Paul Woods

Later this month I am speaking at the JuiceIT road show being run by Data#3.

The concept behind the session is that your IT team (and every other IT team in almost every organisation, anywhere in the world) have a huge opportunity to increase the effectiveness of your people.  Not just increasing the productivity of your IT team and the systems you look after (like all those Virtualisation/VMware fan bois) but EVERYONE IN THE BUSINESS.

That is a BIG DEAL.  And we are not talking about significant numbers either.  There are so many things that IT teams can do to increase the productivity of the business by 1%, 2%, 5%.  That might look small to you, but to management, share holders and share markets, they are improvements that could mean millions of dollars depending on the size and scope of your business.

Think about it.  How much time do you (or your Managing Director, or your HR team, or your Sales people) spend with Outlook every day?  Chances are more than your wife, husband, kids, friends, or your television… combined. 

… and when was the last time you sat down and explored (or more likely someone told you about) functionality in the product that you have not used before??

Most of you will not remember the last time.  And, I can almost guarantee that you don’t know anywhere near as much about Outlook (or Word or Excel) as you need to know. 

My gut feeling is that you could be wasting hours a week doing things that could be done faster, if only you knew how to make the most of the tools you already have at your disposal.

In the session my colleague Joseph Mortimer and I will dive into how you can get the most out of your productivity tools (Office, SharePoint and more), the key to ensuring that you get the results you want, and more importantly how to create the context to deliver a productivity environment that ensures that you meet the expectations of the entire workforce.

So if you are in Brisbane on Thursday March 11, or Adelaide on Thursday March 25 – make sure you register to attend JuiceIT.  Our session is just one of 25 at each event, which brings together vendors like Microsoft, Cisco, HP, VMware, Toshiba, Symantec, and many many more.

The other day Microsoft launched its latest round of big ticket products – Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008. 

For the last few months, a few of the team at Data#3 (where I work – a big Microsoft partner in Australia) have been working on our campaign to support of the launch – in particular around Windows Server 2008.  Basically we are positioning Windows Server 2008 as the core foundation of an organisations Managed Operating Environment (for all the marketers out there – a Managed Operating Environment basically means a really well run and managed fleet of desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones etc in your organisation – the advantage of that is much lower IT support costs, and being able to give end users the tools they need to be more productive a lot faster.)

The first event in Australia was in Sydney this week, and one of my colleagues Jo Cass (pictured here*) from our Sydney office tells it like it is on Mike Heald’s blog.

"Data#3′s Project Deploy, our Integrator of the Year movie headline & our Popcorn stand was a huge success at Microsoft Wave 08 – Heroes Happen."  Read more on Mike’s blog

In a month or two once the launch is over I might do a post campaign analysis on how Data#3′s Project Deploy campaign has rolled – from concept right through to results – stay tuned.  Being a classic B2B campaign with a B2C twist, I think the results might be interesting.

(*Photo credit to Mike Heald from Microsoft Australia)