But those of us on the business side of the corporate landscape depend on the computer folks to let us know how things are going with that highly valuable asset that we have in our IT systems, hardware and software. Most medium to large businesses run very high capacity computers or multitudes of computers connected through a network and those systems must perform at top capacity each day to accomplish the goals of the business.

The upgrade and maintenance budgets for the computers that run your business no doubt represents a fairly sizable percentage of the corporate budget each year. But because those systems are what make you competitive in the marketplace, that investment is worth the money to assure that the mission critical jobs those powerful systems do get done on time each week and month.

When a computer begins to show signs of straining under the load of work, we are giving it, that can be a cause of significant concern for a business. If your business paradigm dictates that the load of traffic or system resources could be pushed to beyond what the computers can do with their existing computing power, that weakness in the IT infrastructure represents a significant risk to the company should the system become overloaded when there is a large body of work to be done by these machines.

What not every business person knows is that there may be a hidden goldmine of computing capacity already resident in your IT resources that simply is not being tapped to its fullest. You know that it isn’t uncommon for your IT professionals to report that your systems are at 80-90% capacity and must be upgraded to handle the next big increase in business.

That hidden goldmine is a discipline that has actually been around for quite sometime but is infrequently tapped in the modern business world. That discipline is called “capacity planning”. By implementing a capacity planning office and monitoring function, you can put the tools and the talent in place to precisely measure scientifically if your computer systems are at capacity of if there is just a need for system tuning or realignment of computing schedules to get more out of the systems you already own.

Recently a large oil company in the Midwest noted that many of its mission critical functions were being delayed in processing, seemingly because the computer systems were overloaded and in dire need of an expensive and time consuming upgrade. Capacity planning measurements were taken and the system was diagnosed to determine what the real problem was and it was found that job priorities of new functions were not tuned to the load of the system at critical time frames. The adjustments were made by talented systems administrators and the IT infrastructure continued to perform at top-notch capacity and the delays were eliminated with no additional hardware or upgrades needed.

By utilizing capacity planning software tools and enabling your IT team to take advantage of this highly scientific computer measurement and prediction method, the business can get the most out of its computer resources and use its corporate resources to further the business objectives of the company. And that benefits everyone.

Young employees bring a lot to a business that can compliment an older work force and make the business much more vital. Younger employees are savvy to the wants and needs of their peers. So instead of trying to guess how to market to the current generation of 18-28 year olds who are the age segment with disposable income, by keeping such employees on staff, you have the inside track to the priorities of the current generation. Further youthful employees are often optimistic and out to change the world. Their sense of mission and belief in the system as a means to make the world a better place results not only in a better morale internally but in business philosophy that shares those values.

The tendency to name the upcoming generations can be a bit trite but it helps in knowing who the target group for recruitment are. And that group of youthful future employees that will be hitting the job market in the next few years has been dubbed “the millennials”. And despite the traumatizing events of world terrorism, war and the decay of the environment, the millennials come to you with that youthful enthusiasm and desire to make a big difference in the world that sets them apart from previous generations.

To lure the brightest minds coming from the nation’s colleges, some rethinking of what we put in front of these young people is in order. They are not leaving academia strictly with the objective of making a lot of money. So to turn the head of youth workers who can make a change for the better in your business…

§ Don’t just make the potential job about money or your recognizable business name. The reputation of the company can be as much a negative as it can be a positive. The millennial recruitee will look past the sign on the building at what the company is really all about.

§ The millennial is more internet savvy and wants to use modern technology to accomplish business goals. It’s in our best interest to facilitate that goal because it will keep us in touch with the marketplace.

§ Corporate culture is an important factor for both recruiting and retaining good employees from this generation. Millenials are looking for a business climate that is creative, able to change when new things become available, highly accessible upper management and responsive.

§ Corporate values mean a lot to the millennial crowd. That means that those high minded values printed on posters and plastered all over the Human Resource department have to actually mean something. By demonstrating that the business lives up to its ethics and values, that will appeal the idealistic side of youthful workers.

