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Sam Miller's Articles Display Category|Title|Newest|Oldest How To Keep Files Secure? Cryptography, File Wiper, Internet Privacy It is well-know fact that files deleted in Windows will be recoverable. So anyone who have access to the computer will be able to undelete file and the content of the file. It seems to be the problem of top-secret organizations and agencies, but in fact, end-users also must consider this problem. Notebook computer might be stolen or lost. In this case the most vulnerable is information that looks like deleted, but is actually available for covering. Another problem is internet activity. Any Internet browser leaves a lot of traces, including the links to visited sites, used loggings and sometime password. This aspect may lead to identity theft problem, when someone could take a lot of information about you from your PC, from browser cookies. Removing Records About Recent Documents Is As Important As Clearing Web-browser History Recent documents is a security risk everyone should consider. What are recent files? The list of recently opened files appears in various kind of software products. The list of recently opened files helps us to find recently opened or edited documents quickly. But this is a security problem too. Any one can quickly scan your computer and see what files you was working with. It's not a problem, if you can guaranty no one else have an access to your computer, but for some reason people concerned about security use file shredders to wipe data, clears regularly browser cookies and cache files, empty recycle bin when there is still enough free space on hard disk. Your Files Are Your Knowledge Base, So How To Make Important Data Both Accessible And Secure?! First, let think about some basic ideas. When you name your file, try to use long name that explain the key idea about the file. Don't name file "Doc1", use some idea specific name. Consider designing some folder structure, try to divide information into different types, consider using some standard folder structures for some certain cases. For instance, if you work with projects, then you can create a template folder structure, which will have a subfolder "people", subfolder "docs" or sub-folder "resources". The efficiency of your knowledgebase depends on how fast you can find file you need. So, it's a good idea to use some file search engine, which will be able to help you with file searching. What one should now about files and file system to do efficient search? Compare Function Of Ms Word Vs. Third-party Compare Tool Sometime we need to compare files, in order to find out differences and learn more about modifications that were made within documents. The common task is to do comparison analysis fast and provide accurate results. Further requirements depends on what is compare done for. For instance, quality assurance specialists need to find changes and analyze how these changes will affect other documents. Manager might need to check someone's job and provide report about project progress. Web developers are interested in comparing web page files to highlight changes that were made. Find Compare And Merge Tool For Your Very Needs Compare and merge software is a must have tool for quality assurance specialists, for web-masters, software developers and many others. So, how to choose compare and merge tool? Sure, diff tool you need depends on what is your final task. If you need to do a version control of software source code, then it's reasonable that your compare and merge tool should have a syntax highlighting function for your programming language. It Is Better Than Mind Mapping With Pen And Paper! Mind mapping is a concept based on semantic maps, using this concept one can create a nice looking chart, which will represent goals, ideas, resources - anything. To create a mind map you don't need anything, but the pen and paper, but if you wish to do it faster, more accurate and if you need result to be nice looking, then you should consider using mind mapping software tool. Is Information Flow In Your Company As Good As You Think It Is? Searching files can be really fun if you have your files at your finger tips. If you ever faced the problem, when you remember you have information you somewhere on your hard disk, but you cannot get it on time. It's common problem today. People are creating more and more documents and it's important to be able to find necessary information quickly. Let's think why we face this problem? There are several reasons. The first is about growth. Electronic documents workflow growth every day, month and year. It's a well-know estimation, that the average number of managed documents growth by 10% every year. We are getting too many documents to manage! If You Don't Do A Backup Then You Have Never Experienced A System Crash One day I had may hard disk crashed, I need to reformat it and to install the Windows again and install all the programs and copy all the files from the backup drives, I was missing some data that was located on the desktop just before the computer crash, so I decided to try file recover utility. It was not hard to find some freeware tool which was working for about 15 minutes analyzing the partition of the hard disk. Once the analysis was finished it showed me the files which were available for recovering and the prognosis about recovering quality. Well, file names were destroyed as I has to fully reformat the hard disk and even change the size of partitions, but the actual content was available for recovering. File Compare Tool For Software Developers What do software developers need from a file compare program? Why do they need to use it? The answers are simple, but it's really hard to do the right choice. First, let's divide software developers into these who work with code and these who manage the process. Both roles are related to the editing code and there are two different viewpoints. All You Missed About Compare Tool Are there any facts about compare and merge software