Over the past 2 weeks I have had the incredible privilege to enjoy the company of a number of local business owners who are, in my opinion, experts in their fields. The purpose of our weekly lunchtime meet-ups is to discuss social media, its implications on businesses, and how to harness the opportunities that this new media offers.

One of the curiousities of our meetings is the perception of experts. Each one of us is an expert in our own right, and yet we rarely perceive ourselves as such. The facilitator of our meetings, Rob Paterson, often says that it is those who proclaim themselves infallible experts are the very experts that we should avoid. With that hanging over our heads we muddle along, discussing ways to connect with our customers, expand the reach of our individual businesses, and discover how to be more engaged in the communities that support us. Ever the consummate observer, I have realized that in spite of our reluctance to proclaim ourselves experts, our collective knowledge, experience, and connectedness (more on that in a later post) makes the collective 'us' an expert. Confused? Let me explain.

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First off I must say I have been poor on the blogging side of things as of late.  All it takes is a conference on Sales and Marketing and Social Media to get you back in the swing of things.  As I write this I am on an 8 hour plane ride back from Paris where CISCO recently held their Partner Velocity conference.   I have attended this event for the past three years and in my opinion it is the most valuable event that I attend annually.

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There is nothing more grand than a beautifully configured Cisco network carelessly streaming video, voice and everything in between.  Any modern business would be hard-pressed to do without their network.  Even a brief outage, let alone an extended outage due to equipment failure, would impact productivity in your business, yet often the Cisco networks that we build function so well that customers sometimes forget that these highly complex information interchanges are not "Plug and Play".  Granted, the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) for a Cisco Catalyst 2960-48TT is pegged at 339,743 hours (or approximately 38 years, 9 months) and, coupled with Cisco's SmartNet service for software upgrades and hardware replacement, you have covered everything that you can from the hardware side, but when something does happen, how will you know?  Perhaps more important, how will you know before something happens

Every network admin, architect and engineer can relate stories of the unexpected and undetected wrecking havoc on a Monday morning.  From weekend lightning storms that can damage equipment to that construction crew down the street that just sliced through your service provider's fiber bundle; the unexpected does happen.  While those are catastrophic events that, as long as they happen during your "standard business hours", someone is bound to notice, more subtle dangers lurk for your shiny new network, especially when nobody is watching.  New applications and services for internal and external customers can place unexpected loads on your network, particularly when implementing new features across WAN connected offices.  New servers, disaster recovery processes and procedures or even that summer intern downloading the latest episode of Heros in high-defintion - they all have the potential to change your humming network into an off-key rendition of our national anthem.  So, what do you do?

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One of the customer experiences I often tell is that of one of our long time customers, Cooke Aquaculture. When I tell someone how IT positively impacted Cooke's business, the person at the other end of the conversation undoubtedly says "Wow that is so cool!" Let's see what you think.

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