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Welcome and thank you for reading this book. Over the course of the chapters I will attempt to explore some new and exciting ways to use technology to your advantage. You will gain insight into the meaning of some frequently used buzzwords and I will attempt to explain how these technologies can make your life easier and run your business cheaper.

Our lives with technology have thought us - and in many cases shown us - that IT is expensive and that it inherently makes our life more difficult while we have been promised that technology will provide us with the exact opposite.

I am here to show you that this opposite scenario is actually possible to achieve and that IT can provide great and exciting opportunities to assist you in adding cash money to bottom line profit, often without making any investments besides the time you put in it.

There are so many technologies out there that it is impossible to know all of them, let alone use then to your benefit. With so much overlap in services, our lives get complicated with possibilities. Look at it: A land line, cellphone, VoIP phone, Messenger account, email account, text messaging and fax number are the minimum ways of communication of the average person. Add social networking like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to this as well. Most people don't stop there and have multiple of each!

But do we really know how to take these great tools and use them to our advantage?

It happens to me almost daily that I run into business owners, department managers and even CEO/CFO's that do not know or understand how simple technologies can be applied to their business model and personal life. Nowadays, everybody is aware of the advantages of email, but there are still key people that do not understand the importance of a proper website, let alone that they have considered blogging, Twitter, Facebook or RSS feeds as business tools. During the course of the pages, I will try to touch many of these technologies in a non technical way.

Yes, I said non-technical: I believe strongly that many technologies can be accessed, set up and used by regular people without the need to learn the underlying technology. Many of the technologies that we are using today, are there because someone, somewhere thought of a way to take the 'fuss' out of using that technology. Before that brilliant thought, it is just an other piece of technology that is too hard to use and understand. So, do you need to know how email is transferred between your PC and the recipient at the other side of the world? Do you need to know all the ins and outs of your email program? No. All you need to know is how to start the program, where the 'new email' and 'check messages' buttons are and you are all set. The rest is done behind the scenes.

Therefore, I will not get into technical details, but merely describe the technology and how it can be used to your advantage.

I will give examples of out-of-the-box solutions that can immediately be used to work for you! If you feel uncomfortable trying this yourself, want to know more about it or have any other questions, talk to your local IT professional or contact me directly for my services.

Even though I have personally implemented and used every product that I write about in this book, none of these are explicitly endorsed by myself or by B@zic Blue, but they are merely given as examples of products that fit into small and medium sized networks.

For any feedback on the contents of this book, we have created a feedback section on the website: http://bazicblue.com/pages/ebookfeedback.php

During my career, I have acted in various top-level IT positions, which has allowed me to be creative in finding solutions, implementing them and streamlining the processes needed to raise Return On Investment (ROI). ROI is a term that - in short - describes by percentage what additional profit can be made by doing a certain investment. For example, a company that is only working with faxes and regular mail, would benefit tremendously from implementing a simple email system. This would yield a high ROI since the investment needed to enable users to process email on their desktop would pay for itself in effectiveness and efficiency. Effectiveness and efficiency are considered 'soft' as they cannot be directly expressed in hard cash. However, when looking at the average hourly price per employee, efficiency can greatly reduce the costs of having employees by letting the same number of people do more work in the same amount of time.

An other term that you will read in this book is TCO, a term that stands for 'Total Cost of Ownership'. This term is used do describe the COMPLETE cost of an IT implementation, including maintenance and any predictable and inpredictable additional costs that may arise over the lifetime of the product. Often, when choosing between two similar products that greatly vary in price, TCO can be the deciding factor. The total cost of the product that is more expensive at purchase, may turn out to be less in the long run.

But not only financial investments can give great return. Investing some time to create a solid set of rules to live and work by, can take the fuss, hassle and expenses away from many daily tasks.

What many people do not understand, is that a good set of policies and a mechanism to enforce them, can cut TCO in half.

The above example is a small example that may or may not work in your specific environment. But when power consumption is calculated as a factor for TCO, this will take a nice bite out of most TCO calculations.

Over the years, IT has expanded from an accounting-related job to a full and worthy department in any self-respecting organization. Many companies still -wrongly- have their IT staff report to financial management, such as a CFO or CPA. While this may have been practical and productive in the past, current IT systems reach far beyond the realm of numbers and IT is often referred to a ICT or IT&C: Information and Communication Technologies.

In the future, this expansion will only continue. The problem that arises for companies is that there are very few IT professionals that have a full grasp about everything that is going on in the IT world. Keeping up with the latest technologies takes up such an amount of time that the know-all-be-all would not have time to actually get any work done... This is where the future of IT comes to play: The Finder Factor

1. the Finder Factor
2. FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt
3. Summary