The Attivo Blog

I've been an avid Anaheim Angels fan (I'll never call them Los Angeles) since my first game in 1984.  These days with my team in the hunt for another American League Championship; I'm sick and tired of reading all the sports "experts" writing off the Angels vs. the Red Sox. Overall Record: Angels. Runs scored: Angels. Head-to-Head: Angels.  How can the experts pick the Red Sox? In their reasoning, it always comes down to one thing, the intangibles. In the IT world, there are literally hundreds of categories of processes you may wish to document. Passwords, Network Architecture, Installed Software and their Update Histories, Backup Schedules; the list goes on and on.  Here at Attivo we considered doing what so many have done - to create a shared database containing all of this information in one place.  From that database, we have one document for each of the above categories, then refer to that document easily when we needed to. We track our own information this way, but more importantly, we keep track of this data for our clients as well. Exact Synergy ,our CRM system,  has the capability to simplify the approach by allowing us to attach this data and documents to the customers. So why did we choose to go with a "workflow" approach instead of documents? Answer: the intangibles. Before I get started, let me explain what a workflow is.  Also called a "process flow" or "request", a workflow is a pre-defined business process that carries information from one employee or resource to another, for the benefit of the required process, until the information is no longer needed. This is best exemplified by a customer comment or complaint. The comment first gets "created" by the satisfied (or angry) customer, then travels with the remarks themselves to the customer's account manager, then on to the general manager - notifying everyone along the way.  As it gets passed along, various people log their own information into the workflow, such as the date of the comment, what product or service the comment concerns, what type of comment it was, to the final resolution of the problem.  A document, on the other hand, is alot like this blog: alot of information on a white sheet of digital paper. I can sort it by category, date, and author...but that's about it.  And that's where the intangibles comes in. Suppose you're a technical support operation and you'd like to see a list of all your customers' installed software sorted by install date. But you'd also like to filter it by Operating System and sort it by the softwares' last updated date. Finally, you'd like to export that data including the updater's comments into an excel spreadsheet.  If this were an online document, you could handle the first and last parts, but all the additional fields and filters in the middle would have required customizations to the document management system that may never be completed. But with Synergy's workflow solution we have at our disposal an almost unlimited number of free fields that are searchable straight out of the box, and the requests themselves carry just as much textual data as a document.

Everyone has "going green" on their minds today, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to stop printing most of the things that you print.  Printing to a PDF (Portable Document Format) print utility instead will not only save the paper, you will save precious time, and improve your productivity.  Remember - more productivity equals one of two things: (1) More work accomplished in the same amount of time, or (2) The same amount of work accomplished in less time.  You choose - both outcomes are good things! When you print a document, you must get up to retrieve it, along with the inevitable chores of putting paper in the printer, etc., and then do something with the paper afterwards like filing it somewhere.  Then all of that filing needs to be dealt with at some point, and put into storage.  You're probably thinking - what about the state and federal records retention requirements?  Don't I have to keep these records for 7 years?  Yes, you probably need to keep certain accounting records for that long.  but they do not have to be hard copies - it is perfectly acceptable to the IRS and others to have electronic copies of these valuable documents available rather than hard copies.  It is actually easier for auditors to use electronic copies, rather than sifting through a mountain of paper.  Which means less time spent on the audit, and the sooner the audit can be completed, the better the chance of a "no change" result. If you don't already have a PDF creator software such as Adobe Acrobat, which can cost $450 for the full version, consider one of the many FREE PDF creators.  One of my personal favorites, which I use and recommend to all my clients, is CutePDF Writer.  So far, 740,000 people have downloaded it from www.downloads.com alone.  You can also download it from www.cutepdf.com.  There is a freeware version, as well as a few other, more functional versions at very reasonable prices. The only other choice to make is where to save all these electronic documents.  They should definitely be saved where they will be backed up, such as your network server if you have one.  Come up with a scheme to store the documents, such as a master folder for "2008 Accounting", with subfolders for each month of the year below that.  When you save the documents using CutePDF, it will prompt you for a name for the document.  For those routine documents, such as accounts payable registers, come up with a short, concise recognizable name for the document and use it consistently, perhaps just changing the date at the end of the file name each time. And don't forget to start using the 2nd monitor that now sits on your desk (see my previous post) to pull up these electronic documents from your easy to navigate electronic filing systems...