Business

Kind Words from Hansbraun

February 29, 2012

As mentioned last week, we have been honoured as a finalist for the GVCC annual awards for the “Business of the Year (11-25 Employees)”. As part of the application process, each nominee submission could be accompanied by Letters of Support. Receiving these letters was one of the most rewarding parts of this process. Over the…

Read More

Greater Victoria Business Awards

February 22, 2012

We’re finalists! Smart Dolphins has been chosen as one of two finalists (cheers to our companions for this honour: Cairnview Mechanical) for the Annual Greater Victoria Business Awards. We are up for the Business of the Year Award (11-25 employees). We were runner up for this award in 2008 – could this be our year?…

Read More

Backup – an investment, NOT an expense

February 17, 2012

Last week I called a doctor’s office of which I am not an existing patient and I booked an appointment for 9 am 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’…

Read More

Proactive IT services

February 2, 2012

I’m not sure you’ve heard, but Smart Dolphins is proactive in our approach to IT management. What does Proactive mean? Proactive means doing the IT work that isn’t simply in response to unexpected client needs. Sounds easy enough in theory, but in practice it is challenging to do in any significant quantities. Reactive IT work…

Read More

IT support professionals

January 25, 2012

I’m sorry. I’m sorry to many of the business leaders that I have met with in the past to talk about Smart Dolphins and your technology. I’ve done many of you a disservice. I have let you down and it probably will cost you thousands of dollars and much frustration. I have begun to see…

Read More

Backup your data

January 5, 2012

Backup systems and car purchases; a little comparison  Have you ever heard the saying “I just drive a car to get to get from point A to point B?” This is almost never true. The truth is that we factor all kinds of decisions into our vehicle purchases.  For example, safety is important. We will be packing our families and or pets or friends into these vehicles. We want…

Read More

The future IT tech

December 9, 2011

Technology seems to be getting easier – stuff that used to need a lot of TLC and kept tech support on their toes, now “just works”. Stuff that would take days or weeks of technical expertise to launch can now just be plugged in. We also have a younger generation who are technically strong and…

Read More

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

December 2, 2011

Fred Reichheld wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review in 2003 called, “The One Number You Need to Grow” and the Net Promoter Score was born. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a very simple measure of customer satisfaction, or more specifically, customer loyalty. The NPS is measured through responses to one question: “How…

Read More

Limited supply of hard drives

November 4, 2011

The IT industry is always full of change and excitement.  Most of the time that’s a good thing.  Sometimes, not so much. Currently we are looking at the beginning of a global component shortage.  Hard drives are going to be in limited supply over the next bit.  It seems that some of the world’s top…

Read More

IT risk

October 28, 2011

Technology helps us do what we do faster and easier. We get a new computer that runs 30% faster than our old one. We get some new, fancy piece of software that cuts our efforts in half. Most see this as good stuff. Flipping that around, some view a lack of technology simply as a…

Read More