that end-user might miss? Sure! For instance, it's not hard to find a absolutely free compare tool. I'm sure you already have it, there are some diff command in both Windows and UNIX systems. But it's a better idea to use some programs with well designed interface, rich feature set and inexpensive. What tool to buy depends on your requirements and consider investing in the tool which will support all your possible business roles for your long business life. Automation In Quality Control Quality assurance is a wide range of methods which provide businesses with expected results. It's know that working with quality is one of the possible way to improve the product and as a result number of products sold. It's a good idea to improve quality assurance with information technologies, getting tests results as an electronic document will enable improve the total efficiency of quality service. The key idea about improving quality assurance with IT technologies is automation. You need to have attention of your employee only in some certain cases, where it's actually needed to do a human check. The task is to automate other processes, which can be performed by computer. Laptop File Security - 3 Rules To Follow Every time I purchase a new laptop with updated OS, more hard disk space, more RAM, nice-looking design I think about possible security problems I might face. It's not a desk PC, which is placed at home or office where the access is limited, laptop is a portable device, which is easier to lost and it can be stolen. So, it's a good idea to think about proactive security measures that can be performed to prevent security accidents. Search Information Like Professionals Do - Use File Masks And Search Syntax Do you know what file mask is? If you are a computer specialist, I'm sure you do and you know a lot of ways how you can benefit from this. But if you are not a computer guru, I'll tell you few secrets, that will really help you to make any search much more effective. First, let's think about what the mask looks like and why we need it. Assume, you are looking for file "file2356.doc", I guess, you have not remembered the name, but you might remember some part of the file name, for instance that it starts with "file...", so if you search for this file over the local disk, then you can specify the file mask: "file*", telling that the file name started with "file" word. Pdf Files Toolkit PDF file format was designed to represent documents in the same way on all computers. Great idea? Yes! Actually, this format also suppose to be non-editable after PDF file was produced. Again, it is good? Yes, if you don't actually need to use this document for further action. So when use PDF document format and when not to use it? If you what to protect your document against changes, if you wan your document to be easy readable at almost any computer then use ... html web-page file format! Well, it's not a joke, as html format is used much for wider than PDF format. For instance, if you have saw any computer without web-browser installed? And can you guaranty that all computers will have an Acrobat Reader? I'm not sure about it. Integrate Compare Tool In Dms Third-party file compare tool is something you need to do a document version control, e.g. finding changes that were made and giving some comments about changing. The kind of comment might be "approve" or "reject" or probably some comments that will give an idea about what modifications were made and how do they affect the further process of development of some tool. It's quite easy to use compare tool as a stand-alone application, but nowadays it is necessary to integrate all tools into document management environment that you already have. It Security Scanning Overview As long information is the most valuable resource of the company, then it's obvious that when we talk about auditing security, we should focus on IT security audit. Getting information about the security procedures in your IT department is critical to your business. Are there any common IT security issues that we should pay attention to? IT security auditor should check that the information you are using is securely kept and managed. Comparison Tools In Action It is important to know where a user's data is stored, and how it is being used. With file comparison, a person can quickly obtain all relevant information regarding a file, detect if any changes have been made to its overall data, and highlight any differences between two or more files. File comparison, for those unaware with the term, is a computing term for the automatic comparing of data between files in a file system. The comparisons are displayed to the user, and can be used to accomplish tasks for revision control and in networks and file systems. File comparison abilities are usually found in word processors and text editors. Managing Files Is Easy - Just Need To Know How When operating a computer, it is important to know where one's most important files are. Searching for files is a common daily practice that any PC user performs constantly, if not daily. It is also equally as vital to maintain files in an organized and structured manner through the use of file management tools. Through the use of today's operating systems, file searching and management keep a user's file system running smoothly. A large number of users rely on standard Windows operations to maintain the task of file searching through Windows Explorer. For basic file searches, this is usually an ideal means to find specific data. For more complex searches, however, Windows Explorer is perhaps not as sophisticated to perform such tasks. Software Tools For Comparison Of Images Unless you are an expert software and computer systems guru, compare images tools is not something an everyday person thinks about. This tool is another way to protect your data from leaking and keeping your data safe. The first thing a person needs to do is decide their specific needs for this type of software. Microsoft, and PDF files all have these capabilities. If you