Key Question:
A: Technology. In this episode you meet experts from Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro. There are many other excellent companies within this industry segment -- the White Hat companies. You should have at least one of these trustedcompanies on your side working for you at your firewall, on your servers, and on each workstation and mobile device.
Expert advice. Know at least one person within your sphere who can come into your office and provide insight and advice. You need a local trusted adviser.
Education. You need to stay constantly abreast of the changes. And, then you need to teach all the people who touch the technology within your business as well.
Key Question:
A: Technology is the driving force behind the growth of our economy. It makes people more productive and companies more profitable.
Certainly by the year 2000, all serious business owners had embraced technology solutions which have in turn made employees more productive. We are accomplishing more with fewer people by placing a bigger burden on technology. At Small Business School we eliminated an administrative assistant position by using more technology ourselves and outsourcing very specific tasks. For example, the administrative assistant used to do a mailing every month. We now use a company called ModernPostcard to do our mailing.
Rather than paying hundreds of dollars an hour to work in post-production studios, we purchased our own off-line equipment. In turn, the editor at the post-production studio quit his full-time job there to become a free agent. We pay this editor directly so he makes more and the old post-production studio takes in fewer dollars from us. The entire process reduced our costs by 30%! To accomplish all of our work, we use digital workflow. This requires everyone we work with to be online all the time. We still speak on the phone as we believe this is critical to relationship building.
BICEPS: The web has become the infrastructure for Broadcasting, Information, Communications, Education, Publishing and Systems (for these and all other businesses). Taken together, we call this perception and use of the web, BICEPS. These are our intellectual biceps and inherent within them is a de facto and constant challenge to address the answers to four of the most questions a person can be asked:
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Where did I come from?
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Who am I?
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Where am I going?
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What is the meaning and value of my life?"
Of course, these are the questions about every business as well.
The four questions are paraphrased from the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Inherent within the questions is your declaration of your mission, your vision, and the very nature of your products and services.
Think about it
What can I do to achieve more digital workflow?
Clip from: Protect Your Priceless Data - Understand Security
Meet Art Wong of Symantec, data security guru
Silicon Valley, Seattle, San Diego: One of the biggest problems in small business today is that we under-estimate the value of our data and we have trouble believing anything can happen to those computers - until it does. And, it will. Issues that face each of us range from viruses to automated internet attacks to outright theft and natural disasters. The cost of these issues in lost information and lost time sometimes is the business itself. Most of us know we need to take a few steps to secure our data but simply do not know where to start. This episode of the show is our 1-2-3. Please, have somebody in your business become an expert. If you are a sole proprietor, you'll just have to do it!
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Trend Micro, Inc.
David Perry, Global Director of Education
Visit our web site: http://trendmicro.com
Business Classification:
Security
Year Founded: 1988
Embrace the Connected World
DAVID PERRY: Here were are. We live in a world where we've developed a whole lot of elaborate Internet capabilities.
HATTIE: (voiceover) This is David Perry, Global Director of Education for TrendMicro.
DAVID PERRY: But, along with that comes the threats that are inherent. Easy to use is easy to use. Easy to install is easy to install. Easy to hack is easy to hack and that's the world that we live in today. The most important thing about your computer environment is not the computer. All of the information that you keep on your computer is important. That's why you have a computer is to deal with data. Information is property. And if you're going to protect that information, you better start thinking about it now.
