Are your emails being taken up the wrong way?

According to the makers of the new Outlook plug-in called ToneCheck, studies show that tone and language choices cause e-mail messages to be misinterpreted 50% of the time.

Tone is very hard to get right in an email and to some degree is influenced by individual interpretation. Nonetheless Microsoft has developed an Outlook plug in that checks the tone of emails for you and aims to prevent angry or misunderstood email.

It’s seamlessly integrated in to your email so it doesn’t slow you down.
It’s currently free whilst it is in beta; preview phase allowing for usability testing.

ToneCheck is used like spell checker. It analyses your e-mail and make suggestions about which sentences which have strong emotional components based on the intensity of 8 primary emotions. As with spell checker it is up to the user to decide whether changes are made.

“As a business the wrong tone can turn-off customers, tick people off, cause you to lose sales. ToneCheck™ helps people write better and prevent them from saying stupid things.”
ToneCheck.com

It may not be necessary to use all the time but perhaps useful when sending a particularly stressful email whether it be late at night, towards the end of a product or to particularly sensitive business partners.

“You might be the most diplomatic person around, but the fact remains that people tend to misinterpret what others say. Picking the right words to use in an email is never easy, and the chances of you coming up with something that will have a negative value if the reader wants to look for it can never be subjugated completely. They can, however, be minimised considerably by using a tool like Tone Check."
Killer Start Ups, July 2010

Boost Creativity – The key to innovation!

We all know about brainstorming, creativity circles and crowd sourcing innovation through suggestion boxes but do how much of it actually works in practice is the real question…

According to Newsweek, brainstorming sessions were discredited as far back as 1958, when it was found that the technique measurably reduces the creative output of a group compared to what they’d accomplish separately.

Switch projects. Multi-tasking might be counter-productive, but stopping one project to work on another at regular intervals has shown to help you solve difficult problems within those separate projects more quickly.

Watch less TV. One study shows that for every hour of television, kids spend 11% less time in creative activities. Three hours of TV adds up to a one-third drop in creativity.

Follow your passion. In a sense, this is common sense. Studies show you’ll do your best at things you are most passionate about. Where this runs afoul of common wisdom, though, is that it suggests you don’t need to be “well rounded” — and in fact, that corporate dictum to do a little of everything for career advancement might actually hurt your ability to work creatively.

Ditch the suggestion box. According to Newsweek, “Formalized suggestion protocols, whether a box on the wall, an e-mailed form, or an internal Web site, actually stifle innovation because employees feel that their ideas go into a black hole of bureaucracy.” The remedy: empower employees to put their ideas into practice without a lot of red tape.

Exercise. As little as 30 minutes of exercise improves “almost every dimension of cognition” for at least 2 hours. It only works on people who are already physically fit, though. For out-of-shape folks, the fatigue outweighs the benefits.

Spontaneous Idea generation is the mother of creativity. Though we don’t know what ultimately promotes the creation of a new idea, we can make every effort to create an environment that promotes idea generation.

There are the two common things that most creative people have; a mind free of rigid social controls and the unwavering desire to follow one's own interests.

The final key to promoting creativity on a personal level and also in terms of creating the most appropriate environment is consistency and practice. Creativity should be a constant rather than a sporadic event just as innovation should be a continual process which demands commitment.

SAP continue to lower their carbon footprint

Companies are increasingly making an effort to reduce their carbon footprint, some more proactively than others in order to reduce their contribution to global climate change.

A carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gases produced to directly and indirectly support human activities, usually expressed in equivalent tons of carbon dioxide (CO2).

SAP has reduced its worldwide CO2 emissions from 120 kilotons to 115 kilotons since Q
2.This is quite an achievement considering the surge in the business travel in light of the economic recovery. It comes down to their efforts to reduce their energy consumption supported by increased levels of renewable electricity being purchased by them. Renewable electricity now accounts for 50% of their global electricity usage.

