The April 1 issue of CIO magazine stressed the importance of “Marketing IT to the Business.” Per the call to "innovate and communicate," you can also market your projects via industrywide recognition.  Which brings me to the Premier IT Awards, where we’re a few weeks to the end of our call for submissions.

CIO custom solutions group and Intel have been receiving numerous IT department submissions from around North America that demonstrate best practices in data center or client fleet management.    Grassroots IT innovation and dedication to driving business value.  The submissions span projects valued from $10K to $2.5M, from customers with in-house vs. managed data centers and client solutions.   Intel products at the center of these solutions include not just Intel Core 2 processors with vPro technology or Intel Xeon processor-based servers, but Intel Itanium processor-based servers, Intel XScale technology and devices.

Just a few examples of our diverse submissions include a:

-Law firm

-Leading transportation company

-State government

-Non-profit healthcare network

-Managed service providers with small/medium business customers

-One of Fortune magazine 100 Best Companies to Work For

The short list of contenders for the awards will be posted on the Intel Premier IT Professional site soon.  And you’ll have the chance to vote for the “people’s choice” winner if you’re a member (it’s free to join).

If you think you’re too small or your industry doesn’t lend itself to driving business value because you’re state/local government or a nonprofit, I encourage you to think again.  Submit your best practices.  For more information visit the program website or if you have any questions, ask me here.

As I go and talk to different SMBs across the country about different technologies, I always get the same question: “What technology is currently available that a lot of SMB companies in industry ‘X’ are using to provide a better customer experience.” Everyone knows that this is a loaded question and there is no silver bullet when it comes to exceeding your customer’s expectations. I try and have SMBs look at it from the end customer’s point of view.

First, what is the experience like when customers first interact with your company? If the process to learn about your company's product or service takes longer than 60 seconds to describe on the phone, SMBs will go to another provider. So ask the question, is my organization’s employees equipped to explain our companies product/service value to a new customer within 60 seconds. From a technology point of view that involves having the appropriate systems in place to support any questions the new customer might ask (i.e. making sure all pertinent data can be accessed by your customer support team). In addition, you need to make sure that your systems are fast enough to access this data very quickly. I have talked with numerous SMBs that have a great product & services information databases established for their employees to access however, the employees don’t use the system because it takes tool long for their system to bring up the needed information.

Second, do your employees have the needed resources to follow up on new customer requests? These resources not only revolved around data associated to customer inquires/needs, it also involves the needed time for your company representatives to follow up with the new customers. I have talked to some customers and they say that for every hour their computer systems are not available, they are losing at least 3 new customer opportunities. As a result, there are more companies making scheduled maintenance updates to the employee’s systems in off-ours. One customer specifically, Midwest Eye Consultants, is implementing new technology that is saving them 10 to 12 worker-hours a month on system maintenance and those extra hours are now being used by company employees to recruit new customers. Click here to see more information about the technology Midwest Eye Consultants have implemented: http://msp.intel.com/midwest-eyes-case-study.pdf

Lastly, does your internal team have the resources available to support existing customers? Most of the time the resources that matter the most for existing customers relate to past product/services they have received from your company. If this information is not readily available when your team is servicing an existing customer, it can mean keeping or losing a loyal customer. In the health care field it is even more critical. Northwest Newborn specialist relies on customer/patient data being available at all times of the day. Carolyn Kraus from Northwest Newborn Specialist says: “Our physicians can be impatient, and with good reason. They’re on 24/7 in a high-stress job where downtime can have serious consequences, and much of their work is done through technology. When a PC goes down, they can’t access patient records, look at an x-ray over the network, or pass on their notes to the next physician on-call. In this field, it’s critical to keep their stress level low and their PCs up and running.” Click here to find out more information  about the new technology Northwest Newborn Specialist is using: http://msp.intel.com/NW%20Newborn%20Specialists_final_318134-001US.pdf

In closing, when you think about what technology you need to provide a better customer experience, think about what you have implemented in your environment today. Do you have quick and efficient systems set up that enable your team to deal with first time customers and all the questions they may have about your company’s products & services? In addition, do your teams have up to date systems available any time during the work day to deal with follow up activities related to new customers? Also, do you have the right system managed infrastructure in place so that your desktops and notebooks will be available to support all existing customer requests during all hours of the work day? The answers to these three basic questions provide the best direction for your company to explore in order to provide a better overall customer experience.