are looking for more in-depth comparison tools, then these tools are available. The questions you need to ask yourself is what is your intention, and what do you need to accomplish? Do you need to compare two or more folders and find out what files have been changed, altered or deleted? If that's the case you'll need a more specific type of program. There are tools available that will allow you to see files and folders side by side on your desktop. They also allow you to synchronize files, replicate folders, perform backups and do file and folder comparisons. These programs will allow you to compare source codes which will keep file and folders in sync, and compare program output and validate copies of your files. The side by side view makes it very easy to spot differences among the files. Comparison of files based on size timestamp and cyclical redundancy check is another way to check and compare folders and files. File Search And Management Software A file manager is actually a computer program that helps to organize and manage several file systems, such as database file systems, disk, network, transactional and other file systems on the computer. An efficient file management system lets you speed up common tasks like creating, opening, viewing, editing, searching files and many other activities. A typical file manager exhibits your files in a tree-like hierarchy. Some file managers even give you backward links, letting you get back to your first step, thereby completing the task more efficiently. Yet others let you work with network connections, like searching and editing files saved directly on the Net, such as FTP, NFS and the like. Local Disk Search Tools There are many extensive searches that can be done to help you locate files. You can search by using the tab on the start menu. Then you can pick whether you want to search by file name, type of file, date of the file, by keywords within the file, or by the size of the file. There are numerous ways to find a specific document or file you need. Some symbols can help you search easier. Use the wildcard symbols * and ? To help specify what you need. The * also ca be used to look for certain types of files. If you want all wma files, then search for *.wma. ? replaces any character in the file name. For example, if you are searching for files on Zimbabwe, but are unsure of how to spell it, you could type in Zimbab??. Does Presentation With Pictures Work Better? What about using graphic if your PowerPoint presentation? Does it make sense? I'm sure you heard something like "our graphics will make your presentation looks professional" or "make it vivid", but you still must understand why you use or do not use graphics in your presentation. The first fact is that pictures are easier for visual perception than text, but pictures will not contain as much information as text will. So, use pictures to add some life to your presentation, to point on key concepts and ideas. Data Leak Prevention - Protect Your Business Most businesses and other enterprises have access control devices in place such as access control lists, defined permissions, encryption, or firewalls, just to name a few. Yet authorities confirm that these devices are not as effective as one would hope, given the vast amount of materials which circulates via the internet. Probably the majority of these breaches occur because most control features in IT systems and other company directed security measures are focused on those villains who attempt to come into the company records from the outside. Most companies are less aware and thus more subject to violations of electronic access due to inside access, whether malicious or accidental. Last year, a Global Security Study reported that a staggering 49% of companies stated they had experienced a breach of security from internal sources. Specifically, of this group, the majority of incidents (31 percent) were caused by a virus or worm experience, nearly one third were through deliberate fraud by an insider. another 18 percent reported data leakage. Nearly all the the respondents reported concern about employee misconduct in regard to data systems. Document Comparison - Eliminate Time-consuming Process Whenever a business or organization is working with a great many documents, it's important to have a means of ensuring that changes in those documents are identified and logged. When multiple changes are made in a working copy during the course of negotiations, or legal settlements, it's important that all changes are tracked so that the most current form of the document is the one which is being used and contains the agreed upon terms, conditions and wording. Changes may be made in an online document by the owner, by the reviewer, or by other contributors to the end product. To do the document comparison process manually is both time-consuming and difficult. It can require a staggering amount of time and energy to review and document each change. First the changes must be determined by looking at a printed document. Then the modifications in the original document on line must be cut and pasted from the modifications copy. Sometimes there is a process of merging two documents which must be done with further comparison and possibly further editing. Pdf Search Engine: 2d Searches PDF, which is an acronym for portable document formant was initially developed by Adobe Systems beginning in 1993. Its primary purpose was to represent two dimensional documents in a way that was independent both of the device and the display resolution. a pdf file can typically be read by most web browsers on most devices. PDF files include the complete description of either a two-dimensional or with Acrobat 3D, three-dimensional documents. Currently pdf files are considered open standard. Preparation for submission as an ISO standard is in process. Over the years, pdf files have become the accepted way of capturing and storing two and now three dimensional images. Governmental jurisdictions, colleges and university research archives, medical records