CDW plays technology deus ex machina

Online IT products and services reseller CDW ran a contest last fall called Project Upgrade, sponsored by HP and Microsoft. Small businesses with 50 or fewer employees entered the contest to win $50,000 worth of hardware and software, along with help setting it all up. My advice? Don't fall into such a deep technology hole you need a benevolent force to float down from above to rescue you.

Over 200 small businesses entered the contest, which surprised me. I figured it would attract 2,000 entries, although when the process started last summer the economy was in better shape. CDW judged entrants based on their overall business case, how technology improvements would help, how unique their problems were so they could serve as a good example to others, whether a technology upgrade would really fix their business problems, and if CDW could make that difference for them. Seems like a fair set of criteria to me.

CDW has videos of two of their three winners up now at Project Upgrade. The first one, Little Mittens child care in Wisconsin, had 15 security cameras installed to help monitor their 160 or so active “clients,” but only five of them worked. One of three installed surveillance cameras actually surveilled.

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Online IT products and services reseller CDW ran a contest last fall called Project Upgrade, sponsored by HP and Microsoft. Small businesses with 50 or fewer employees entered the contest to win $50,000 worth of hardware and software, along with help setting it all up. My advice? Don't fall into such a deep technology hole you need a benevolent force to float down from above to rescue you.

Over 200 small businesses entered the contest, which surprised me. I figured it would attract 2,000 entries, although when the process started last summer the economy was in better shape. CDW judged entrants based on their overall business case, how technology improvements would help, how unique their problems were so they could serve as a good example to others, whether a technology upgrade would really fix their business problems, and if CDW could make that difference for them. Seems like a fair set of criteria to me.

CDW has videos of two of their three winners up now at Project Upgrade. The first one, Little Mittens child care in Wisconsin, had 15 security cameras installed to help monitor their 160 or so active “clients,” but only five of them worked. One of three installed surveillance cameras actually surveilled.

I know things get behind, money gets tight, and there's not enough hours in many of our days, but I wonder if the insurance company that provided liability coverage for Little Mittens knew the video system was effectively blind? Is it cost effective to ignore broken cameras that could lead to a lawsuit? People get understandably protective about their children, as well they should. When your insurance company finds out you bought a policy based on 15 cameras but only five actually work, they could realistically say you caused your own problem, therefore they have no obligation to cover you. Oops.

The contest winner I spoke to, Mark Nelson of Spring Hill Music Group, sounds like the prototypical IT tech enabler in a tough environment. When he started at Spring Hill just over a year ago, he worked 75 hours per week for several months. Ouch. Nelson seems like a nice guy, but 75 hours per week is insanity. I hope he was getting overtime, but I don't think he was.

If he was getting overtime management might have realized it would be less expensive to upgrade their ratty old desktops and servers rather than stuff money in Nelson's bank account. No doubt the work overload explains why Nelson is the fourth onsite IT person in the last five or six years.

Budget? “I don't have a real budget, I just argue to get new pieces of equipment,” said Nelson. While familiar to every IT person, that makes it hard to get anything done in a sensible fashion. Other problems? Of the 20 or so users that stream music to and from the Web as part of the business, none of the desktops had any type of antivirus or antispyware installed. Would you like your employees running around multiple social networks and music sites, as Spring Hill employees do for marketing, without any desktop security?