Starting a new business can be an exciting time and keeping on top of organising all the different aspects of your new venture can be challenging, but then again that is half the fun of going into business in the first place.

One key area of business planning is Information and Communications Technology or ICT, which is often insufficiently prepared for, either in considering its importance or financially in the budget.

Not all aspects of ICT as covered in this article, are required by all businesses, but it is a much better situation during your planning to leave something out consciously than to forget a critical aspect of running your business and having to backtrack.

After all you want your business to continue to move onwards and upwards.

As such we have prepared a simple checklist for businesses to use so they can make sure that key aspects of a business’s ICT requirements don’t get missed.

We will break the checklist down into the following sections –

Physical Equipment

When starting a new business one of the greatest costs is all the equipment that is required, in the case of ICT this includes servers, workstations, printers, laptops, switches, routers, telephone system and the network cabling to connect it all together.

With most small businesses the extent of ICT planning is going down to the local electrical mega store and putting everything the salesperson tells you, you need on 24 months interest free or even to lease/rent* the equipment because the terms sound so great. Now this may work for you, but it is a rather haphazard way of planning a large and ongoing operating cost to your business.

*VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: Speak to your accountant before making any purchase decisions, they will advise you on what is the best way to invest your funds. Then ALWAYS read the fine print of any rental/ lease arrangement, do not ever take what the sales person tells you on face value especially the buyout figure for equipment at the end of the period.

Take notes during your conversation and then get the crucial points in writing, attached and signed to the agreement, then get it witnessed, preferably by a manager as they are considered a legally authorised representative of the business. If the supplier won’t agree to this, ask why, there is no legitimate reason why they wouldn’t if they are reputable.

We will start off with your actual requirements

Server vs. Workstation

When designing a computing system the main things you need to consider are the tasks you require the computing system to perform or the “needs” of the system and the physical number of staff or users that will use the system.

All software programs use resources on your computing system and it makes sense to make your primary purchasing decision based on the needs of the software your staff will need to use, ensuring that the system is capable of supporting their system requirements. Below are two links to demonstrate the system requirements for Integrated Productivity Software solutions so you know what to look for.

System Requirements for OpenOffice.org 3

System Requirements for Microsoft Office 2007

Now once you have determined all the software that will be used, how many staff will be using this software?

Once you have more than about three staff resource sharing becomes an excellent way to reduce costs and centralise information sources, providing the benefits listed below. If you decide on a centralised system then you should set aside a significant portion of your ICT budget to the specification of the server(s) rather than individual workstations, as it will be the backbone of your computing network. If you have sufficient resources in your budget, it is a good idea to look at improving the system memory and hard disk capacity (use RAID5 for hard drive redundancy).

    Centralised Server Benefits

  • centralised storage of business information
  • easier backup of data
  • share standard business documents and forms
  • document version control
  • email server – record all company electronic correspondence
  • run server based applications that are shared by all users
  • teleworking, remote sales staff and branch office access

Telephone System

A telephone system can be the life blood of your new enterprise, taking incoming enquiries for your products and services and making calls to follow up on opportunities, so it is a “mission critical” part of your success. Yet little thought is given to the system as an independent device to the service being provided, in most circumstances telephone systems are sold as part of a bundle with services for an extended period, sometimes as long as five years.

When looking just at the telephone system, a five year agreement with a vendor is quite practical and industry practice, with the vendor providing agreed maintenance and support during that period. However, call costs set for five years with a single provider is not as practical, nor is it in line with the reduction in call costs due to the introduction of new IP based telephony, VoIP services and greater competition within the sector.

Telephone services should always be considered independently from the telephone system.

This doesn’t mean that a vendor’s services are not valuable but they should always be analysed on their own merits.

What do you need the phone system to do?

Every business is different and the way they use their telephone system can vary completely, does your business need bells and whistles or a system that simply makes and receives calls?

The following is a list of typical features that a modern telephone system will have, which of these do you actually need to carry out your daily business and which are just nice features that are more want than need.

