kdr ebusiness

Here is a question that seems to be very popular:

“If you could change one thing what would you choose?”

People tend to choose something big, ambitious and often unrealistic, difficult or even impossible to achieve. In business, I believe this question has its place, especially during a strategic review, but what about the rest of the time? I suggest an alternative question that could produce greater benefits and is particularly relevant to the operational side of your business.

“If you could change one hundred small things what would you choose?”

Why is this question relevant? Because small changes are easier to find, take less time to implement, cost less and often the people who are aware of them are those we hear from least i.e., those doing the job! Big changes usually mean big resistance. Empowering people to make small changes means a greater buy-in as the ideas come from within your teams.

This approach is also known as “Continuous improvement”. Its purpose is to make gradual improvements at little or no cost, using your knowledge, not your money.

Tags: Continuous improvement

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If your company is looking for funding to expand, then maybe venture capital is the way to go? Fox Capital, an Isle of Man VC is running a “dragon’s den” style competition with the winners being offered up to £25 million in venture capital. The aim is to find expansion stage companies that are looking for funding to take their businesses to the next level.

Can your team pull together a top quality proposition to tempt the foxes? If you’re interested you’ll need to be quick, the competition closes on 13th November 2006.

[more on this at BBC News]

UPDATE: The Competiton is now closed. Out of 27 companies who replied, 14 have been invited into the Foxes’ lair to make their pitch.

Tags: venture capital, Isle of Man

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Here at KDR EBusiness Ltd. we use Wordpress to run our website. It’s a powerful web publishing tool which allows us to concentrate on what we want to say. When we want to publish something we just type it in. If we want to redesign the look of the site, we can ask a web designer to create a new theme for us. We apply the theme and that’s it.

Separating your website content from the presentation gives you plenty of advantages: easy editing, better search engine optimisation (SEO) and less cost.

If your current website requires you to pay fees to your web designer every time you want to change something, then perhaps you should consider a tool like Wordpress.

Tags: KDR, EBusiness, Wordpress, web, publishing, SEO

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Here’s a prediction of the future of advertising from a four year old. Makes you think?

via Seth’s Blog

UPDATE: More commentary on this from POSIWID about the wider effects of advertising

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If you were to total up all the disk storage you have available in your computer room, you might be surprised at the total. We conducted this exercise with one of the larger Isle of Man based companies and we found that they had 300% more capacity than they really needed.
We believe this to be a typical picture amongst companies that have no formal storage management plan in place. All that extra capacity costs money, takes up power and produces heat that must be dealt with. By examining how much storage you really need, and by creating a storage management plan, you can consolidate your requirements and save money.

Backups are another area where savings can be found. Over time, as new servers are added, more backup units appear, each incompatible with the last. This results in a large amount of expensive backup tapes requiring off-site storage. By considering your storage and backup as an integrated pair you can balance your requirements, save money and ensure that recovery from failure is much easier to perform.

Related Article: Cost Saving Idea: Reduce Server Count

Tags: disk storage, Isle of Man, storage management, Backups, recovery

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The role of the IT manager is dependent on several factors, with the top three being organisation size, industry sector, and geographic distribution. The detailed IT Managers checklist for each of these would be widely different, but for the purposes of this article I would like to concentrate on the common threads that should appear in every IT Managers checklist.

As an ex IT manager of a small/medium sized enterprise (<250 staff, finance industry, 3 locations) my own checklist had four items at the top level, and I think that this was a good starting point which helped me to prioritise and concentrate our efforts.

• Legal/Statutory
• Operational/Support
• Projects/Development
• Strategic

Legal/Statutory
These are the must do things that ensures your organisation stays on the right side of the law. Within the IT world there are an ever increasing number of legal and statutory requirements. A good IT manager should have a working knowledge of them and know how they might affect the company they work for.

Operational/Support
Operational encompasses the scheduled and regular tasks that should be done in order to maintain a stable and available set of IT services. Support deals with services that are not working properly.

Project/Development
Projects are intended to achieve a specific benefit or business objective, and most IT development, coding, infrastructure improvements, etc., would fit within this category.

