Lax as we've been in posting, we'll make up for it this month with three topics. What's the theme? Relationship management (not necessarily IT related), green IT, and an ad that makes you wonder.

Relationship Management

Here we are in the middle of a severe recession, and I can't think of too many businesses that want to turn away customers. But I ran across a few situations last month that just make me wonder. It's not related to the IT industry, but it is about relationship management, and since one third of CRM is about the mindset - as I write often -- this is fair game.

Item 1 - We live in a condo that gives each unit owner a small private area where they can landscape, all to make first time condo owners feel like they haven't given up the "home". (As an aside, giving up home care is precisely why I wanted a condo, but...) This year, we decided to have underground sprinklers installed. I invited three installers to give me estimates. One has a pleasant chatty style, and as we talk, he senses that, as a full-service landscaper, he can provide some other services that I need, and he can bundle the whole thing in a much bigger proposal. I'm game. He gives me a rough guess, but his sprinkler guy is away for 10 days, so "as soon as he gets back", they'll take a look and give me a better firm fixed-price estimate. I put off two other installers to wait for this estimate.

His ten days come and go, and after two more I call him. They have a stack of proposals to work through (I don't care) and they can get to me in 5 days. I'll be out of town on business that day. How about 3 or 7? They're going to be out here in 5, and if I can't meet them, we'll have to pick something a couple of weeks out.

I conclude I'm not that important to his business, and I am not happy I put off the other vendors to give this one an opportunity he didn't deserve.

Item 2 - It's time to pressure-wash and treat the deck. My wife happens to find a marketing piece in the mail from someone who does that, so she calls. There's nobody there, so she leaves voicemail.

He called back in a week, and at that point, we considered him unresponsive. No sale.

Consider: This business spent probably one dollar for a 5x8 full color postcard, including postage. Good direct mail campaigns yield a 2% response, so this business is spending perhaps $50 to find one lead. They just threw away the $50 of their marketing money that would have brought the opportunity to do business with us. How many other $50 bills did this business waste?

Much is being written about how to run your business to get through a recession. The first instinct in tough times is to cut costs. Thoughtleaders everywhere are recommending aggressive marketing and investment instead, and they've got historical evidence to back them up. Now for what follows: Once you get a lead, pay attention to the relationship! Be responsive. Listen. Follow up in a timely way.

Green IT

In the last newsletter, I wrote about the possibilities of green IT. I mentioned that I ran across a small service provider that offered a loss-leader IT "green" audit for $250, and in the interest of seeing some evidence first hand, I donated an audit to a non-profit on whose board I sit. By way of background, this is a 25 person social services agency with moderately old desktops for all, CRT monitors, and one server that's long in the tooth.

We'll call the outcome "faintly green" IT.

Some quick results: After one week's measurement, the potential savings of turning off machines and monitors when they weren't being used was calculated to be about $1200 per year. We learned this after 2 hours of my time and 2 hours of management time. Considering the fee and billing rates of those involved, it was a wash. In fact I learned something about the agency. They own the office condo (which I knew), but the utilities are considered shared expenses (which I didn't). Given their ownership interest in the condo, the other owners would have gained about 60% of the green IT benefit, so it would take 3-4 years to pay back our time investment.

Following my comments on the relatively small gains, the technical lead suggested we could gain more by switching to LCD monitors, and since the agency was about to upgrade to two new servers for its email and the applications it needs to run its operations, he suggested virtualization.

Here's reality for small non-profits: They can't afford to discard perfectly usable equipment to buy more efficient equipment, they haven't got the skills to run virtualized servers, and they haven't got the money to test their applications in a virtualized environment (none of their vendors do either). The best they can do is buy efficient equipment when the old stuff wears out, buy low-power "terminal" machines if they can figure out how to serve up their applications and utilities on the web, and - if they're smart - use as much software as a service (SaaS) as they can.

And after talking with the provider's president, she agreed that they're coming to that same conclusion.

So, green IT scales with the size of the company. Small organizations can start by investing in low power machines and building on SaaS applications, but the cost of a small organization making a wholesale transition isn't worth it.

Green IT is worth it when you're big, and it works when you're at natural transition points. But for small organizations, be realistic.

Apropos of Nothing....

...certainly not IT, but since we value critical thinking, and remark at its absence, we can't resist.

Some huge ads have been plastered on the sides of some mass transit buses in New York. The signs say "Learn English...Call 1-800-ENGLISH".

Think about that.