§ The values that the business supports must reflect a modern attitude toward diversity and “going green”. If you walk a millennial around the office during his or her interview, they will notice the recycling bins scattered about. They will notice the diversity of culture and race in the employee mix.

§ Be prepared to recruit from various disciplines. Even if you are recruiting for a financial services function or some other specialization, keep your mind open to recruiting students with a focus on liberal arts or teaching. These millennials can be trained to the specific job and they bring a fresh approach to the job description that comes from their college area of focus.

These are things that might take time to change if the corporate culture is behind the times. But it’s worth the effort to start now to attract the kinds of workers that mean long term growth for the company. By doing some serious analysis on how up to the date the business is, you can begin to affect change now so by this time next year, you will be in better shape to court the millennials.

When a business turns its eye to cost cutting, there is a stated or unstated business objective that the business owners will discover significant bleeding of revenues that are going on within the systems of doing business. So if those systems can be improved to eliminate that waste, the business would literally make money from the inside out because the overhead of the business would drop so dramatically.

The usual progress of such a cost saving campaign by a business is to find “the low hanging fruit” first. By that we mean that in order to satisfy the demands of management, middle management will identify superficial savings in hopes of satisfying the requirement. Hence switching from disposable cups to mugs or cutting back on break room amenities often go on the chopping block first.

Sadly, while there may be some superficial savings to be found in such places, the significant introduction of efficiencies for any business lie at a deeper level and take a more in-depth process of locating problems with how things get done internally. The methodology of finding these “money pits” within a business is often called “Process Improvement.” The concept of process improvement is to diagram a particular business process from inception to completion and document the stages it goes through, the handing over of authority for the process and to pin point places where inefficient methods are causing excessive cost in executing that process en route to the final stage of process completion.

Routinely, the areas of business structure that most often identified as being candidates for a process improvement examination are…

* Excessive overhead between departments. Departments within a business are notorious for taking on the atmosphere of a fiefdom and becoming resistant if not suspicious of other departments in the same company. When that happens, department managers will introduce paperwork and unnecessary processing to cause “work” to move to his or her department from another or for completed jobs to continue along their path. This excessive overhead can be costly at the department level and bog down the business as a unit enough to actually reduce the profitability of the organization.

* Communication problems. A business process moves through the organization as each department or entity adds value to the process through to the completion of the job. However if communications between departments or people along the process chain are flawed, a process can grind to a halt and wait for hours if not days before the missed communication is discovered and the work is put into the cycle to be completed. This slow down or break down in communications can be a tremendous drain on the company. To correct the problem, modern tools of communication should be reviewed so each significant person along the chain is quickly made aware of work that needs to be done and can signal to the next agent that their step is complete and that the process is moving to the next stage.

* An inefficient IT infrastructure. Out of date computer programs that are not integrated with each other cause needless work to be done to take data from one system and moving it into the next computer program only to be entered again at the next stop along the chain. Standardization and integration of data and systems will introduce huge efficiencies to the process.

By streamlining the process of moving a business requirement from inception to conclusion, we can remove much of the inefficiency and waste that has become inherent to that process. We can introduce up to date integration designs both at the IT and process level to quickly move the process from one department to the next upon completion. The outcome is a streamlined organization that is no longer “bleeding money” due to inefficiencies and as such is making money “from the inside out”.

Of course, the value of the internet for sales and promotions has been well known in the industries that service the youth markets and for the companies dealing with entertainment and the arts. Because the internet is in virtually every home and even now on hand held devices of every description, the access it gives to reach a target market are phenomenal.

This explosion of an entirely new marketing model has introduced the world of business to entirely new paradigms of marketing and new ways to achieve greater market penetration and sales. And so any business who has had to get out on cyberspace to keep up with the competition has already had to learn a whole new vocabulary that has grown up around the internet marketing phenomenon. Now terms like “Search Engine Optimization”, “Auto responders” and “Viral Marketing” become important and powerful tools to any business that wants to tap the power of the internet to increase sales.

