The Inovis Blog

Say you are a technology person (you know B2B, EDI, VAN, Gateway, RosettaNet, etc.) Are you smart though? And how can you use it to your advantage?

Karen E. Klein posted this article on BusinessWeek: Why ‘Total Geeks’ Build Businesses Faster. 

It’s about a survey of business leaders’ attitudes toward IT and showed an owner’s level of tech savvy is linked to growth in revenue and employee count

The survey conducted by CDW showed that the top challenges of growth-oriented entrepreneurial companies were employee issues and managing information technology.

The Business Review Mirror survey, which is downloadable, was carried out across a wide range of industries of small to medium-sized companies that had reported various degrees of positive growth.  

One of the questions posed to CEOs was to choose several significant challenges faced while growing. Managing information technology to an advantage garnered a 38% response, just below employee recruiting and retention. 

When asked about expertise with technology, the CEOs were give options including:

• Total Geek
• Power User
• Slide Rule User

Total Geeks and Power Users totaled 81%, while Slide Rule Users were less than 1%. Companies integrating IT into business strategies early experienced faster growth than their counterparts.

While 98% of respondents said their company had a defined IT strategy as a small business, those who viewed IT as a “strategic or competitive resource” tended to grow faster than CEOs who said they “spent just enough” to ensure that employees could do their jobs. 

The two biggest mistakes reported? Not integrating technology into our business strategy sooner, and not taking advantage of technology acquired.

Companies often aren’t sure what they really need, and may buy something that doesn’t meet their needs. In order to implement new software, they may change business processes, or maybe they’ve underestimated the work needed to integrate new technology. 

The Bottom Line: We appreciate Total Geek CEOs, and suggest you reconsider investing in duplicate technologies to integrate a B2B supply chain.

Inovis would like to take the opportunity to celebrate members of the Inovis staff who exhibit outstanding efforts.The following email was sent to Inovis several weeks ago recognizing Richard Compestine and Richard Thoman:

Last night I encountered phenomenal customer service. AGL Resources is required to perform a DR simulation as part of our Business Continuity program. As a utility, we have to guarantee our operations during a significant business interruption as mandated by the state and federal regulatory agencies. We were at Smyrna and Philadelphia using the SunGuard facilities to perform this critical process using their contracted equipment to follow our environment at 10 Peachtree Place. Just like in a natural disaster, we work until we are fully functional- which means long hours. The EDI application was selected for 2007.

At 4:30 last night, the application team was called to go into action and left for Smyrna. We started the OCC software installation at approximately 6:15. As a window into our database, OCC showed our events, trading partners and applications at 6:50PM. Our file server showed all necessary directories from the restore process.

We started our simplest translation around 7:10PM. Nothing. No working directories, No errors in the database. A state of shock occurred. We frantically began to read the logs only to find a simple error message stating “could not write to the working directory.” Okay, the pressure was off the EDI team. The issue was on the Intel Server group.

Well, all security and permissions were double-checked. We even used a text editor to create a file where an inbound working directory would have appeared. Of course, we rebooted and stopped / started services. Nothing worked. The same error message occurred – error 34.

I logged a ticket at 7:30PM. I called the toll-free number and made updates to the support ticket. Now we were in after-hours support mode. I spoke to a gentleman on the VAN side who called Concord. Around 8:30PM, Richard Compestine (a Tech Support Specialist III at Inovis) called me at SunGuard. We discussed the problem. Richard called into our bridge line to talk to our Intel server team. There were a lot of questions and answers.

With 2 phones to his ears, Richard C now called Richard Thoman (a Tech Support Specialist IV at Inovis). There was a brief discussion between the 2 Richards. Richard T dialed into our bridge-line and asked questions about our cluster environment. In this DR simulation, we were a stand-alone server. It was 9:10PM. Richard T mentioned the T_Sequence table in our database. My DBA jumped into action to pull up this table. We compared the last working directory number on the server to the record in the table. They were out-of-sequence as a result of the database back-up and the server back-up occurring at different times. This was AGL’s fault. Richard advised the data repair. At 9:13, we had a successful inbound translation. AT 9:15, we had a successful outbound translation. TLE was working in our DR environment. We had a successful DR simulation and learned a valuable lesson!!

I elaborated on the details to share what extraordinary service Richard C and Richard T gave to AGL Resources. It was after-hours for Inovis yet part of the working day or night for AGL. As a utility, we are a 7 x 24 company. Richard C and Richard T did what it took to get the job done for a 9 year old customer. Thank you for being part of our AGL team.