  • auto-attendant – a recorded message that instructs callers how to reach a department or person they are looking for
  • voice mail / unified messaging (voicemail in your email inbox)
  • conferencing
  • music-on-hold
  • intra-site calls (e.g. between branch offices)
  • call-barring / filtering
  • electronic facsimile send/receive
  • call logging / audit / boundaries

Consider the ability to upgrade your telephone system during its lifetime, does it have the ability to connect additional key stations and how many before it reaches capacity and requires a major upgrade or complete replacement. You as a business owner need to plan for where you see your business in five years and this will be done for most other aspects of a business including staffing and facilities management, but critical part of that growth is the systems you use. Make sure when you qualify suppliers that they are interested in your businesses goals and aspirations.

Printing and Faxing

Printers are quite simple to share within a Local Area Network (LAN) either by directly connecting the printer to a workstation. However, it is recommended where ever possible that the printer has its own network connection, either via an installed network card or a dedicated print server.

In most small businesses it makes sense to have two printer appliances, a black and white laser for general everyday printing and a higher quality colour laser for presentations, proposals, tender responses and other marketing collateral. It is also useful to consider the paper quality, size and availability of dedicated printer trays for letter head stationary and envelopes to improve your efficiency as part of this appraisal process.

But as we are discussing start-up businesses, a combination or all-in-one printer/fax/copier /scanner may be perfect for your everyday business printing and faxing requirements and with the lowering in costs in these commodity products over the past few years, even a small investment can provide your business with an excellent quality device. Outsourcing your colour or marketing printing to a professional printer will also reduce the higher capital cost during start-up.

Other points to consider are the cost of replacement cartridges and other consumables when determining the total cost of ownership.

Fax Servers are a good investment that can reduce your paper requirements and integrate into your email to allow receipt of faxes in your inbox and even to send faxes from your desktop. Make sure you check the ongoing licensing costs of these appliances as they can vary from vendor to vendor.

Networking appliances and cabling

How will your business operate from day to day, who will sit at which desk and what do staff need to carry out their roll, how does it all fit together (e.g. workstations, servers, printers, network equipment, fax and photocopier). This physical jigsaw needs to be determined before any cables or network can be designed, let alone installed. So get out your pad and pencil and do a quick sketch of the office layout. Mark where you need desks, power points, phones and other appliances as a quick visual reference, this will also help determine where any structured cabling needs to run.

A combination of fixed networking and wireless may be perfect for your business, but you need to ensure the vendor you choose understands the limitations of such networks and the security implications of wireless.

Software Needs and Licences

Every business needs software, whether its the pre-installed applications that come with your computer or from the acquisition of specific software that you want installed to carry out your business.

This brings is to a key point, all software will have some form of license, and this will affect your business and the use of that software.

Understanding licensing

Software licensing comes in many forms, from single user, to server based licenses, FOSS (see below) and Creative Commons. Licensing can be a nightmare and also costly for businesses if not managed correctly.

A common breach of End User License Agreements (EULA) is using personal versions of software for commercial use or sharing copies with more devices than the license allows.

Do not be tempted to “borrow” a copy of software from a friend or download it from a torrent site. In your business if you can’t afford software licenses, look for an alternative solution until you can.

Generally software licences cover the single computer they are installed on with a single user EULA, and the licence will also clearly state whether it is for personal of commercial use. If you stick to the terms of the licence you should have an unhindered and pleasant experience using the particular software.

You may be able to save considerable capital outlay by purchasing server based versions of required software, rather than individual versions, as you may receive a group or bundle discount.

General Business Software

Every business has fundamental needs to carry on its operations and as such will need some form of Productivity Solution, whether MS Office or a FOSS alternative (see below). These are critical for every business we have ever come across for a number of basic reasons

  • Write proposals, tenders and or other legal documents
  • Developing collateral and other marketing materials to promote your business
  • Record transactions between your business and customers
  • Customers/Vendors will send you documents in these formats, you need to be able to open them

Most computing systems come with a Productivity Suite preloaded or at least a trial of one, it is quite straight forward process to purchase the licence and continue using the pre-installed software and this is perfectly adequate for most businesses.

The only time we would recommend not using MS Office is if your budget cannot support it. As a proponent of FOSS this may be a strange position, but at the end of the day you are running a business to be successful in however you measure that success. And the one common software tool to most businesses is MS Office.

