Nex-Tech Blog | Technology Tips and Tricks | Industry News

Every year we learn and get better.  And, 2017 is no different.  We will put on the best Tech Edge ever, including some of the best from the past:

If you are implementing any marketing at your business, have you ever had a problem deciding how you were going to track it?  After all, you don’t just want to blindly throw money where you cannot track an ROI, do you?  A lot of times this is what marketers are doing…casting a huge net to see if they can catch anything.  Tracking and targeting is a lot more cost-effective and gets your message to the correct audience.

When you own a small business, you wear so many hats that you can’t see straight most days. The amount of responsibilities seems endless. With handling all of the marketing, accounting, payroll, inventory, scheduling, customer service and ordering, among other things, it can be difficult to manage it all. Below are three must-have technologies that will make running your business much easier.

For the majority of my life, I have been a shoot from the hip kind of a guy. Don’t get me wrong, I like plans and to know where things are going and how we will get there. But, sometimes the details didn’t interest me. This is great if you can get away with it. For many years it worked out well. As our company has evolved, we have had to take a different approach and really dig in to see where we could gain efficiencies.

In the last couple of years, I have been tasked with new responsibilities where detail and process are imperative. At first, I will admit it was a struggle to try and understand the “why” behind digging into the details. But now that we are a couple of years into this new normal, I get it.

So much of what we all do every day is too complex. We use processes that have naturally evolved without being thought out. Don’t get me wrong, changing processes and asking people to do things in a different way isn’t easy. Nobody likes someone else looking at how they do their job. It is scary to think something is going to be taken away from you. However, if you are going to grow your business or product, speed and efficiency is the only way in a hyper-competitive 24x7 kind of world. The only way to become efficient is to remove as many wasteful steps, systems and people from the process.

The byproduct of removing waste is simple… Scale!

Recently, I flew out of Wichita Eisenhower Airport which is a great experience if you haven’t tried it.  Close parking, quick check in, fast security and you are quickly at your gate.  For this trip, I was flying Southwest Airlines which is known for their amazing culture and this trip did not disappoint. 

It was nearly 20 years ago and I had just started with Nex-Tech, or at that time Rural Telephone Service.  While touring one of our central offices, I was introduced to Ed.  Ed was a seasoned Central Office Tech that had been with the company for what I believed forever.  With a strong German accent, he told stories of “back in da day”.

Ethernet emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as the de facto layer 2 protocol for LAN networks but distance restrictions, technology limitation, and customer traffic primarily composed of voice services limited Ethernet expansion as a WAN network service.  However, 21^st century has shifted primary WAN traffic from voice services to packet-based data services which has led to new implementations and standardizations of technologies and protocols by organizations - International Telecommunications Union-Telecommunication Standards Bureau (ITU-T), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) - to support the increasing demand of packet-based data services including VoIP, video services, wireless backhaul, and data center interconnect.  This has led to the 21^st century emergence of Ethernet as a viable carrier service based on the protocol’s capabilities of supporting packet-based data services and the reduction of limitations when integrating Ethernet on a WAN. To further reduce the complexity of Ethernet integrated services on the WAN, Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) was formed as a global industry alliance with a mission to accelerate the worldwide adoption of Carrier-class Ethernet networks and services.  The MEF distinguishes Carrier Ethernet (CE) services from traditional LAN-based Ethernet services based on five attributes:

If you’re like most independent telephone companies investing to deliver bigger and better broadband services, you may also be seeing special access revenue slowly replaced with Virtual Private Network Service (VPNs) over Internet, or even point to point wireless service.  This has been a common challenge within the industry, as many cost recovery Telco’s only have Interstate Tariff’s and investing into their networks may be driving rates higher.  As these rates climb, it pushes IT personnel from local banks, hospitals and businesses to give up their reliable T1 or Ethernet Transport Services (ETS) to less expensive VPN over Internet service.

Electronic payments are so stress-free, right?  This technology makes shopping at a store much more convenient versus pulling out cash and counting out coins…or worse, getting coins back to weigh down your purse, or pocket, whichever you prefer.  As far as check-writing…that’s gone by the wayside.  Checks are much larger to transport and take longer to complete versus that sleek card with a 4-digit PIN.

As I sit at my desk closing out the year, I like to reflect on what went well, what could have gone better, and how I can improve next year.  One of the first areas I thought about was how well I planned and how well I executed that plan.  At the beginning of the year, it was easy to plan ahead and to set goals for where I wanted to be by the end of the year both professionally and personally.  Through the first six months, things were going well and it was easy to stick to the plan and measure progress towards my goals.  Then it happened.  A couple of unexpected twists and turns and I found myself just trying to keep up instead of following my plan.