I asked one of our engineers how he felt after joining Five Nines recently from another company.  His response was simple, “I’m glad to not be the smartest person in the company”. I found his answer both encouraging and thought-provoking.

While pointing out that Five Nines has some highly skilled engineers, he also illustrated a principal that is not often embraced in an industry full of know-it-alls. Most of us have experienced the arrogant nature of technical staff who feel like they are the smartest person in the room or even the company, which usually only encourages intellectual arguments, not productive collaboration.

Sensing that you are ‘not the smartest person in the company’ will not only help you to learn from those ahead of you, but it will also encourage you to push harder to improve yourself personally and professionally. I recently ran across an article on CIO.com titled, “Why Even CIOs Need Smart Friends”, which points to the same concept, encouraging technology leaders to find smart friends in a variety of roles.  If each of us as technology professionals realizes that we are not the smartest, we begin to measure our success not in our intelligence related to the people we know, but in the solutions that make businesses successful.

Regardless of your position and profession, we hope you can say that “you are glad to not be the smartest person in the company”, and if you find that you are, it may be time to make some new friends.

-Ben Pankonin

Starting while Tim Tebow and Florida won the College Football National Championship, much of our staff downloaded the first beta version of Windows 7, January 8^th. At that time, my tablet PC running Windows Vista was a source of frustration for me.  Like many others who adopted Vista, we had become exceedingly frustrated and blamed things on Vista even after it became more stable.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner who rejected implementing Vista for our business clients, I was cautious in deploying Windows 7.  My caution turned when running the first beta releases in January.  Windows 7 had less glitches and a cleaner feel than the otherwise clunky Vista.

Evaluating an Operating System

An operating system should function as the platform by which the applications you wish to run may operate.  Keep in mind, when evaluating an Operating system, you are not looking for a specific application (Applications such as Office 2010 will simply use the abilities of the Operating system).  What you are looking for is a platform that is non-intrusive, performs well and supports new software looking to take advantage of the capabilities.

An Honest Look at Windows 7

Windows 7 taskbar improvements

Immediately after loading Windows 7 you will notice that the taskbar functionality is greatly increased.  You will see the functionality of jumplists, that is the ability to mouse-over applications and see recent documents and applications. You will also be attracted to the ability to have a preview of the open documents without having to actually open the application, referred to by Microsoft as Preview Plus.

Reducing Notifications has made Windows 7 more attractive and usable, you now have the ability to customize notifications and keep them in the background, where they should be.  Vista even has some nifty hidden tools like shaking the top of a window to scare away the other windows – slick. Also some of the most basic browsing, like file folders can now be modified into libraries to be better organized with photos, documents and other content.

I am running my Windows 7 machine on a Dell XT tablet which includes the ability to utilize multi-touch, similar to the touch abilities of an iphone. I will admit that this is something that will require applications to take advantage of this new ability to do multi-touch in an useful manner.  Currently multi-touch only helps to expand or contract a picture and scroll which is easily served by a mouse or scroll-wheel.

While we work with Business clients in Windows 7, the lines continue to be blurred as many businesses chose laptops that their employees will also use at home.  That said, Windows 7 does have some very attractive components for those wishing to network their home. An extremely useful and easy-to-implement feature of streaming music directly to other computers with Windows Media Player and previews of MP3s before you listen. Many backup functions have been greatly increased, especially for home users wishing to backup some or all portions of their hard disk.

Ready to go?

Perhaps better than any other motivating point for Windows 7 is that it is a well-tested operating system.  After one of the most successful and largest beta tests in history, Windows 7 performs well and software and hardware vendors have been quick to adapt their applications for use with Windows 7.  But, as always, make sure that line-of-business applications are compatible before beginning your deployment of Windows 7.

by Michelle Leach
The Lincoln Business Journal

Businesses have powerful ammunition to fight the fall-out of the recession: new technology. But tech experts contend many businesses don’t know what’s out there and don’t understand the splash that can be made by implementing a new tool or process.
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Five Nines Technology is getting noticed through both Twitter and Facebook, and recently launched a blog.

“We found many businesses and individuals within the community who asked us for specific thoughts about technology,” said Ben Pankonin. “A blog provides a unique way for us to communicate with clients, prospects and even other IT partners within our industry.”

Pankonin said the use of blogs and other types of viral communication isn’t anything new to IT firms.

“But many IT professionals are not accustomed to communicating these concepts to business leaders, only other people who speak their language,” he said.

The Five Nines’ blog, “Boardroom Ideas,” offers clients tips on how to solve problems through IT, according to its Web site.

As for the future of IT, one need only look at what kids in junior high are doing, Pankonin said.

“Middle-school students don’t need advanced server infrastructures to communicate effectively with dozens of friends; they do it through utilizing a network of tools that can share information,” he said. “Tomorrow’s businesses will rely heavily on outsourced hardware, software and services – cloud-based computing and software as a service.”

Welcome to our Boardroom Ideas blog. We are excited to have a way of communicating with clients and the community on a regular basis, and hope to bring up some things that may help you and your business be more effective. As time goes by we will be posting different ways we are helping our clients solve problems, technologies that we see emerging that may be useful, and ideas on how to solve business problems both from an IT perspective. Finally, we hope that through this we can give you an insight into some of the things that you get when you engage a company that wants to be your IT company, CIO, and business partner.

You will notice that there will be a number of contributors, which should keep the content fresh and new. We will try to keep this updated on a weekly basis, so make sure you check back regularly!

Nick Bock