The objective for 2010 is to stay below 460 kilotons and achieve this they will need to continue to compensate for travel needs.

Last year SAP announced their aggressive commitment to reduce its total carbon emissions to the year 200 emissions level of approximately 274 kilotons by the year 2020. This represents an overall reduction of about half compared to the company’s year-2007 peak levels of 540 kilotons.

To help reach this goal, SAP is using the SAP® Carbon Impact OnDemand solution to access and analyze emissions data across its entire operations and evaluate its carbon footprint reduction efforts. SAP identified several key areas for implementing carbon-efficient operations, including travel, data centers, buildings and commitment to renewable energy.

Detailed emissions data are available to the public in the SAP sustainability report and are updated quarterly.

SAP Now Tougher Competition for Oracle with Acquistion of Sybase

SAP continues to grow and further substantiate their position as the world’s leading provider of business software with what was could possibly be the largest acquisition the company has ever completed. SAP will now prove to be tougher competition for Oracle as they enter the mobile segment where Oracle has no presence.

SAP have completed the acquisition of Sybase, a partner and a market leader in managing, analysing, and mobilising business information. The intention behind the acquisition is to accelerate the reach of SAP solutions across mobile platforms and drive forward the realisation of SAP’s in-memory computing vision. The long held tradition of organic growth has been further abandoned.

“With this transaction, SAP will dramatically expand its addressable market by making available its market-leading solutions to hundreds of millions of mobile users, combining the world's best business software with the world's most powerful mobile infrastructure platform," SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott said in a statement.

Based in Dublin, California, Sybase delivers a range of solutions to ensure that customer information is securely managed and mobilized to the point of action, including enterprise and mobile databases, middleware, synchronisation, encryption and device management software, and mobile messaging services.

Sybase will continue to function as a separate entity under the SAP’s ownership. The present management of Sybase will also be retained. The industry pundits are saying that SAP has realised the importance of acquiring smaller but popular companies for expanding its operations into hitherto untapped markets.

The acquisition supports SAP's strategy of pursuing acquisitions that complement its portfolio and offer additional value to customers worldwide. The acquisition brings together SAP solutions with the Sybase platform to unwire the enterprise and deliver critical and accurate business information on any device, at any time.

SAP and Sybase will build on their successful co-innovation history to present new and exciting solutions to the marketplace. Bringing together in-memory technology from SAP and Sybase's strong database and mobility products will enable companies to become "unwired enterprises," in which critical information and applications are available on any device, at any time.

Customers will have the ability to take the explosion of data and harness it in a way that is consumable by employees using any device. Employees will be able to make faster, more informed decisions, and companies will benefit from greater productivity, speed, and agility to help their businesses grow.

All this talk of Virtualisation but what is it?

I keep seeing articles, posts and features around virtualisation and the benefits it offers to businesses but before we can begin to consider the benefits we need to know what it is.

I can’t be the only one who is not completely technologically minded and new to the world of IT (as a new employee at IIS) so I went on the hunt for some simplified information that I thought might be of use or interest to the SME owners, managers and employees.

The traditional approach to IT required a new server for every new software application which of course added substantial costs and weeks to projects. Even planned hardware and software updates and maintenance impacted productivity. IT managers were challenged to meet organisational demands with limited time and budgets available to them.

The increase in the number of servers being introduced resulted in more money, time and people being required.

Virtualisation means that one single server can be used to run multiple applications simultaneously in virtual machines. New applications can now be rapidly deployed.
Virtualisation is the smarter way to grow IT; less time, money and people are necessitated.

The main benefits are:
Minimum spend on power and cooling facilities
Allows you to take full advantage of hardware performance
Facilitates a rapid response to organisational needs

The focus shifts from maintenance to efficiency and innovation with less people being needed to support the IT environment, their skills and knowledge can be utilised more efficiently elsewhere within the organisation.