We have been through the pain of trying to open documents from suppliers that have macros (small embedded programs) in them that will not run in OpenOffice or having developed documents in OpenOffice that would not open in MS Office and spent hours re-writing them.

In your start-up you may have the time and not the capital to resolve these small issues, but they can add up and the efficiency your business will get by just using the same product as everyone else cannot be underestimated – your time is money.

Now that being said OpenOffice is a perfectly adequate solution if you are just using its basic word processing, spreadsheet and publication features as these will not incur the compatibility issues of complex documents.

Once you have established these basic solutions within your start-up business there may be other industry specific software required. And we always recommend that you get referrals from other users, even ask for their contact details so you can have a chat. If the vendor knows what they are doing this should be straight forward.

The better the tools you have at your disposal are, regardless of industry or organisation, the easier and more productive your job will be. After all the whole point behind business software is to improve the speed, quality and efficiency of that business.

FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) alternatives

As we have just discussed software licensing can be a complex subject. Now we will look at Free and Open Source Software and what this entails.

Typically, it has very liberal licensing to grant users the right to study, change, and improve its design by making the source code available to developers. This model has become a commercial reality with many successful applications being developed and in use by millions of users.

The term “free” can cause some confusion to people not within the development community. In FOSS, free refers to the freedom to copy and re-use the software, rather than referring to the Recommended Retail Price (RRP) of the software.

An example of FOSS is OpenOffice which is the strongest competitor to MS Office’s suite of Productivity Solutions. It has an equivalent to the most popular MS Office Applications and can even read and edit files in MS Office format. It started development over 20 years ago and is a well supported and mature software application.

With studies showing that it is easier and cheaper to move to OpenOffice.org 3 from MS Office than to upgrade to MS Office 2007.

The following is a list of the equivalent software in Open Office.org 3 and MS Office.

  • Word Processor ~ Writer – MS Word
  • Spreadsheet ~ Calc – MS Excel
  • Presentation ~ Impress – MS Powerpoint
  • Art ~ Draw – MS Paint
  • Database ~ Base – MS Access

For start-up businesses this provides an extremely tempting option to implement FOSS as a straight up replacement for other Commercially Licenced software.

We at Sequios think this is great, but we also recommend to proceed with caution, make sure you research the product well before rolling it out within your organisation. This is because we try and use many FOSS solutions ourselves, for example this website is designed on WordPress blogging software, the most widely used blogging application in the world with countless millions of users.

We think its great because we have been able to modify the code for our own uses and now use it as a website Content Management System. We can add any number of the thousands of user contributed plug-ins to provide functionality that if we were to develop from scratch would cost our customers a great deal more in development time.

However, we have also found some solutions that don’t meet our expectations or are built and supported to a level that would mean they can be confidently rolled out in a commercial environment.

Rather than name and shame here is a list of software that we have used internally and also for clients, after our own benchmarking and internal testing we have implemented a number of these solutions successfully for clients with rave reviews.

With just this simple list of tools most start-up businesses can carry on traditional business processes and functions. The only caveat to this is we are yet to find an adequate and compliant bookkeeping solution, we haven’t found a way to replace a good accountant, yet…

FOSS is definitely here to stay and with the strengths of its peer-to-peer development model and rapid commercial adoption it won’t be long until you are using a FOSS solution to run your business without even knowing it.

Online or Internet Related Concerns

Email

Website design

Next on the agenda is telling the world who you are and what you do and for that you will need a website, websites are no longer an extravagance but a necessity in modern business. We have written a previous article on this that covers the reasons for a website design in greater detail.

Domain registration

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Once you have promoted your products and services to prospective customers, it is invaluable to record all interaction with them so that you can retain as much pertinent information about them to build trust and make them a happy repeat customer. This is where an integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution is needed.

CRM allows you to manage your customers contact details right through to recording conversations, organising meetings and follow ups so that hot opportunities don’t go cold. The saying goes – strike while the iron is hot and as a start-up it is important that you make the most of every opportunity. CRM will also assist you in building sales pipelines so you can measure performance and set benchmarks for sales based on activity.

Intranet (internal information resources)

The Privacy Act 1988 (Cth)

This section of the document applies to the Commonwealth of Australia and the resources and links provided here are only relevant for businesses and start-ups operating or intending to operate within an Australian state or territory.