The second wave of businesses that, perhaps reluctantly, ventured out into cyberspace were traditional retail business that you would not associate with cyberspace at all. This includes sport teams, restaurants and even retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Border’s Book Stores. In fact, the wave of change in how products and services are sold has been so rapid that entire market niches have been virtually revolutionalized by internet sales techniques. Book and music outlets have been virtually hard hit as a large percentage of their customers have abandoned the “brick and mortar” sales outlets entirely to use the more convenient tools of internet shopping.

This has made it tough on some retailers to keep up. For the “mom and pop” business, the change has been particularly devastating. Already small, home grown businesses were struggling to compete with the giant mega-stores like Wal-Mart to keep their loyal clientele coming back. Add to that the migration of customers to the internet and the need for change just to stay in business became even more urgent.

But even businesses who do not depend on marketing at all have seen the need to build and maintain a well functioning business web site so they will have a “face” in cyberspace. In the modern marketplace, the consumer will go to the internet first to find out about a company and it’s goods and services. This has turned traditional ways of connecting with existing and new customers upside down entirely.

The good news is that these rapid changes in how modern markets work have made the business world more diverse, more able to adjust to changing business dynamics and more open to the creative and innovative minds that have always been the real life blood of the business world. And, ironically, it is often the small business that is most capable of making rapid changes to its online presence and ways to doing things.

In that the internet is a phenomenally dynamic place, new ways of reaching our customers change almost annually. Where one year a simple web page may have been sufficient, soon we had to have chat rooms, MySpace pages and YouTube compatibility. Any business that sees these changes as chances to do something new and exciting with their business will be the companies that thrive in this modern world. And, as always, those who do not thrive with change will be destined to be made obsolete by it.

But there are segments of every business that have no contact with customers so it is difficult for them to develop a customer service mentality.  And if the business itself is not structured to deal with the public or have conventional “customers”, that approach to the business world can be lacking in the workplace.  That is why a big business trend in all type of business settings is to change the work ethic internally so that workers view those who use their work as customers.

When properly implemented, each employee actually begins to view each other, their bosses and especially people who rely on their work in other departments as customers or clients. In theory, this approach has as its objective to build that customer service mentality even in workers for whom the outcome of their work is only for internal

departments or other workers in the company.

Its an innovate approach to changing the corporate culture of any business.  By altering the mindset especially of an office worker to that of someone who comes to work with that entrepreneurial or retail oriented outlook, the employee is freed to become more creative, more aggressive about completing quality work for their “customers” and get a greater feeling of satisfaction from satisfying their internal customers.

It’s a noble effort to try to alter the traditional culture of an office based business setting.  The traditional culture of a “cubicle farm” type of office setting often resembles the comic strip Dilbert.   That strip can be painful to read if you are a manager trying to keep a creative and proactive team moving forward in a business setting.  But Dilbert does point out some of the communication problems that are common in an office setting.  The distrust of management, the tendency by employees to drift toward unproductive attitudes and behavior and the low morale of many office settings is lampooned by the strip.

The client coworker business concept attempts to empower the employee to strive to perform to his or her best even when only performing duties for the department or another department internal to the company.  The client customer model calls for viewing that other department as a customer and providing customer service to that internal relationship with the same “eager to please” attitude that is necessary when serving external customers whose revenue drives the company.

There are some real values to be had by introducing a customer service attitude even to internal support functions within the company.  When combined with other empowering techniques such as process improvement and open communications with all levels of management, it can unify an office and put some real life into your staff.

However, the negatives of the client customer model have to be avoided.  This approach can create animosity between coworkers and hard feelings when one employee feels that he or she is not being treated like a customer by another.  The client customer model can create distance between peer employees and reduce comradery which has a great deal of value in a team oriented corporate culture.  But a wise manager can implement the client customer model to a business setting and harvest from it the productivity gains while skillfully avoiding the pitfalls.