Strategic
Here I would include IT finance and budgeting. Work on policies and procedures, awareness of emerging technologies. But most importantly the IT manager should understand the business direction and drivers, and determine how IT can assist in the success of the company.

As an IT manager this helped me to keep the big picture in mind. But what about you, and bearing in mind the high level, is there anything else you would add to this checklist?

Later in Part #2 we’ll put a little more flesh on the bones.

Tags: IT manager, checklist

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Due to the activity of speculators, who buy up domains on the chance of selling them on for a premium, the chances of being able to obtain a one word or interesting domain name are fairly slim. Nowadays you need to have deep pockets if you want to obtain something memorable.

Unless you think outside the box, like the people behind “delicious”.
Their social bookmarking site is known by the website address del.icio.us

So how does this work?
Website addresses are usually made up of three parts, the prefix, the domain name, and the suffix.

People are used to seeing “www” or “mail” at the start of website addresses, but it is possible to set up your domain with any prefix you like, or you can skip the prefix all together like see2swim.com. The people at delicious set up their prefix as “del”.

By registering the domain name “icio” with the United States domain registry this gave them the suffix of “us”. Thereby giving the final del.icio.us result

So what other words are possible using this domain hack?
Take a look at the ISO country code list. This gives a two letter abbreviation for each country recognised by the ISO. There are domain registries for most of them and many of them are suitable for word endings, for example IM is the abbreviation for the Isle of Man where KDR Ebusiness Ltd. is based.

So how about some of these for a domain name?

• cou.ntercla.im
• ins.urance-cla.im
• den.im
• accla.im
• a.im
• for.h.im

So right now there are plenty of great names available, but don’t be constrained by the conventional, go for the unconventional. You might end up with something much more memorable than a dot com.

Tags: speculators, domains, delicious, del.icio.us, ISO, Isle of Man, unconventional

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“If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it”

This old management adage is still relevant today, but many companies still use a scattergun approach for their internet marketing efforts. If you have no idea what worked and what didn’t, you will end up wasting money. You need to set goals, measure them, and then keep refining your efforts to achieve the best results you can. What worked last quarter might not work this quarter, so this should become part of a continuous process.

There are so many different aspects to an internet marketing campaign that it is difficult to know where to start, so we put our heads together and came up with this diagram of areas to consider for an integrated internet marketing campaign.

We’ve left out a lot of fine detail, but this should give you an overview of what may be involved.

If there’s anything you think we’ve missed or if you have a question, please leave a comment and we’ll do our best to answer it.

Tags: continuous process, internet marketing, integrated internet marketing

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I’ve been wanting to write up my own definition of this for ages, but then I found this from Security Guru, Bruce Schneier. There’s no way I can say it better. Below is an extract, but I recommend that you read the whole thing.

A hacker is someone who thinks outside the box. It’s someone who discards conventional wisdom, and does something else instead. It’s someone who looks at the edge and wonders what’s beyond. It’s someone who sees a set of rules and wonders what happens if you don’t follow them. A hacker is someone who experiments with the limitations of systems for intellectual curiosity.

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OK, so you have a business website, that’s great, what’s next?

Well rather a lot more than you may have thought.

Your website costs you money, so what do you expect to get back as a result? Did you decide what your objectives were for the website? How do you measure its effectiveness?

When your only advertising was a line in the yellow pages, it wasn’t possible to determine how someone found your number unless you asked the question. But with a website it is possible to record visits to your site, where they came from (referrals) and also which areas of the site they were more interested in. By analysing visitor behaviour, and by setting goals and objectives for your website, it is much easier to fine tune your site so that it becomes an effective business tool, rather than a static brochure.

Statistics tools like Google Analytics enable you to easily track how each part of your site is performing, how you direct (funnel) people to the areas you want them to see, how long they spent at the site, and which page they left from, plus many more besides.

Your website can be so much more effective than a brochure, because a brochure can’t tell you how it gets used. A website can.

Tags: brochure, Statistics tools, Google Analytics, website

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