What are the main technology challenges that are facing your businesses in 2008? Entrepreneurs share their thoughts…

Knowing your IT needs

“One of the issues, is that I don’t know what I don’t know,” shares Ian Hughes, chief executive of Consumer Intelligence, a provider of market insight to insurance companies. “So I don’t know what that little box in the cupboard could be doing for me, because no one’s talked about it.”

For the average entrepreneur who doesn’t boast a degree in computer science, this may sound infuriatingly familiar. A graduate of Harvard Business School and with 20 years’ experience building marketing and technology businesses (including starting one of the first internet shops in 1994), Hughes nevertheless concedes that sometimes technology can get the better of him.

What he needs, he says, is someone to sit in on the business and understand its workflows, and then implement a solution that works, rather than expect him to make sense of something given to him still in its box.

“Just take those problems away from me,” says Hughes. “As a small business, those are the things I don’t want to worry about. I want it to be ready to go, so the salesperson can use it straight out of the box.”

Cathy Brode, chief executive of 3Bview, also has more than 20 years’ experience in the IT and life sciences industry. She believes the issue is about major IT providers segmenting end users more. “The messaging needs to be differentiated further in the small to medium-sized business market,” says Brode, “because there’s small and then even smaller. That’s the key thing.”

Security threats

These are undoubtedly a major concern. Near-daily coverage of virus threats, fraudulent trading, such as that which beset Société Générale in January, and the spate of discs with personal data being lost has raised fear levels in the business community.

“It’s such a big problem,” says Brode, “that they end up being the ostrich in the sand. Technology is doing good, but the threats that come with it are enormous.”

Meanwhile, Paul Merrigan, chief executive of Lifetime Financial Management, a mortgage and insurance advisory service he founded in 1998, adds: “Someone loses information every day. It’s an industry now, to find out who’s lost data.”

The rise, believes Paul Watson of IT solutions provider Star Technology Services, has a great deal to do with the maturing of the technology-literate generation. “It used to be kids in bedrooms,” he says. “Now it’s an industry worth hundreds of billions. The kids have grown up and they’re quite bright.”

As if you weren’t concerned enough, Watson warns that a new threat is on the rise. “We are seeing the emergence of whaling, which is like phishing but going for the chief executive. If I was your competitor, I could get all sorts of intellectual property from you about your technology or your banking by targeting you or your wife.”

The Facebook question

Embrace it, says Dom Monkhouse, managing director of outsourced IT support services provider IT Lab. His company is asked by clients to disable MSN and Facebook for staff use. “It’s an employee trust issue. We’ll do it if absolutely forced to, but I have to say I’d rather have a conversation with them,” he says. “They’re not banning mobile phones or speaking to the person next to you, so out of all the ways you could potentially waste your time at work it’s not so bad.

“Often, they don’t want to address the issue with the employee, so they use technology to turn that issue off in the hope that it will somehow change the person’s behaviour,” says Monkhouse. “They’re running scared from their management or human resources issue.”

Dan Somers, managing director of the world’s first collaboration solutions provider VC-Net agrees, saying: “This is the virtual watercooler.” Although he warns that too much instant messaging means very little social interaction with colleagues, and the implications for a healthy team could be dire.

On the other hand, there could be major benefits, according to Somers. “Particularly with Web 2.0 technologies, there’s no point training old dogs, just get the new dog in. If they’re between 25 and 30, they waste all their personal time learning how to be good at business. They’re already trained!”

Remote working

When Paul Watson’s offices were affected by the floods in Gloucester last year, the company resorted to remote working. It proved a catalyst in his thinking. “Although customers had no interruption of service, we couldn’t get into our office for over two weeks. We learned you don’t really need an office. Actually, it’s a big risk having everyone in one place.”

Monkhouse agrees and cites an example of best practice across the pond. Airline Jet Blue has 3,000 ticketing agents, he says, all of whom “work from home in their curlers and bathrobes”. Jet Blue’s competitive advantage over other airlines is that if it needs more agents, it pages those that aren’t online and asks them to log on. “You’ve got set hours, but again, if there’s not enough work for all the agents, they send an instant message out to everyone and say: ‘Would anyone like to drop off?’” says Monkhouse. “Obviously, they lose pay if they drop off, but one might want an hour off that afternoon.” This kind of flexibility is not something you could easily engineer once a workforce has arrived at the office.

It’s not all plain-sailing, though, says Dan Somers. Despite the virtues of technology enabling new work behaviours, any change takes time to bed in. “Human beings are bizarre machines,” he says. “They don’t actually update very easily. What we’ve found is that you need to spend a ratio of one to five: you spend five dollars on people for every dollar you spend on technology.”

Bernadette Wightman, Cisco’s SMB director for UK & Ireland, agrees: “Most people haven’t thought about the necessary training and re-training. So I think that’s often why ROIs aren’t recognised from the outset, because it comes further down the line, as people start to change the way they do things.”

Great customer service

Good communication is so hard to achieve, yet crucial for consistently good customer service. “When you’re communicating with your customer, it has to be bespoke to them,” says Paul Nicholas, vice president of marketing for AwayPhone, a business that enables users to switch international calls to a local mobile rate. “The Boots loyalty card is an example of good use of technology. They know which shops you’ve gone to, what you buy and how to attract you back to the store. If you want information from a customer, you need to give something back.”

Merrigan agrees. From February last year, he recalls, the interest rate had risen consistently. The Woolwich used this proactively to engender loyalty, offering those on a tracker rate, and therefore disadvantaged by the increases, a fixed-rate switch – effectively getting them to pay more upfront with an eye on the longer term. “They emailed about 600 people and asked: “Would you like to switch? It’s going to cost you a quarter of a % more, but you can do it quickly and fix it here and now.” I think it got about 120 takers. And during that campaign the interest rates went up two or three times.”

Tiering customers goes much further too. Cisco, reveals Wightman, has been working with banks on radio frequency identification tracking (RFID). “In banks, they want to tier the levels of customer service,” she says. “The bank immediately wants to know which wealth category you fall into. They already know a bit, because you’ve just put a mortgage application in, so they ask you to bring a letter. When you walk in a chip in it identifies you.”

Ultimately, if the customer gleans a benefit, there’s an argument for doing it. The challenge, though, says Hughes, who comes from the direct marketing industry, “is determining what constitutes junkmail and when is it a piece of well-crafted, well-targeted direct marketing. That’s what information technology needs to try and encompass. The barrier that technology puts in place is that it makes our life so much easier not to talk to them. And talking is at least 50% listening, probably more.”

Views were expressed at a lunch sponsored by Cisco, the worldwide leader in networking that transforms the way people connect, communicate and collaborate. www.cisco.com