Social Media Marketing for Business Seminar
Ready for immediate release -- Ventura, CA
A marketing seminar for small local businesses wanting to understand how Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+ and other social media can help their busisnesses will be held on Tuesday, September 27th, 2011 in the upper conference room of MJP Computers, 6085 King Dr. #102, Ventura, Ca 93003 (behind the Auto Center between Johnson and Victoria).
It will be led by Andy Collins, My CIO, who's been providing senior IT Leadership and direction for small Ventura area businesses for over 30 years and has taught this class at Ventura College in the past.
What's a Technology Change Specialist?
September 7, 2007 -- Ventura, CA
A new specialty has arisen within the computer field, a technology change specialist. This is an individual who helps businesses at the point in their growth where they need to upgrade their systems. The company has gotten by on older technology, but now the computers are running slowly and/or their software is out of date with the times for their industry. In some cases the software is no longer supported by the vendor and is held together only by long time employees.
Since most companies aren't forced to make these changes very often they may not have the expertise or manpower to do all the research as to the best solution for their business and then install all the pieces and go through the pain staking effort of converting the data out of one system and placing it all in the right places in the new system.
Enter the technology change specialist, an individual who's done many migrations for various companies. An objective outside resource that isn't tied to any one vendor but is an advocate for your business to make sure you have the right software, running on the right hardware, and all having enough room to grow so you won't be looking to do this again for a long time.
One such expert is Andy Collins, who's background includes working for individual companies and consulting with companies, all of whom have gone through moving their networks to new offices, upgraded to software capable of running everything for the company, to migrating data (even out of spreadsheets) into the new system.
"Most companies don't realize the impact making this big of change to their organization has on their current staffs. Hiring me makes the process a lot smoother and they can rely on my experience to get them the right pieces to make the transition an easier road to hoe," says Collins.
Collins is offering a free checklist to companies contemplating changing their technology on his website --
www.AndyMyCIO.com or by calling 805-642-5827.
Working 1 Day a Week
May 28, 2007 -- Ventura, CA
Andy Collins has been an IT Director and in IS management and consulting for nearly a quarter of a century, but now is offering his services to 5 companies in the Ventura area for what it would normally cost those companies to hire the lowest level IT help full-time by working for each of them only 1 day per week, doing business as, Andy Collins, My Chief Information Officer – www.AndyMyCIO.com.
While doing general IT consulting, Collins found a niche that wasn’t being filled. He found smaller companies that were caught in the middle between being 1) too big to ignore how much their business depends on computers and the information they hold and their ability to communicate with the outside world via the Internet and e-mail and 2) being too small to afford the $100,000+ salaries many senior IT directors make.
While these companies struggle along and either bite the bullet and pay the high priced executive (because the days of getting by with their old paper systems while their computers are down are long since past) or they hire less experienced individuals (who may lack the expertise or years of connections in the area to fully meet their current and future needs) or they trust outside vendors (at $75 - $200 / hour), to fix the crisis and not worry about long term planning to prevent future disasters.
Collins cuts through those issues for these size companies by offering his senior IT management skills one day a week where the companies get that week’s computer problems resolved, plus a whole lot more. They receive a long range plan for backups, remote diagnostics, virus and spyware protection, contingency planning, software license compliance, IT asset control, and centralized help desk functionality, a review of their critical needs, and contacts to and management of the best vendors.
“I’m talking with business people all the time who tell me stories of how they have one guy set up the server and someone else comes in and configures something else and they don’t know how to access this or they don’t know who to call when a piece on their network breaks down and even worse, their backup of their data is corrupted when their main computer just went down”, says Collins.
“I provide that consistent steadying influence in their use of computers and even oversight over the people who might be in charge of their computers right now (if they even have someone) to put them on a solid course so the owners can sleep at night knowing what he or she’s built up in their business won’t go away in one day’s time.”
Anyone with a server and 10 computers or more (especially companies doing millions of dollars a year) but don’t have a full-time senior level IT person would benefit from Collins’ once a week services.
Andy Collins may be reached at 805-642-5827.