Virtualisation will help small and medium businesses achieve enterprise-class levels of IT high availability and continuity at a significantly lower cost if they have the appropriate IT infrastructure foundation.

Technology Adoption in SMEs

It has been claimed that the majority of IT spending by SMEs is on communication solutions.

The high spend and investment in communications technology is a result firms seeking to deliver faster and more reliable service to their customers.

Speaking to the SME Times, Dell director Satyen Vyas claimed that in addition to email technology, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management solutions are highly sought-after.

The question which overshadows SMEs investment in more formulised CRM is perhaps the potential for the process to become inhumanised which is perhaps what differentiates SMEs from their larger competitors.

There is the debate as to whether technology is being adopted by SMEs as a result of external or internal pressures, or whether they are taking preemptive actions ahead of their adverseries allowing them to achieve a competitively advantageous position.

Grandon and Pearson (2004) found external pressure to be a statistically significant determinant of technology (e-commerce) adoption by SMEs. Broadly stated, external pressure could include demands on technology adoption imposed by suppliers, trading partners, customers, competitors, and collaborators.

Likewise, competitive pressure has been found to be a strong determinant of the adoption of communication technology by SMEs (Premkumar & Roberts, 1999). Further, technology obsolescence, adoption of newer technological standards by the industry or business sector, and demand from customers or markets also serve as external influences on technology adoption.

New technology presents many opportunities to SMEs but there is evidence that many hurdles are still faced when it comes to technology adoption and that there is still a considerable number of SMEs that are adverse to the risk of embracing new innovative solutions.

Journal of Business and Entrepreneurship, Mar 2010 by Badrinarayanan, Vishag, West, Vicki L

To read more visit: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5424/is_201003/ai_n53505283/?tag=content;col1

SMEs missing out on funding opportunities in the UK

It is estimated the total value of support schemes available to UK business is £5 billion per year.

According to experts, it’s not just government grants that are not being taken advantage of but financial support from advisory, guidance and information services too.

The issue has been highlighted by North West accountancy firm, Hurst which has seen an increase in demand from businesses seeking alternative sources of funding and advice on grant applications.

Helen Besant-Roberts, partner at Hurst said:

“Lots of grants are set aside for specific business types for example IT, construction and creative media. There are also lots of grants available for innovation and research as well as to help new businesses to grow. Some funding is aimed at business owners to help develop skills, but they often find that looking at the different schemes awarded by many different awarding bodies can be daunting at first.

“Even if you know what funding to apply for, you need to make sure you apply for it in the right way. I work with a lot of charities and businesses who feel they are often wasting valuable time filling in grant application forms incorrectly and need guidance in getting the most out of the application process.”

Helen, who specialises in providing compliance and advisory services added:

“Typically you can get business grants and other awards for anything from £500 to £1 million and you might be able to apply for multiple schemes or grants. There are also a lot of interest free loans available for capital investment, particularly in energy efficient assets. The application process for different types of funding can vary greatly and some are more onerous than others. Before applying for a grant, loan or award, you should prepare a business plan with forecasts outlining how much money is needed, what it is needed for, and the benefits that will be obtained. We would always recommend that you get advice before making an application.”

Jan O’Connor, manager at Wood Street Mission, a charity that provides help to families in the Manchester and Salford area said:

“As a charity there are several funding options available but it’s easy to get bogged down in the rigorous application processes. We need to secure funding to cover all our costs so it can be immensely frustrating having to invest so much time and effort completing complex forms rather than doing hands on work for the charity.”

The government provides a number of financial products for helping small and medium businesses, including Grants for Business Investment and Research & Development, the Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme, and small loans. In addition, there are many other organisations that offer funding for certain types of business investment and growth.

Examples of funding available for charities include awards from charitable foundations, such as the Lloyds TSB Foundation, Awards for All, the Hedley Foundation, plus grants from organisations such as the Big Lottery and Futurebuilders.

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