and many other applications have been converted to pdf files so that full retention is available and searchable. This allows massive amounts of information to be protected and stored in much the same way as microfiche and microfilm used to be retained. However, the use of the computer for preparation and storage of the files means that almost anyone with a desktop has access to the information. No longer is it necessary to have a bulky microfiche or microfilm reader in order to view the images. Compare File Software - Find Better Tool Within Various Compare Utilities Whatever the source code language, C++, C#, Visual Basic, Object Pascal, Java, Perl or any other, the ability to compare file or compare text contents accurately and quickly can make the difference between delivering a project on schedule and on budget or a project management nightmare. In this article we shall examine some of the compare file utilities available on the market. Active File Compare from Formula provides a compare file and compare text solution delivered in side by side windows with highlighted code lines if they differ. This utility also provides the facility to manage changes being made by several authors and includes a file manager which manages folder contents when loaded, saved or copied. Compare Folders Utilities - - Eliminate Manual Checking And Save Your Time How many times have you saved a document to a disk from your office PC to take home to work on and then had to do the double take to see which document is the current one and what changes have been made at the office by someone else ? How about when there are multiple users accessing documents stored centrally and saving the current version to their local hard drive without you knowing which version is the one you need to be contributing to ? Compare folders and compare directories utilities are essential tools for team management and your own data management when multiple devices and users are accessing and changing data. When you are looking at compare folder utilities here are some questions to ask when selecting a solution and identify some of the features you will need. The primary function of compare folders and compare directories utilities is to ensure that disparate files and documents are synchronized and replicated across team members and then properly backed-up. Doing this manually is not only time consuming but prone to error, and both of these can prove to be extremely expensive. Look for utilities that offer a visual display to compare folders and compare directories so you can see the differences highlighted, dated and by whom the alteration has been made. This will make it far easier for you to manage and focus in on any issues that may arise. Search Microsoft Office Files, Create An Ms Word File Database Instead of having dozens, hundreds or perhaps thousands of MS Word documents, importing them all into one searchable database will stop endless hours being lost searching for information through even the most organized set of directories and folders. There are a number of software solutions on the market that will not only allow you to import MS Word documents but also .pdf files, html and web documents, emails and others. This approach has already been seen by many public email providers such as Google, who are including a search tool for search text strings of your email store in exactly the same way as you perform an internet search. Once you have compiled a Word document database, it becomes relatively simple to search the database for information enclosed in the disparate files and documents with many solutions offering the ability to tailor searches on varying parameters aside from search text strings. Wildcard characters and fuzzy searches will allow users to find information based upon intuition rather than absolute knowledge of the information being sought. Balanced Scorecard Software: Redefining The Measure Of Success The concept of Balance Scorecard has been utilized by businesses and organizations since the early 1990's Over the years, it has gone through many iterations, with some sometimes significant changes in character by users. Initially the concept was intended to measure the activities of the company in terms of its vision and strategies rather than solely on a financial basis. The comprehensive view of the performance of the business forces managers to target the performance markers which measure success. Because it balances financial objectives with customer viewpoints, employee perspective and process planning, these measurements become the framework of future success. Software which assists in the formalization of the balanced scorecard principles helps managers focus on the questions at hand and how to develop successful strategies and measurements for the future. Compare Excel Spreadsheet: Measurement Of Errors, Ideals And Progress Because Excel spreadsheets are the standard for any mathematical calculations, it is fairly common for many different worksheets to be developed over time which will have roughly the same format or will attempt to capture the same information. In this instance, if there is to be comparison of the same information over time, there are only two ways to approach the data collection phase. 