Your IT Report Card
February 17, 2009 by Kevin Hazard, Web Hosting Evangelist in Tech Stuff, The Planet
Do you remember how you felt as the school year came to a close and summer peaked over the horizon?
For me, it was a strange combination of exhilaration, anxiousness and terror. The catalyst for those emotions was always a singular nemesis: the report card.
Being a bit of a nerd (please keep the commentary about this to a minimum, thank you), my report card was generally regarded as my life’s unequivocal barometer of success. My two or three months of summer could be made or broken by that piece of paper, and I have to admit that I didn’t always do well:
Yes, that is an A-. No, it is not a typo. An entire class boiled down into a single grade. How arbitrary and unfair can you get? … The other three grades were clearly thoughtful and accurate. What’s was the International Finance professor’s problem?!
No, I’m not actually that vain.
That’s an actual excerpt from my college transcript, and the grades weren’t arbitrary … I worked hard and prepared for class day-in and day-out, so my benchmark validated the time and effort I invested in each class … even International Finance.
It turns out grades are often directly correlated with preparation, and they can be extremely useful in personal development and business development if you ask the right questions.
Over the past few months, The Planet has been working with Microsoft, SmallBizTechnology.com, Nine Lives Media Inc., SMB Nation, Small Business Trends, HostSearch, Yankee Group and Georgia’s Kennesaw State University to put together a survey tool aimed at asking the right questions to small- and medium-sized businesses.
Welcome to the ITEI
The Information Technology Effectiveness Index (ITEI) is a survey that evaluates the effectiveness of an SMB IT infrastructure.
The vast majority of research from analyst firms focuses on large enterprise-type organizations with deep pockets and vast IT resources to support their businesses. In contrast, SMBs are largely ignored, despite the fact they drive our economy.
After taking the survey, you immediately receive your grade, along with prescriptive guidance and recommendations on how you can improve your IT effectiveness.
With questions about everything from business continuity and disaster recovery to change management and budgeting, the ITEI is has been built to provide relevant, helpful feedback and best practices to the SMB market.
As we gain critical mass, you can receive research on how they compete against others in your peer groups and in comparison with other types of SMB companies. We will run the survey throughout 2009, issuing periodic news on what we learn. In December, the partnership will issue an annual report about the state-of-the-state of IT effectiveness.
The survey is 12 questions long and only takes about 10 minutes to complete. So what are you waiting for?
-Kevin
