Newmind Summer Party 2013

Thank you Laura for taking the time to craft these amazing
Minion cupcakes! 

Throughout the year Newmind Group brings together employees, family and friends for retreats to build friendship and community. Our time together is used to meet new friends, share stories, and recognize hard work.

This summer we gathered in Covert Park, MI and spent a weekend enjoying the Lake Michigan Beach!

For some of us, the retreat started with camping that included cooking over open fire, stories around a campfire, and a short midnight torrential downpour.

James Duke brewed homemade soda and grabbed
inspiration from historical soda labels to create custrom
Newmind Orange Soda!

The rain didn't drown our spirits and the next morning we awoke to enjoy friends and family!

Newminders from our Minnesota and South Carolina offices even made the trip to enjoy the camaraderie, tasty grilling, awesome desserts - like Minion cupcakes (Thanks Laura!) - Newmind Orange soda, and awards.

One of the most important aspects of the Newmind Group summer retreat is the unveiling of the results of the Newmind Group Peer Review. Every year Newminders rate each other in 5 areas measuring productivity, innovation, reflection, work/life balance, and teamwork. This is also an opportunity for Newminders to award each other with custom awards.

Congratulations to this year's "Co-Newminders of the Year"
Ryan Hawkins & James Duke.

The Newminder with the highest score in each category is recognized and the Newminder with the highest overall score is crowned "Newminder of the Year" - affording them bragging rights for a year and few other confidential perks!

Companies and organizations hold yearly gatherings for different reasons, but usually they're meant to help with bonding, team building, or maybe even management showing they care about their employees. At Newmind Group, we like planning regular gatherings and retreats because they give us time to Rest & Reflect. We get to joke about the past year and keep perspective.

Thank you for a great year and here's to more fun working together!

BYOD vs Standardization - Understanding Your Mobile Strategy Pt1

Mobile devices, collaboration & mobility, seem to be a hot topic recently. In just about everyone’s pocket is a device that gives them instant access to the Internet. A Nielsen study recently found that “66% of Americans 24-35 now own a smartphone.” With so many users owning their own mobile devices and bringing them to the workplace, its not surprising that IT departments and employees are clashing over ownership, data access and privacy.

Misconceptions

Employees aren’t waiting for IT & management approval to bring their devices to work. According to a CTIA study, “60 percent of IT professionals believe 25 percent or less of their employees are accessing work related information on their smartphone or tablet, while 57% of users said they access work related information on their smartphone or tablet at least once a week.” This may be why “smaller companies, with fewer than 500 employees, are less likely to communicate to their employees about BYOD and security.” Misconceptions about the workforce drive IT departments to prioritize the importance of strict mobile device policies, defaulting to device standardization. Standardization circumvents the grey areas of privacy and personal property, but comes with its own pitfalls.

Range of Device Standardization

Where does your organization currently stand?
Where do you want to be?

High device standardization
requires that everyone use the same type of PC (laptop vs desktop, Apple vs Microsoft vs Linux vs Unix), the same mobile phone (iPhone vs Android) even so far as to require the same model and software version (iPhone 4S or HTC ONE running Android v 4.1.2). This level of rigidity allows IT departments to specialize in a few devices and provide deeper levels of support, internally developing business operation platforms to obtain competitive advantage. High device standardization carries high device purchase costs and high technological debt, causing some enterprises to run outdated software.

Low (or zero) device standardization, BYOD, is essentially the exact opposite. Employees are able to use any device they like, creating an atmosphere that may have over 15 different types of devices, from different manufacturers, running different versions of software. This makes it difficult for IT employees to cultivate a high degree of proficiency in every device. Although IT staff may not be experts in all device types in an organization, this atmosphere opens the door for employees to create user groups and organize genius bars. The most important aspect of low device standardization is the high accessibility of data, which leads to greater gains and efficiencies, that we’ll explore in a later article of this series.

The Tipping Point is Mobility & Collaboration

As you’ve probably deduced, the conversation isn’t BYOD vs Standardization, but instead understanding the culture & needs of your workforce. If a high degree of mobility & collaboration is needed, then your data will need higher accessibility via more devices.

