Category: Business

The recording of yesterday’s conference call with Karl Palachuk is now available.
As Karl promised, one of the topics we discussed was my “Ten Commandments” for solo IT consultants. I’ve now posted those commandments, with commentary, on The Schlog.

Michael Vizard has an interesting commentary on the choice we IT consultants face between offering our “own” services and offering similar services from well-known, brand-name providers. It’s not all that different from the choice we faced years ago, between selling “white-box” PCs and recommending or reselling Dell, HP, IBM, and so on.
There are still a [...]

Well, not exactly. But if you’re running a one-person IT consulting business, it should be a reasonably valuable way to spend an hour of your time. Tune in on June 18th at 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time, and in the meantime, buy some books from our sponsor.

The head of Boston’s Department of Public Works was suspended for three weeks for having allowed a data analyst to work remotely. In this case, the analyst was working very remotely — from Venezuela.
The Boston Globe coverage of the story omits any mention of a rather salient point: was the employee adequately performing her job? [...]

You know how they say that when you’re getting surgery, you should go with a surgeon who does that particular kind of surgery all the time? It’s good advice. It’s not that other surgeons can’t do a good job. It’s just that they’re more likely to be inefficient and make mistakes. Why? Because surgery is [...]

Kevin McLaughlin of CMP did just that. I said no.

I’m writing to you today from a Microsoft Response Point training session. Response Point is a phone system intended for businesses with up to 50 users. Although Microsoft supplies the software, you don’t actually buy a Response Point system from Microsoft. You buy a hardware bundle from one of their authorized manufacturers. Currently, there are [...]

I plan to add some longer pieces to The Schlog as pages rather than posts, so they can be slowly savored and digested rather than getting chugged down along with the ordinary blog posts.
Here is the first.

If you’re thinking about getting into my line of work, read this first. It may not be a complete list of reasons why NOT to become an IT consultant, but what’s there is pretty accurate.

Reflections a year after my taping of Vladfire ….
There are many names for people and businesses who do what I do.

IT consultant
Trusted advisor
Outsourced IT vendor
Value added reseller (VAR)
Value added provider (VAP)
Managed services provider (MSP)
Channel partner
Solution provider
God (on our good days)
Those idiots (on our bad days)

The names we choose for ourselves and that others pin on [...]