1. Lack of constancy of purpose
2. Emphasis on short-term profits
3. Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance
4. Mobility of management
5. Running a company on visible figures alone
6. Excessive medical costs
7. Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees

“A Lesser Category of Obstacles” includes

1. Neglecting long-range planning
2. Relying on technology to solve problems
3. Seeking examples to follow rather than developing solutions
4. Excuses, such as “Our problems are different”

Deming’s advocacy of the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, his 14 Points, and Seven Deadly Sins have had a huge influence outside of just manufacturing.

Today in the West, we see huge corporations bankrupt and crumbling. We believe the Fourteen Points of Dr. W. Edwards Deming are a way out of the crisis. Deming’s 14 points were first presented in his book Out of the Crisis.

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and stay in business, and to provide jobs.
2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Institute leadership (see Point 12 and Ch. 8 of “Out of the Crisis”). The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company. (See Ch. 3 of “Out of the Crisis”)
9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
11. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
12. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia,” abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective (See Ch. 3 of “Out of the Crisis”).
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.

“Massive training is required to instill the courage to break with tradition. Every activity and every job is a part of the process.”

Foundations provides small businesses with an easy to use, turnkey collaboration solution. Foundations offers file storage, advanced backup and recovery, connectivity and security, collaboration and email and application services in one integrated package. Some of the things that set it apart include:

• Automated installation and configuration; it discovers and maps the network for you, and auto-configures firewall and VPN, so you can deploy it in 30 minutes or less.
• Automatic data backups, and full system recovery if a disaster should occur.
• Symphony office productivity tools are bundled with it, so you don’t need to buy Microsoft Office software.
• Under the covers, you get the reliability and cost benefits of Linux and open source technologies (Foundations is priced less than Microsoft SBS servers), but you don’t have to know a thing about Linux or these technologies to run it.
• It has the collaboration power of Lotus Notes and Domino, tailored for small businesses, with Notes clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Furthermore, IBM has factored in what’s often the biggest hurdle to getting momentum for new product: inertia. Outlook users can continue to use Outlook with Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook. And, IBM added VMware virtualization to Foundations, so you can also run Windows applications on it. Customers don’t have to give up things they already use—Outlook and Windows apps, such as Intuit QuickBooks.

The time is right, businesses are tired of dealing with the cost and complexity of Microsoft products and licensing. IBM is in the right place, at the right time, with the right solution, to give them a true alternative.

The IT industry has many standards covering topics such as software asset management, IT service management, disaster recovery, business continuity, information security… there’s a long list of BS/ISO/IEC documents running into thousands of pages. Likewise ITIL, PRINCE, PMP, formal development methodologies, etc.

They are almost all very large and comprehensive; they are highly structured and require significant commitment and investment in order to implement them. For the busy IT directors of large enterprises these standards and methodologies form excellent off-the-shelf blueprints of how to get it right.

A team can be set up to address a particular governance issue, and given the appropriate manual or standard, suitable training and possibly support from an external specialist consultant, the team can get on with addressing the issue knowing that at the end of the process they will have implemented a robust and comprehensive solution.

This is very laudable, adoption of standards and best practices significantly helps to ensure that crucial considerations are not omitted, and it helps big organisations to avoid making big mistakes. But as I was reminded recently, the world is not made up of big organisations. We do not all work in major corporates, we do not all have large IT teams able to take on the likes of BS 25999 (Business Continuity Management).

In reality, more than half of UK private sector income, and over half of private sector employment, is from businesses with fewer than 250 employees. These small and medium-sized enterprises generally have small IT teams – perhaps a handful of people, or a single IT person. Some have no dedicated IT resource at all; they outsource everything to a third-party on the basis that they don’t have the critical mass to justify the cost of a single talented IT generalist.

These small firms, which according to the UK’s BERR Department make up 99.9% of all enterprises, cannot practically implement the standards and best practices which we have invented for the management of IT, and many of the IT firms to whom they may outsource the problem are small businesses themselves, employing fewer than a dozen multi-talented technicians. Like their clients they do not have the depth of resource to adopt and implement our standards and best practices.

Our current regime of standards and best practices, designed to protect organisations, investors, customers and employees from the consequences of critical omissions and failures, is critically flawed. Our development of all-encompassing standards suited to the needs of large public sector organisations and major corporates misses the point. It provides guidance to those organisations whose resources and pockets are already deep enough to solve the problems addressed by the standards. It fails to address the needs of the majority of businesses, employees and customers. We need a different standards regime.

We need standards and best practices that are scalable and stratified, targeted at the smaller enterprises who cannot afford an IT team of 30 or 3,000. Simple, basic standards that can be read and digested in a couple of hours, and implemented with resource that is measured in man-days, not man-years. We need management strategies that are appropriate for the lone “IT manager” – the sole, do-it-all, IT dogsbody who keeps the systems going for a 12 person advertising agency or a small chain of estate agents. We need standards for the real world.

Our current standards have been developed by collaborations of public sector organisations and major corporates, supported by expert consultants. The learning from these sources has been wrapped up by the BSI and government. Unfortunately, these bodies are so different in scale from the typical SME that it is hard to see how they can comprehend the nature of the challenges and pressures faced by smaller organisations. Nevertheless, as IT becomes ever more complex and pervasive, we desperately need standards “for the rest of us”.

What you get for £37 per mailbox per month.

• 25Gb of storage
• Access anywhere in the World via Webmail
• Access mail off line with your web client such as Outlook
• Access mail with mobile phone
• Professional email address e.g. user_name@your_domain.co.uk
• Spam filters that really work
• On Line Calendar
• Shared Calendars
• Service Level Agreement (99.9%)

This compares favourably with Hosted Exchange at ~£60 per box per year.

Compared with running an in house Exchange Server meeting a 99.9% SLA the savings are more significant.

Training a group of users in the Rain Forest to use a chain of custody system developed by UK Company Helveta.

1. Linux is open source and free as in speech, not as in beer. I am not prepared to say that it will cost any less to set up a Linux vs Windows based systems.  However, Joe the Plumber will have a better idea of what he is paying for, services much like the services he provides his customers.
2. Joe may be small but to compete he needs to to be responsive. Joe’s Linux Homeserver has been set up so information is accessible on the road, in fact he has an infrastructure solution comparable with the Big Boys.  It is unlikely that Joe the plumber could afford all the software licenses required to set up a system in the Windows World.
3. Security is a concern for Joe the plumber and his inbox is always full of spam. Linux is open to attack like all software solutions however it is allot more secure (by Default) than Windows.
4. Joe the plumber wanted to implement a small website in order to increase his visibility in the local market.  Services for the Windows (.NET/ASP) solutions appear to be significantly more expensive than the Open source solutions. Now that is just weird particularly as Opensource is good enough for some of the biggest sites in the World (Amazon, Google)

Conclusion, for a small business who see technology and connectivity as a competitive benefit, Linux is a firm base on which to base systems.

For those companies who value their brand we provide SEO best practice staples combined with a range of innovative SEO solutions including:  content creation,  press release services and viral marketing.

Our overall approach to SEO is to build content that is targetted at delivering client desired outcomes.  We are sceptical at best when SEO practicioners look to “game” the system.