Resources for your business to make sure you comply
Privacy Laws for your State or Territory

Consumables

Security

Acceptable Use and Privacy Policies

It is important that your business consider the use of electronic resources and the handling of confidential data about your business and its customers. As such legal advice should be sought, but as with most small businesses reducing start up costs is essential and so we have collected a number of free online templates that can be modified for your business and its needs until you can afford to get a lawyer to write you one.

A point to consider is that lawyers also use templates to write these standard business documents so, make sure you are getting what you paid for if you use the services of a lawyer and that the document is written specifically for your business and what you do. If you are unsure ask them where they get the basis for the document from and ask for a copy of the original template.

Employee Acceptable Use Policy Template by Electronic Frontiers Australia
Website Privacy Policy Template provided by Tasmanian Partnership of Advanced Computing (TPAC)
Other Human Resources related ICT policies

Faults and Escalation Procedures

Ongoing Support

Staff Skills

We’ll start this article on website design by posing the question that we get asked most commonly and then carry out a small exercise to demonstrate this point to the reader.

Q – My business is only small, why do I need a website design?
A – The shortest answer is this – If you don’t have a website, you are losing business to companies that do.

Why not try doing some basic research and type in your business name into a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing and see what results you get. You may see your name in an online business directory or other business service listing and think that at least you know customers can find you by direct association.

That is true, but what other names come up along with yours in these directories?

Your competitors…

This gives prospect the choice to go somewhere else for your product or service.

Now if you consider what if they didn’t even know your name, try doing a search based on your location and industry using terms that would generally describe what you do, e.g. Albury handyman – now what comes up, if you don’t have a website design then you can safely say that your competitors will.

The point of this exercise is to show you how prospective customers perceive your business and the reputation your business has built up is not directly transferred to the web. This is because the web in all of its glory is emotionless; it isn’t driven by the goodwill you have built up over many years of dedicated and tireless service to your customers, but upon content.

A common term used within the media regarding the success of a particular venture is that “content is king” and this applies to print, radio and television. This term also now applies as a rule to website design in allowing prospective customers to find a particular business online, and that is “well written, relevant content is king”.

The internet is seen now as “new media” where even a one man small business website design can have just as much impact as a multi-national company’s website. This is because the playing field is level; you can have access to the same tools that they use to reach your customers or more importantly for you to reach theirs.

At this point we might take the opportunity to describe what good website design is not.

Considered and thoughtful website design is not about just looking good; or style over substance. Website design is not for impressing your mates, your family or even grandstanding to your peers.

But, it is a great tool for attracting customers and your website design can be your online interactive brochure to promote your products and services to a specific audience or the entire world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year – no other form of promotion or marketing can do this.

Taking this line of thought and seeing website design has the same basic requirements as a brochure; it becomes easier to understand the reason for having a website design in the first place and what information needs to be included.

In the same way as a printed brochure you can use website design to generate awareness of your products and services, provide communication between yourself and your customers, and improve your competitive advantage within your industry or profession.

“But my business doesn’t even use brochures so why would we need a website design; our main marketing is by word of mouth from other happy customers.”

In the modern computer age, generally anyone that has access to a computer uses it to find out information, and even if a customer has been recommended to use your business they still may want to check you out for themselves.

Having a professional website design will only strengthen your credibility and turn that prospect into another happy customer.

The last point to consider is what not having a website design says about your business and the easiest way to demonstrate this is to provide an example.

You are a handyman that never uses a computer and none of your services are for sale or even could be sold online, so why should you have a website design.

The simple answer is – that’s where your customers are.

The customers of a handyman are by definition, people that are time poor or lack the skills or ability to perform tasks around their home. They generally have the disposable income to pay for these jobs to be done by someone else and they personally work in an office or professional environment.

“So what, I already knew that…”

Have you considered that those same potential customers are sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day and that the first place most of them turn is the internet to research information about products and services they need. Having a website design is not a luxury or extravagant purchase for a business, but shows to your target customers that you understand their needs and how they look for information during their hectic schedules.

Having a website design won’t ever replace your hard work or great customer service, but it will make you available to customers that word of mouth can’t reach.

Website design is a crucial part of any businesses marketing and promotional strategy; make sure you treat it as such.