In this video, I'm talking to Dan Wright, the author of "Downtime, Disruption and Deception"
- a book he's written about all of his experiences running an IT Company over the course of 2
and a half decades.
Good day Dan, how are you?
Good, thanks Tim.
Now, this book is very much intended to be a practical guide..
It is.
To help people, to do better in their IT Services, in their cloud services and security.
And I know that what we did was distill a lot of these issues down to commonly asked
questions that have come in through your business over the course of decades.
So, lets talk about some of those.
What's the number one question that people ask?
If they call up and ring again and again and again that they ask you guys and how do you
solve it.
Look, the most common thing that we get from the end-users, is it's too slow.
So, they'll call up and say, "my computer's running slow," "the internet's running slow,""my
server's running slow, can you help us out?"
So we need to then look at what is causing that to run slow, is it because equipment's
old, is it because there's something on the equipment that make it run slow do we need
to fix that, what types of things do we need to then narrow down so we can fix the problem.
So what are some of the common steps you'd actually take once you figured out what's
going on?
So the first thing, the common question that we replied back to is, what is running slow,
so it might be the computer.
Okay, is that only affecting one person or is that affecting everybody in the office?
Who else is affected by this slowness?
And those, just those couple of questions help us to narrow down what might be causing
it to run slow.
It also helps us to get an idea of how critical is this issue for the business.
Now if it's just running slow for one user and it's been running slow for the last few
weeks it may not be that important for that particular person.
But if it's running slow for everybody, and it's affecting 20, 30 people in the organization
then we know we need to respond fairly quickly.
I've been watching a television show called The IT Crowd, and the very first thing happens
when everyone calls in is the guy says, "Turn it off, turn it on again."
How important is doing something like that?
Well, I think that's sage advice.
We use it quite often.
And they are the first things that we need to find out, has it been restarted.
Just restarting the computer can free it up and make sure that it's running as best as
it can be.
So yeah, restart the computer, the printer, the scanner,
whatever it is that's running slow.
And then once it's been restarted, if it's still running slow, if it hasn't fixed the
problem, yeah absolutely, give us a call.
Okay, cool.
There are a variety of questions that are addressed in the book.
The second one is, it's crashing.
This is definitely worse than it's slow.
What sort of analysis do you do to figure out what to do about, it's crashing.
So when, somebody calls up and says it's crashing, they're generally getting some kind of an
error message.
So a bit different from slowness, you're not actually seeing an error.
When it's crashing, you might see an error message pop-up on the screen.
So we wanna know what is that error message.
Again, is it only affecting your computer or does it affect everybody in the organization.
Does it crash at certain times of the day, does it crash in the morning, does it crash
at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, so it can give you an early mark.
We wanna know the different times of the day that it's crashing.
And these things help us to narrow down to help us to try and resolve the problem as
quickly as we can.
What sorts of things often work or help when it comes to fixing a crashing computer?
So the types of things that we would wanna look at is, has there been something done
on that machine recently which might be causing it to crash, has there been an update installed,
has there been a new piece of software that's installed on that computer.
So we can narrow that down in those first couple of questions, just trying to resolve
what has actually happened.
There are a variety of other questions, let's just do two or three more.
One of them is talking about the need to upgrade a machine.
How do you know when a computer's just sort of on its last legs and needs to go?
So occasionally, somebody will call us and say, "my computers are really old, we need
to upgrade them."
So, computers that are really old can be, either be too slow or they can be crashing,
or they can just be really old.
And you know that you need to upgrade them.
So we would tend to say to people every 3 to 4 years you generally need to either upgrade
those computers and put new hardware in them to make them run a little bit better, or if
you don't wanna upgrade, then you would replace that computer and buy a brand new one.
One of the other commonly asked questions that you address, is that people come to you
and say, "Listen, we're growing and we wanna use technology to facilitate that growth."
What sort of advice might you be able to give them?
So the first thing we wanna know when somebody's growing is, are you adding new people, are
you adding new offices, do you wanna grow into another country, or you just wanna grow
into another office in a different location.
So we wanna know about the growth and that helps us to make decisions about how to structure
the technology as well.
So just narrowing down on where that growth is coming from, can really help us with helping
the business.
Thanks very much.
There are a bunch more questions answered in the book "Downtime, Disruption and Deception"
For more information please visit us online through sabervox.com.au