Category: Business

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Business Technology

Where Does IT Fit

Nate Beran wrote a really good post about how IT views itself within a business over at his personal blog. It is called Dangers of IT Exceptionalism and I recommend you go and read it. It cuts to the heart of how IT views itself and how it is viewed within businesses. Both really excellent things to look at.

Here is one of my favorite lines:

The other problem, as I see it, is that IT has a uniquely global view of the enterprise.

That is 100% true. IT has the opportunity to touch almost every aspect of an organization. This is both a great power … and a great responsibility.

I agree with everything else Nate writes in the post about treating other departments as colleagues because, really, that is what they are. Every person you work with as an internal IT member is a colleague at that organization. You all are working toward the same goals and need to keep that in mind.

This can mean cutting people some slack when they seemingly “just don’t get it”, but also speaking your mind and being outspoken about things as well. The part about being true colleagues is that everyone should feel free to both agree and disagree on almost every subject because from that mass of ideas and/or opinions a good one will pop out you were not expecting.

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Business Technology

Better Documentation

As my role has changed at work, so has my main reading material. Gone are a lot of the design and development books (even though I still keep them on a shelf in my office basement) and in are the reams and reams of documentation to try to get up-to-speed both on where we are as a college IT department and where we need to go.

Because of the shift I’m going to take a moment to describe what I would like to see from vendors when it comes to documentation. Let me start with some examples of what I am working with right now.

We currently use Novell NetWare 6.5 for file serving and directory management and authentication. Since we are looking at a migration to Novell Open Enterprise Server 11, I get to spend quite a bit of time with Novell’s documentation. Here is a look at what is available for Novell Filr.

Filr Documentation

Not bad. A lot of different guides available both as HTML and a downloadable PDF. The documentation itself is quite good, so I don’t have any issue with that. Having it available online is really nice and it is nicely formatted and everything.

I also am looking at SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to help us standardize on a few Linux distributions and because Open Enterprise Server 11 uses SLES 11 as its base operating system. Here is a look at what is available for SLES 11.

SLES Documentation

Similar to what is being offered by Novell, but there are a few more options! Not just online HTML and a downloadable PDF, but also an EPUB option! So you can load up that file into your eBook reader of choice and enjoy the documentation along with a table of contents and other niceties.

I want to see that from more vendors in the future. What EPUB allows is also the embedding of things like videos and animations into the files as well. That could open up better documentation in the future if time and effort can be dedicated to it.

However, I understand the hesitation as well. EPUB is still not a ubiquitous format with Amazon tying their entire eBook ecosystem to their Kindle formats and Apple using the iBooks format to extend EPUB to something entirely its own. The flip side of that on Apple’s side is that at least iBooks.app can read a standard EPUB.

Maybe ideally, there would be some way to “subscribe” to documentation so that an updated version of an EPUB or some other format might be automatically downloaded and incorporated so that you always have the most up-to-date version. Dash.app does something like that by allowing you to download documentation for various libraries and languages and then have updated versions delivered as they are available.

It is kind of like RSS for documentation.

Moving to something like that would maybe encourage vendors to take the approach of treating documentation as a living document, making changes as flaws are found and also updating it with best practices or even releasing different types or styles of documentation.

That is where I would like to see things move. It feels like the technologies are already out there, but they need to be tested in such a manner and improved upon.

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Business Technology

A Paperless Farm: Scanners

One interesting thing about starting to get more involved with a growing farm is that you start to get a grim picture of just how much paperwork there is to do any small thing. I know that we are putting up a new hog barn (which I would say is a “big thing”), but even just hauling manure onto land that is owned is cause for paperwork.

So what is a person to do?

I’m not sure what the “end game” will look like for this, but I do know that I want to try go as paperless as I am able to. This will require a few things to happen:

  1. I need to get my hands on every piece of paper that flows to and from the farm.
  2. I need to try to digitize as many of the forms as I am able to, including invoices.
  3. I will need to find myself a capable scanner I can tuck into a backpack. I can’t keep a computer and scanner in the hog barn office, so I will need to be able to take one with me.
  4. Figure out the best way to catalog, share, and backup all of the various pieces of paper I will be digitizing.
  5. Invest in a good paper shredder.

The idea is to digitize as much as possible and then to transition more and more of the paper stuff that we need to do to digital as well. It will be a long process, but I think it will be worth it in the end.

However, the wildcard at the moment is the portable scanner. It would be nice to have something be small enough to fit into a backpack (along with a laptop), comes with a document feeder attached, scan both sides of a document, and be USB-powered as well. Actually, that is also the order I wold rank those features (1 being most important):

  1. Small enough to fit into a backpack
  2. Has a document feeder
  3. Scans both side of a document
  4. USB-powered

After throwing the question out to Twitter and doing a little research myself I’ve come up with the following possibilities (all links to Amazon):

Each has problems so I’m not sure what I am going to ultimately purchase.