As I sit here fresh from a leadership conference for IT employees, I find myself thinking about that. Does IT need radical change? After hearing several examples of how people engineered solutions to solve specific problems or reviewed projects they had developed over the past year, I can answer with a definite yes. While it wasn’t simply this experience that pushed me to realization, it definitely helped complete the pattern I had noticed in today’s IT.

I spend most of my normal role investigating and researching emerging and next generation technologies. With this role came many headaches from pounding my head against the wall of established processes, procedures and preconceived notions. But to borrow an idea from Gene Meieran, that is simply the toll I am paying on this road to my success. But I look at this and ask a simple question, why?

When pushing to adopt a new technology, why do we have to wait until it meets all of our established requirements? Why do we try to make vendor’s products adapt to us, versus us considering the possibility to adapt to them? Why does it take us 2 years to adopt a new operating system or major product? Why do we run projects for 18-24 months to implement a product that exists out on the shelf today? In looking at several examples of what people consider successful products today, I look to see what makes them different, attractive, and a must have. I then ask what would it take to make IT different, attractive and a must have for any corporation.

Five or six years ago, people came to work and looked to IT to get the latest hardware, OS and innovations, because we had it here. We spent the dollars and time to solve problems and innovate. But in the last few years, people have adopted technology must faster at home than we do at work. They use the iPhone, a Wii, social networking tools, cloud based services, etc. They are enabled at home with more options than we provide as an IT shop. We use instant messaging in IT, not because we developed it as a way to eliminate small emails, but because instant messaging was a consumer product that grew so fast, that IT had to adopt it. Social networking is doing the same thing. So I wonder, what would it take to get IT back ahead of the curve and become an enabler of new ideas and solutions, rather than an implementer & reinventer of existing technology?

We need to get back to freethinking and innovation that is core to our roots. Companies like Intel were founded on thoughts like the famous quote from Robert Noyce – “Don’t be encumbered by the past, go out and do something wonderful” yet in our day to day life I see many encumbered by the past and am waiting for the wonderful. We choose solutions that have more of the one size fits all. Instead of picking the best solutions for the roles that exist; we try to find the one item that can solve all of our problems. Rather than choosing the optimal product for the “one size”, we should look at the product that enables the end user to perform optimally. Imagined if corporations took this approach with their products. Image a shoe manufacture that developed the one size fits all. It would be an opened toe, ¾ shank athletic tread, men’s size 10, 3-inch heel, sneaker pump. It would meet most of the needs of the shoe-wearing world, but wouldn’t be the right shoe for many, if anyone. So why do we settle for the same model in IT? We need to be innovative. We need to look at Apple, Google, Nintendo and others. They didn’t just develop products that do what everyone else’s products do today, but they did them differently & in many cases better. What does it take to make your part of IT the next iPod, iPhone or Wii? How can we enable our partners to perform optimally? What does it take to just go out and do something without worrying about how many existing committees; review boards, processes and groups have to be engaged to just get it going? The answer is radical change. We need to change how we work. We need to change the level of control we have today. We need to shrink what we try to manage. We need to strive to enable the partners versus totally control their work life. We need to ask so what every once in a while. When someone says if we do A then B might happen. Ask the question, so what? We spend all this time doing the day-to-day moving from spot to spot, never worrying about the resources, costs and effort put into the status quo. When we try to implement something new, it goes under the microscope and quite often is held to a different standard than existing solutions. Requirements seem to be a never-ending monster of growth, instead of the simple point-by-point items they should be for solutions. Many times the solutions themselves are actually listed as the requirements. So I challenge us all to start a process of Radical Change. Start asking the question So What? Start pushing back on the status quo, quit being encumbered and start a process of innovation. Help your partners perform optimally and be a key part of their success rather than just one of their suppliers. It won’t be easy, it won’t always be fun, but it will be rewarding.