Last week I called a doctor’s office of which I am not an existing patient and I booked an appointment for 9am this morning. When I showed up they had no record of me. Apparently they suffered a major computer crash a couple of days earlier and lost at least a couple of days’ worth of data, including all of their bookings and obviously their customer database.

This place had five or six computers in the reception area, a computer in every room, and several thousand dollars in monitor arms and other medical equipment. They had Windows 7 on every desktop that I saw. They obviously aren’t afraid to spend money on technology and they appear to see the value in having a nice clean, professional, high-tech medical office with up to date, secure operating systems.

So what the hell happened to their data?

All I can do is speculate here, but I’m going to guess that whoever installed all of this great equipment for them severely neglected the backup system. Thousands of dollars in new equipment and monitor arms, and I would assume more thousands in service to install it all, but the backup system left me standing at the reception desk this morning repeating my first and last name to the medical office assistant as she re-entered me into the computer. It was by pure luck that I still got to see the doctor, who was great by the way.

If this was a customer of Smart Dolphins they would have lost an hour’s worth of data in a worst case scenario. The day they signed up with us, we’d order them an amazing new backup system and we’d install it for them as part of our monthly fee. This type of crash would be nearly impossible. Our backup system backs up every single hour of every day, and we monitor it 24/7 to ensure that it is always working. Backup problems (which are rare) are caught and resolved on the same day because we give them a very high priority.

I bet this crash cost them over $10,000-$20,000 in wasted staff productivity and missed appointments, and that’s extremely conservative. I’m also guessing they probably aren’t able to quantify it. I bet it also cost them some customer satisfaction, as people would have shown up for appointments only to be turned away. Perhaps some of those customers never return and thus further thousands of dollars in revenue over the next decade are lost. Perhaps word of mouth from a dissatisfied customer costs them referrals, and more thousands of dollars.

All because the backup system wasn’t robust enough. It’s probably because it wasn’t valued enough when it was put in. It’s probably because somebody treated the backup system as an expense, rather than valuing it for the investment that it truly is. Sadly this is not the first time I have visited a doctor’s office on a day where they were recovering from data loss.

It wouldn’t even surprise me if a doctor put it in given what I’ve seen in the past. The amount of doctors in Victoria that think ‘IT on the side’ is a good use of their time is just astounding to me. That’s a whole other discussion though which I won’t get into today and I’m going to assume this isn’t the case.

There’s two points to all this:

1. When you neglect things like your backup system (or your security, as another example), the risk you take on is exponentially more expensive than whatever those solutions would have cost in the first place. Well planned technology is not an expense, it is an investment in your company’s health and well-being. It keeps your highly paid employees working, it keeps your manufacturing or services from grinding to a halt, and it keeps your customers happy.
2. You should be demanding that your IT provider take these things seriously. If your backup system seems cheap then it probably is, and the results will show. If they don’t understand point #1 then I would fire them immediately and find somebody who does, because all they are doing is putting your business and the livelihood of you and your employees in jeopardy.

We’ve all been there. Someone sends an email to a Distribution List (DL) and before the day is over we have ten replies sitting in our inbox that seem to reappear faster than we can delete them.

I believe that the way most of us mash Reply to All and abuse our DLs is poisonous to our efficiency and creates a lot more noise than people realise. Consider this: An email sent to a 10 member DL which is replied to 4 times throughout a day has been read or at least skimmed 50 times (the original + 4 replies). Most of the time we only think about how these things affect us as individuals, but if you expand some of those DLs and think about how many people are reading some of those messages it can be quite disheartening. At Smart Dolphins these ‘unnecessary’ emails equate to thousands per year, but I’m happy to say that this is shrinking.

Here are a few simple suggestions that you can put in place at your business to help cut down on the email noise.

1. For the great majority of your emails that utilize DLs, use the BCC field. The BCC field masks the recipients, meaning that only the original Sender will show up when the Reply or Reply to All buttons are pressed. This obviously assumes that only the original sender needs to see the replies (which is true in a lot of cases). So many DL messages are simple questions or FYIs, with a great majority of the replies being simple answers or thank yous intended for the original sender. These make great BCC candidates.
2. If the sender wants replies to go to specific individuals, those people should be included in the CC box. This allows recipients to simply click on Reply to All and their replies will go to the intended people rather than to the entire DL.
3. Similar to 2 above, in cases where the sender feels that the DL should actually be replied to, place the DL into the CC field rather than the BCC or the To field. It’s important to use CC rather than To because it shows consideration of the email policy and that the sender consciously chose to open the email up to replies to the DL. If people were to use the To box then you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference people who were ignoring your email policy, and people who were consciously following it. This allows you to police the email policy somewhat, because anyone who still uses the To field will clearly not be following your policy and so can be reminded of it.
4. Or if you really want to cause a stir, give us a call and ask us to disable the Reply to All button for all of your users. Some very big companies have done this with great results!

This is just one small piece of the fairly large email noise puzzle, but I hope it helps you!

Ever hear the saying “I drive a car to get to get from point A to point B”? It’s almost never true. The truth is that we factor all kinds of decisions into our vehicle purchases.

• Safety – we’ll be packing our families into those vehicles. We want to do better than ‘hopefully survive’ in an accident.
• Reliability – we want to ensure that our vehicle is going to work for us consistently, and not break down leaving us stranded in the middle of nowhere
• Comfort/Options – we generally want better than the bare minimum for ourselves, and getting from point A to point B is a bare minimum. We need heating, windows that open, windshield wipers, and more. Some of us want power windows, heated seats, GPS, and airbags.

Time and time again, I hear smart business owners talk about their backup systems with a ‘point A to point B’ mentality because nobody has told them about what a good backup system should be doing for their business. Too many businesses are operating with the bare minimum and believe that they are protected from failure because they ‘have a backup’, and that’s just simply not the case the majority of the time. What does ‘having a backup’ mean exactly? It can mean a great deal of things, just as ‘having a vehicle’ can mean the difference between life and death or being stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Here are a few of the key considerations when looking at backup systems:

• Recoverability – What happens when you delete a file that you’ve been working on all morning? What happens when your server hardware fails completely? How long is your business down for in a real disaster like an earthquake? Is your data protected in an offsite location somewhere?

• How often does the backup fail? How much do I have to pay my IT company to monitor and resolve issues with my backup system? How much risk do I take on by having a backup system that fails even a small percentage of the time?

• Granularity – What happens if a file was deleted three weeks ago and nobody noticed until today? Can it still be recovered? How far back can you restore from?

• Retention – What about archiving? What about data from six months ago? Or a year ago?

• What about the backup window? Is data being backed up continuously, or does it backup overnight? Does the server slow down while the backups are running? Is employee productivity lost because the server is running slowly?

So do you know the answer to some or all of these questions? If not, I suggest calling your IT provider and asking them sooner rather than later. Ultimately, a business protects the lives and health of the families it employs and the businesses it serves. So there are a lot of reasons why it is critically important to invest in a backup system that is capable of protecting that business properly. Unfortunately, there are a lot of businesses out there with a ‘point A to point B’ backup system. If you’re concerned that you might be one of them we would love to help you fix this problem.