Forget the research evidence, the dozens of pages of documentation and the years of prodding by communications consultants. Do your own survey right now. Pick up your telephone and call ten companies or businesses in your area that provide some sort of customer service, such as banks, brokerage firms, business equipment or insurance companies. Ask to speak to "a manager." If you get through, explain that you called to evaluate their telephone techniques. Then give the manager a brief report, hang up, and record your findings.

Chances are your research will prove that the most common errors you encounter in telephone answering are among the "dirty dozen." Here they are:

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Sandwich every bit of criticism between
 two thick layers of praise.

~ Mary Kay Ash

In case you haven't heard, Google is building an experimental fiber network that will offer ultra-high-speed internet service to between 50,000 and 500,000 people initially. Chances are you won't be one of the recipients of this (although the City of Savannah is applying to be one of the participants), but it will eventually impact all of us. Even if Google doesn't come to the Low Country, initiatives such as this mean pressure will be applied to the AT&T's and Verizon's of this country to ramp up to meet what others are offering. . . competition is a great thing! Think about how technology, specifically the 'rise of the Internet' has changed your everyday life. Forget about Facebook (300 million users), Twitter (10 million users), Google search (2 billion searches a day). . . What about GPS mapping on your phone, using real-time maps? Most new phones either do or will have the capability to show you where you are, anywhere, any time as a basic capability. Remember the days when you told those at home "I'll call you when I get there?"; that's been replaced with tracking of your location within 20 foot accuracy where ever you travel, and instant messaging, email, and the like. And medical imaging so that a specialist in California can do a high-resolution review of tests that were done on the other side of the country seconds before. Or Google Earth, where you can really see what other parts of the world look like and where they are. Finally, when was the last time you or your child picked up an (expensive and outdated) encyclopedia volume?

So what will it mean to have 1 gigabit (yes that's GIGABIT) Internet speeds to your home? It will mean new methods of service delivery such as movies and television. It will mean high quality real-time collaboration with 3-d images for multiple people in all parts of the world. Goodbye jerky web-cam. . . hello Star Trek holodeck! Or, to put it in terms that may make more sense. . . 1 TerraByte of data is roughly the equivalent of 50,000 trees turned into paper and printed. The Library of Congress printed collection is roughly 10 TerraBytes of data. With a 1 gbps connection, you could transfer roughly 10 TB per day to your home! There is little doubt that when this much bandwidth is truly available to most home users, it will be a transformative technology, changing the way we work and live.

Chuck

In today's competitive global market, businesses need technology that enables flexibility and cost-effectively adds value to their organization. Internet-based hosted services provide a way to meet these objectives. They deliver feature-rich productivity tools to users while helping to relieve the burden of managing and maintaining business systems -- freeing up IT departments to focus on initiatives that can deliver true competitive advantage.

Microsoft has a long history of developing and delivering innovative software and services for businesses and individuals. Designed to meet your unique business needs, our software-plus-services vision brings together the best of rich on-premise applications and flexible online services to give you ready access to the latest messaging and collaboration tools – without costly deployment and time-consuming maintenance. Microsoft® Online Services reliably delivers 99.9 percent scheduled uptime and carries a financially backed service level agreement.

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Every business deals with risk. But medium-sized businesses, with smaller IT staff and tighter operating budgets are often more exposed to risk than larger companies. This reality is never more evident than in a down economy: When the repercussions of a business disruption are as grave as they are, how do you insulate your business from risk?

"For mid-sized businesses, the financial impact of business disruptions is tremendous," said Anil Miglani, senior vice president, AMI-Partners. "We estimate that through security breaches and data loss alone, medium-sized businesses worldwide lost approximately US$4.7 billion in 2008."

According to strategy consulting firm AMI-Partners, in 2008 medium-sized businesses worldwide lost approximately US$4.7 billion due to security breaches and loss of data.

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Change, whether it is wanted or unwanted brings out our best and worst. The Stop Your Drama Methodology incorporates 8 principles and multiple tools for navigating change or reinventing any part of your life or business.

1. Clear the Fog
Where drama is, clarity is not. If you feel like you are shoveling coal in the boiler room instead of navigating the ship, then you have a clarity issue. When you are clear, your decisions are easy and emotions are steady. Clarity helps you handle the winds of change and life flows. First get clear about your values and vision. Everything flows from there.

2. Identify the Gap
The distance between where you are and where you want to be is the gap. The bigger the gap, the more potential for drama. If you can identify those times when you are moving faster than your resources allow, or when what you want seems too far out of reach, find a way to shorten the gap, by taking only the next right step. When you learn how to identify the gap, you can shorten it instead of suffering.

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What's good for the environment can also make incredibly good business sense. By taking advantage of green IT strategies such as virtualization and server consolidation, midsized businesses can realize immediate ROI in 2010. What's more, today's energy-efficient technologies do more than just alleviate power and cooling costs. Green IT solutions can also have a significant impact on company-wide operational efficiency.

Facing the rising costs of business
Running a midsized company today calls for doing more with less  -  while also keeping up with the technology curve to remain competitive. Yet supporting new IT services often means increased costs in hardware, maintenance and power. As time goes on and energy costs continue to rise, many companies start to run out of physical space, or overload the power and cooling capabilities of hardware facilities from small computer rooms to large data centers.

So while many companies pursue green agendas, capacity issues often become the foundation for adopting energy-efficient IT technologies.

Explains Logan Scott, IBM energy efficiency offering manager, "If we keep growing with the current model  -  a very distributed IT model where a lot of companies are running one application per server  -  that is not really going to be sustainable. That's where we are seeing server sprawl. And even on the storage side it is just becoming too difficult to keep up with the increasing demand for storage capacity."

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