The Attivo Blog

I feel really productive today.  I reduced my emails received for the day to just 5 items that I really need to follow up on.  They are in good company…there with the 16 from the day before, and the 12 from the day before that.  Three days ago was not very productive; some 80 emails remain.  Of course, I probably won’t get to any of them, since tomorrow will come and I’ll be busy again deleting emails or responding to the “emergencies” that appear in my inbox.  In my 30+ years in business, apparently I was never very important until my email started to overflow with things I just HAD to deal with now, or face phone calls (remember them?) with angry people asking why I haven’t responded to their email. Mixed in that morass are 42 seminar invites from associates, jokes from my retired friends and relatives, you know the rest of the stuff that shows up.  At least our Barracuda Spamwall is filtering out the Viagra offers (compliments of Alinco Computers great email hosting). So, here’s some recommendation to solve this all too familiar dilemma: Any other comments and recommendations are welcome!

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.