1. You can link the two worksheets manually and prepare a third worksheet which will display the difference between the two either as a positive or negative change. This generally requires a significant amount of manual checking and linking and the information is only as good as the attention to detail present in the one who is preparing the report. You could also perform this same series of steps but without linking the two worksheets in Excel How Do I Compare Folders And Files On Different Machines That Should Have The Same Contents? Imagine you are part of a team working on a project that has files all over the place in folders stored on different machines, perhaps on the server and a few of the clients. One member is writing up the technical manual, another team member writes up the training guide, another pulls both of these text files down because they are road testing the guides against the machine that is being developed. In this article we are going to look at some options for you. The big question is, how do you make sure that all of these files and the project folder are always up to date and everyone is working on the same material? Balanced Scorecard Design Toolkit Balanced Scorecard concept is about measure and control. The first step is to determine the goal of Balanced Scorecard: it should help to measure and control the performance of business unit. The next step is to assign a target performance values and develop a plan to archive the target results. The final step is controlling the performance, re-thinking business and separate business processes. Balanced Scorecard must be a document packed with performance information. That’s why it is the best way to share management and business goal ideas with colleagues. Robert Kaplan and David Norton in early 1990’s suggested performance measurement perspectives: Financial Perspective, Customer Perspective, Internal Processes Perspective, Employee Learning and Growth Perspective. These perspectives are must-use basic groups. Even if it’s necessary to describe the business unit that is not involved in sales, financial perspective must be taken in account. Using these four perspectives is a guaranty that all aspects of business will be considered carefully. How Many Key Performance Indicators Should Be Taken Into Account To Manage Business? Managing large business is a hard task as CEO should take into account a lot of factors that affect or may affect business. It's important to see what business was in the past, what business is now and what it is going to be. On of the approaches to managing business is developing key performance indicators which will tell how the business is working, where the problems are and what can be done about this. Business performance indicators base on metrics as a way to measure performance in numbers, for instance, if CEO should evaluate and manage it security within a company, then "Security Controls" metric should be developed to determine the efficiency of closing significant system weaknesses. You Company Is Growing Fast? It's A Time To Think About Possible Information Leakages. Do you know all possible ways to take information out of company so that no one would know about this? I'm sure, even there are some certain security rules there are still some possible ways for information leakage. Let's think about how can we control this process. First, it's necessary to understand that there no any absolute means about security. Even if USB port it blocked, it's still possible to write some data to USB, if there is system that controls outgoing mails, then it's still possible to use some trick that intruder might use to send out important data out of the company. Get A Valuable Feedback From Your Presentation It's quite easy to prepare presentation and do a speech, actually you will still need some skills, but there are many people and services willing to help you with slides. Some suggest you a custom tools, which will simplify the process of PowerPoint presentation development, other suggest to buy a nice looking graphics, so that your presentation will look professional. What do you miss? If you have the most successful slides in the world you will still need to prepare a nice speech and make people who listen to you believe what you talk about. It's really important not just to talk about the topic, but get the feedback. Kpi Start-up - Learn How To Design, Fill With Data And Use Key Performance Indicators KPI term is for key performance indicators, the KPI concept is about measuring and controlling business performance focusing on the most important performance indicators. Does this concept works? How to make use of it? There might be a number of viewpoints on KPI, and this concept can be used on various level of organization. For instance, CEO might use KPI to measure and control business, also, some managers can design and use KPI for their department. World-clock: What Time Is In Japan Now? Computer clocks are they for fun or for profit? I guess both. If you are doing international business, then I'm sure you'd like to know what the time is now in Tokyo, I know it's easy to calculate the time difference, but I guess it's not what most people like to do. That is the reason why most market traders put the analogue clock on the wall to see what the time is. People like to have visually appealing clocks and it is confirmed by what Microsoft company is doing now. Old days there were just clocks in system tray, telling the time in format "10:41", for now in Vista you will find nice looking analog clock with looks more like wrist-watch clock that digital clocks. Balanced Scorecard Vs. Kpi Balanced Scorecard concept reefers to the theory of metrics linked by the specific rules, where the total value is calculated using specific formulas. Balanced Scorecard is talked a lot about, but there are some applications of Balanced Scorecard concept which are sometime overlooked. For instance, combination of metrics, used in Balanced Scorecard can be easily used for benchmarking, e.g. comparing your product or service against competitors. What metrics should be used to compare your product to your rival's solution? There are many opinions, but the most reasonable answer sounds as: "Why should I reinvent something new, I can use the same metrics as I use for my business". Performance Managed Customer Support Service Customer service is not something which will generate you a sales directly, but customer service is something that is really important for any business. Actually, good customer service can generate you a sales as good as a well-trained sales agent does. The question is: how to make a customer serviced that will generate sales? The answers must focus on measure and control. One must measure and control the performance of call center trying to identify potential