The sole purpose of a business is to make money. Business school taught me many things about how to run a business. Out of all the hours of Economics, Marketing, Accounting and math classes, the most important thing that stuck was about business and money.
Aside from the nature of a business, every business needs to make money for itself and its stakeholders. I attended college long before computers were considered a necessity in the workplace. At that time everything was done with pen and paper before it was entered digitally.
Due to the nature of my business we service other small businesses. I get to see a huge host of mistakes business owners make with regards to technology. Most owners don’t realize their mistakes until their business is brought to a grinding halt from the failure.
Probably the biggest mistake businesses make is not having rules in place regarding personal surfing on work machines. Major sites like Facebook pose little harm due to viruses. However, some shopping sites and many file download sites contain viruses which may install on a work computer.
Policies should be written regarding the use of business owned computers. I suggest businesses have a separate computer designated as a personal use computer. If the employee has time and wants to surf the web or check their personal email then they will use a separate computer.
Backing up data is essential. Computers fail for all sorts of reasons and there’s no predicting when a hardware failure will occur. Hard drive breakdown is probably the biggest culprit for data loss. Life expectancy of a hard drive is typically two to three years depending on the environment.
Backing up a hard drive is fairly straight forward using software and an external storage drive. Good practice is to perform a weekly backup of the entire hard drive and daily backups of newly created data. Restoring a failed drive can be as simple as installing the new drive and reimaging from the backup. In the worst case, data can be recovered from the external backup device.
Operating system and software discs aren’t difficult to store. Nevertheless, you’d be surprised how many people tell us they lost their media and can’t have us reinstall. Without media CDs, it’s impossible to reload due to catastrophic failure or cases when we need to migrate the customer to a new computer.
CDs take up next to no space. Due to their importance, they should be kept in a safe location. Media that’s crucial to my business is kept in a safe. I’ve seen customers with hundreds of CDs organized in a dedicated fire box. Though CDs have little value by themselves, they are valuable to the business.
Owners come to me all the time with equipment that has been serviced by many different technology companies. For whatever reasons, business owners make decisions to have different people work on their equipment. If computer work is done in-house, then the employee should be qualified to perform the repairs. Otherwise, pick one repair technician and stick with him or her.
Computer failures can bring a business to a halt while repairs are being performed. I relate office computers to tools; like a wrench to a mechanic. Computers are necessary to run our businesses today and if they fail so does our business for the amount of time it takes to perform repairs. Treat the revenue generating machines in your office nicely and they will make you money.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can call him at (978) 919-8059 or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)