The goal is not to decide for your organization what level of mobility & accessibility is needed, but rather allow the organization and its members to dictate the level they require. Here are a few questions to help start to evaluate your organizational situation:

• Does your organization have employees spread geographically? 
• Is there a specific type of device the members of your organization already lean toward? 
• Do the software platforms and data formats in use require a particular device or platform for access?

Use the questions above, and form other questions, targeting value-driving processes within your organization to gather data about your company’s environment & attitudes toward personal devices & data access. Use those insights to create a BYOD & mobile device policy and IT data access strategy that will be easier and more positively viewed by your workforce.

In the next installment of this series, “BYOD to COPE: The Mobility Spectrum ”

Daniel Proczko has been working with organizations and individuals to build & grow the entrepreneur community of Kalamazoo, MI. From organizing TEDx events, hack-a-thons, and documentary screenings to engaging with business leaders, Dan strives to inspire individuals with new ideas and better thinking.

Having always been interested in tech and understanding the value of innovation through IT, communicating the importance of strategic IT thinking is one of Dan's primary goals within Newmind Group.

Get Your IT Project Approved

At a tech event I attended recently I asked a room full of IT Directors if they would say that internally marketing and selling a technology project to their leadership was one of the main hurdles in keeping their company’s technology infrastructure healthy. The feedback was a unanimous yes.

This topic comes up over and over with IT Directors I come into contact with.

How does an IT Director go about getting a technology project approved by Operations and a budget allocated from Finance? And all within increasingly shorter time frames so that productivity gains can be made without falling significantly behind competitors who were quicker in snapping up [insert your favorite technology game-changer here]?

Current Environment

The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that, according to a Gartner CIO survey, since the 2002 dot-com bust IT budgets have been flat to negative and for 2013 are expected to shrink. IT departments must also wrestle with lean human resource allocations and nothing to speak of as far as the luxury of an IT team member who is well-versed in sales and marketing and can create the business case for a technology project.

The scenario I see over and over is that the IT team knows how to select a solution and plan a project that will have favorable ROI results for the company, but not the time/expertise to articulate it to leadership.

Needing a Paradigm Shift

What it really boils down to are the non-IT people (aka the Operations and Finance folks). More often than not they still view their company’s entire IT budget as pure cost, which is why they want to cut it every year because in their mind technology dollars, like keeping the lights on, the roof repaired and the trash taken out is all about minimizing cost. Just find the cheapest option and we’re good.

The truth is that while a portion of an IT budget is to keep the phones ringing and the computers booting, increasing percentages of IT budgets are really strategic spends, not cost at all. By recognizing and allocating strategic IT dollars they enable the IT team to find, select, and implement technology that will increase the overall productivity and efficiency of the entire organization. If spent correctly a strategic IT budget can mean that for every dollar spent, two or even three dollars can be realized in efficiency benefits.

Wearing Someone Else’s Shoes

As IT actions become more important to the strategic success of companies, the IT team needs to be better at communicating to other departments.

One example that comes to mind is a client, that I’ve been helping over the last couple of months, who was looking for a new messaging and collaboration system to replace their aging Exchange environment.

After working with the IT Director to choose the right solution we both sat down and planned out the “sales plan” to make the case to the CFO. We worked together to create and provide the CFO with end-user demos and feature overviews of the solution, ROI calculations of the new solution (Google Apps for Business in this case) vs alternatives (a new Exchange server or Office365), a change management training plan, and a budget.

Because the right solution was chosen by the IT Director, the evidence that the analysis and collateral pointed to was a pretty straightforward “yes,” that the CFO was able to deliver with confidence, and the project was able to move forward.

Best Practice

When getting approvals from Operations and Finance for a technology project take the time to give them what they need to be able to confidently say “yes”. Concentrate on metrics that matter to them, ROI calculations, compelling feature-sets, comparisons of alternatives, provide them with the change management plan and scaling expectations of the new solution to meet the needs of the organization over time.

Michael Jefferies' passions include volunteering at orphanages in Asia to brainstorming with other Newminders on how to make workflows better. He is happiest when problems are being solved and work is becoming more fun and efficient.

Since joining Newmind in April 2012, Michael has been consulting with clients to discover their organizational objectives and working alongside them to identify, analyze, and implement technologies that can help take them there. He believes that IT budgets are not merely a cost of doing business, but instead an opportunity to increase fun, efficiency and profitability.

SMB Helpdesk Trends 2013 [Survey]