content. I would venture a guess, most people don’t make it past the top 1/3 of the page before they move on to another page. If that is the case, YouTube has indeed done their job on layout.

In summary, form and function play a vital role in “findability”. It is not sufficient to dismiss one or the other in a majority of situations. This being said, the creator must understand the goal of the content and design according to need of the customer rather than his or her own perceptions.