Central Illinois' IT Experts

Defining Collaboration
Some people use the word “collaboration” in the same way as the word “communication,” but they are not necessarily synonymous. Collaboration is the act of people working together as a team toward a goal, while communication is the act of sharing thoughts and ideas with others. Communication facilitates collaboration, but doesn’t define it. Here are the various levels of collaboration that a business can use to its advantage:

• Simple Collaboration: In its most basic form, collaboration looks like quick communications initiated by instant messages or other similar technology. These kinds of tools can still be misused to create distractions, but they can expedite productivity and communication toward a specific goal.
• Document Collaboration: Document collaboration brings the previous concept and implements it on a document level, giving multiple users the ability to work on a single document toward an end goal. This can benefit the task at hand and make sure collaboration happens, whether your employees are in the same room or miles apart.
• Structured Collaboration: Meetings might not be everyone’s favorite thing about the workday, but it’s inevitable that they must happen at some point or another to ensure that people are working toward common goals. Meetings give users the ability to express their feelings or ideas on certain topics, and forms can be used to capture these ideas to gauge interest. By their nature, meetings are designed as collaborative exercises that promote transparency and communication, but only if there is structure to them.

Why Is Collaboration Important?
If a business takes measures to support collaboration in the workplace, it can expect to see improvements to productivity. When more people work on a project, you get more brain power and more thoughts or feedback on it. This can be effective for determining solutions to problems and thinking outside of what employees might normally consider. Collaboration tools can further aid in this process, giving employees more access to solutions and each other.

For information on how you can implement collaboration tools for your business, the professionals at Decatur Computers Inc. can help. To learn more, reach out to us at 217-475-0226.

Benefits
If a business owner was to sit and consider the beneficial characteristics of social media for their business it wouldn’t take long to ascertain that the main draw of the technology is that the people that buy the product or service (or would buy it) are on social media. No matter what type of advertising the organization has done up until now, having access to the people that would be interested in the offerings is a massive win. With over 50 percent of adults actively using multiple social media sites, any business has an opportunity to access their customer’s attention, a revelation for the modern business.

Another benefit for the use of social media is the nature of social media itself. Being able to understand what people like/dislike, products they will/won’t buy, and services they will/won’t subscribe to can help an organization alter their offerings to make them more attractive; or, at the very least, give marketers a strategy about how to go about presenting their offerings on social media.

Finally, while social media is free, per say, businesses that use it typically pay to advertise or promote the content they share. It gives any business the ability to target their marketing investments to touch the people that would most likely be interested in a product or service. This provides a litany of benefits including:

• Knowledge about customers/prospects
• Interaction with customers/prospects
• Increased traffic to a company website or store
• Increased sales leads (and therefore increased sales)
• Promotion of a business’ authority
• Promotion of a business’ willingness to help others
• And many more

While this technology is largely divisive for individual, for the modern business using its benefits only serves to benefit the entire business.

Detriments
The use of social media is not all good for a business, however. While it does give the business a platform to interact with customers, customers are still people and some of them will frustrate marketers. What’s worse is that since social media is constantly evolving, it is not always easy to ascertain whether or not the practices in use are working until they do.

Another problem with social media is that tracking its ROI takes a lot of time. The idea is to be more accessible by the average customer, but since this theory only provides a business with marginal success most of the time, they have to be able to measure how well their social media investments are tracking. If a business lacks a concrete strategy in which to use the platform, it may see their return off their social media investments plummet, which often leads to social media neglect. With 92 percent of millennials expecting every business to have a Facebook presence, not having one can actually be a major problem.

Finally, the worst part of social media for any business is the cost they see in a loss of productivity. Over three-quarters of all SMB employees use social media. That is a massive number. If the average user spends 15-to-30 minutes a day looking at their social accounts, whether that be scrolling down their Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram walls, or watching a funny video on YouTube, they are costing their companies a lot of money. Furthermore, nearly one-third of U.S.-based SMBs have had to deal with malware propagated via social media.

Today, there are two schools of thought on the distraction. One is that since everyone uses social media, that some businesses have begun to give their staff social media breaks, where they are allowed to do what they have to do online. The other, and much more prevalent view is that using social sites on company time is akin to theft. From the employer's perspective, even if their employees only use social media for five minutes - that five minutes multiplied over 200+ working days per year is a whole lot of distraction. With more and more studies showing that it takes time after being distracted to get back focused again, that’s a lot of time and potential cost incurred by the company for something seemingly minor. If this theory is to be believed, then employees are costing companies thousands or even millions of dollars every year, by just being on social media.

How to Manage Social Media Use
Obviously, the people that manage and use your company’s social media need to have access to it. Since it is a big portion of these people’s jobs, and important to your business’ online success, blocking social media across the network isn’t an option. If you are one a business owner that believes that you are missing out on significant revenue as a result of your workers addiction to social media sites, you have options.

You can try and implement a soft ban, which entails not allowing these sites access on any company-owned device. This would still allow your staff to utilize their personal devices to use their social sites. This could reduce the amount of distraction on your team.

Another option would be to put a complete ban on social media (except for essential employees). While this would be the most effective at avoiding wasteful social media-related behavior, it could also backfire on you. Many of today’s workers don’t feel complete without access to their social accounts and would quickly become disgruntled if they had access to social media one day, and had it blocked the next. This strategy is one that may work best in a workplace that has a limited amount of workers, since you would probably be more apt to be involved in your company’s social media use.

Whichever strategy you choose, you will need technology that allows you to control website access. A content filtering solution allows IT administrators to whitelist and blacklist websites per user, giving any organization the ability to control what their staff can access and what they can’t. For more information about acquiring a content filtering solution, or any other software solution that can help your business be more profitable, contact Decatur Computers Inc. today at 217-475-0226.

Wireless Connections
With the popularity of mobile devices, wireless communications are more important than ever before. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the office, at home, or out and about while traveling; security will be a major concern. That’s not the point we’re making here, though. We’re discussing wireless networks, which are defined by their Service Set Identifier, or SSID.

Each of the SSIDs you see on your device is the name of a wireless network that your device is in range of. These networks should be protected by a password, but security isn’t really the point of the SSID, as it’s meant to help you determine which connection belongs to you.

How and Why to Change Your SSID
It’s generally only beneficial to change the SSID of your wireless network specifically because it makes it more difficult for a hacker to get into it without the password. Furthermore, it provides a way to identify the network from others nearby. You can change your SSID by entering your router’s IP address into your web browser and typing in the access credentials. These are generic by design to make it easy for users to change their settings, and you’ll find these on your device. You can then alter the SSID and password as you see fit, being sure to keep in mind that the SSID is case-sensitive up to 32 characters.

Assigning Multiple SSIDs
The option is also there to configure your router to support several different networks by using separate SSIDs. This helps if you want to protect your business’ internal information while still allowing visitors in your office. Think of it like your “guest” network.

For more assistance with your wireless networks, reach out to Decatur Computers Inc. at 217-475-0226.