  • The Doxie One is the smallest one along with being the cheapest. I can also scan directly to removable media, which could be a benefit where I just bring it a long, scan the documents, and then bring them back to my computer to work with them. Sadly, no dual-side scanning and only a single page at a time.
  • The Canon imageFORMULA P-215 is perhaps the front-running at this point. It is the middle-of-the-road option as far as size and weight but it has a document feeder, does dual-side scanning, and looks to be pretty speedy at the same time. While it is still small, it IS more than twice the weight of the Doxie One.
  • The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i is the largest of the bunch and is comparable to the Canon P-215. The ScanSnap series is very well-regarded overall.

At the moment it is a toss-up between the Doxie and the Canon. I’ll report back when I have made a decision and used it a little bit, but it will need to be soon. That paperwork does not go away.

Categories
Business Technology

Agricultural Accounting

Well, Martens Family Farm is finally alive! After months of planning, meetings, more planning, more meetings and more meetings … the business is alive and we are pushing ahead with our plans for an expansion of the hog operation and also freeing up some more time for some partners so that we can continue to push things ahead into the future.

That’s the really exciting part.

The not-so-exciting part is that now we need to keep better track of where money is going, where it is coming from, and what it is being used for and why. That’s the nitty-gritty of what my job is from this point forward. I like to think of my job as “greasing the gears” to make sure that those who know how to farm can continue to do so without needing to worry as much about the money and compliance issues inherit with any business.

Alright, so I lied … that does sound really exciting to me.

What I need now is the ability to easily track income and expenses for an operation where I am only one of for partners and one of any number of people who are going to help on a small-but-growing family operation.

So I get to look at the current state of agricultural accounting software (or just small business accounting software in general, but for use within a farm).

Let me say, I’m not impressed so far.

QuickBooks is the “industry leader” at the moment and so far the online version as a few things going for it:

  1. Access from anywhere.
  2. iOS apps.

Alright, I lied, it really only has two things going for it. Other than that it is a highly complicated and slow web application which has 1000s of options to try to fit into any and all different industries.

I think I also need a basic accounting book to get my head around things.

However, I get the feeling that there has to be something better, easier, and simpler to use to get us started and off the ground. Having a mobile application so that I can easily add income and expenses right where I am would be a bonus.

On the cheap side of things, I have been thinking about trying to use GnuCash to get started. Seeing as it is free and doesn’t try to hem you into any set way of doing things, it looks like a decent lower-tech solution to our problem.

Needless to say I have a lot of work to do as we get things ramped up on our end. I’ll keep posting things as I find them, but I’ll leave with this plea to the software industry at-large:

There is a huge swath of farmers who are nearing retirement age and their younger progeny are going to be taking over the operations or at least taking a more active role in them. There is a huge opportunity to start developing software to serve this industry that doesn’t look like it was written for Windows 95. Do it. We are out there and we want to use software that is good.

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Business Technology

The Outsourcing Conundrum

The first round of “outsourcing” was focused around the physical shift of employees from their one country to another for cost savings (moving support staffing from the United States to India for example, or moving manufacturing to China).

The current round of outsourcing doesn’t necessarily have to do with shifting geography, but from shifting responsibility and skill from an organization to a third-party. It could be about using managed services or moving to “the cloud” in some form or another.

The question now doesn’t seem to be “if” an organization should be outsourcing, but “what” and “how much”. If some administrators would have their way, it seems like they would completely and totally outsource their information technology needs to an outside provider in the hope that things would work out.

I can’t help but think going that extreme is nothing less than a huge and glaring mistake.

So if we can’t outsource everything, what things should we be working to keep “in-house” when it comes to technology?

Basically, ask yourself this: what are the goals of the institution? If something is directly involved with the mission or goals of the institution or organization, those things should be kept as close to home as possible.

What are you held accountable for by law? That might be a good place where you DO want to invest some effort into keeping it as close to home as possible. This is another lens through which to look at a pending decision.

Think about what sorts of skills you want your IT workforce to have. What do you need a quick response to? If you are outsourcing major parts of your IT staff and infrastructure, when something happens, you are now bound to that company. Even if you have a good relationship, that company does not care as much about you as you and your own staff do, say experts at 360ict in London.

Outages happen (even to Google, I can assure you), so try not to look outside every single time but think hard about what outsourcing is going to mean for your organization and talk with your current staff to get their perspective on things. They might have some ideas on how to improve things too.