problems and good solutions, it's important to find and share both - good and bad experience, it's important to make a training process perfect, it's important to make the control process better than ever, as it's very easy with up today technologies. Measure And Control Human Resources Performance The business success is about taking right people to the right place on right time. So what is the problem? Actually, if you need to manage not one, but five employees or better five groups of employees, then you face the problem of measuring and control. It's hard to tell whether one group is performing better or not, it becoming hard to compare one employees success against other one, it's hard to see the unique features of people. So what the solution is? The key metrics and key indicators, which will tell you how to manage your stuff right. There are two approaches I suggest to take into account when thinking about human resources (HR) at your company. First, you can think in terms of process, second you can think it terms of how do employees affect the whole business. Metrics To Measure And Control The Performance Of Sales Department The salespeople and company sales force are those who actually generate your income dollars. Sure, it's important to have a good product, support which can respond fast, pretty design and make people write about your company in magazines, but still the most important part is to get the resulted leads converted into actual dollars. It's quite easy to organize the sales department. For instance, you can hire someone who have experience in managing this kind of department in other company. He or she will hire a team of sales professionals and they will generate some revenue for your business. Metrics For Talented Employees What is the most important task of any HR department? I think the one thing they can do is to find and keep talented people within company. The problem is that these people are usually not like others (that's why you want to hire they!), they do not pay much attention to salary you suggest, they don't want to have stock options and don't think in terms of profit and loose. You goal is to find these people, hire them and keep them in company as long as you can. That is the main goal of any HR department. Let's discuss how to manage talents in your company. The first task is to find gifted people, I'm sure you know how to find people to hire, but the task here is to find talented? How to do it? Well, I cannot advise much here, you will need to talk with hundreds to find the one, more over you will probably need to provide some people with test job to find the right person. But there is an indicator that you are performing well: if you will find something that is not usual and is extraordinary, pay attention to this person. Cutting Call-center Costs The call-center is theoretically the place with a lot of phones and people sitting next to each other talking at the same time. But does this is a call-center you should dream about? I'd prefer if my phone would ring just few times a day with a very particular questions, focused on my business or better sales-oriented question. There is a lot you can do to cut your call-center expenses. But the first step is to measure them and measure the performance of your call-center. It's a good idea to start with running costs. How much does it cost to run a single seat? What if you will be outsourcing some questions to a more cheaper operator. More over, there are some questions that your web-site can answer easily, for instance if you will put product brochures, manuals or frequently asked questions online, then you will save huge time. Call Center Performance Management Call Centers, or customer services receiving and transmitting multiple requests by telephone, were introduced as offshoots of telecommunications providing streamlined service for consumers of large companies with extensive customer support needs. Normally, a call center is able to handle a considerable volume of calls at the same time, i.e. to screen calls and forward them to skilled support staff, where most issues can be resolved. Organizations starting from mail-order catalog companies and telemarketing companies to computer product help desks use call centers. Typically, there are two types of calls ? inbound and outbound. The latter suggests the agent's calling potential customers with intentions to sell or service which is amply used in telemarketing. Apart from it inbound calls are made by the customer to get information or ask for help reporting malfunction of the product. That's where the problem of management performance is acute. Performance measures and benchmarking are indispensable to any well-run call center to eliminate criticism of call centers on common themes such as non-expert operators, poor training of agents incapable to process customers' requests effectively, automated queuing systems resulting in long hold times, operators working from a script, etc. Benchmarking, typically associated with strategic management, presupposes evaluation of business processes in relation to best practice and helps to develop plans with the aim of increasing performance levels. At large benchmarking reforms all the levels of the company ? from the state of mind of the employees to that of top managers, penetrating into the whole hierarchical organization of the organization. The gist of benchmarking is to break the resistance to change by employing methods different from the currently used ones that might be less effective in order to increase certain aspects of performance. It Is Important To Measure A Performance Is it really important to measure a business performance? I think if you will even need to purchase someone's business, then you will never ask this question and the answer will be "Yes! Sure!", because if you do not measure the performance of the business that you are going to purchase you will be going blind. Then why people don't like to measure the performance of their own businesses? When you are inside, you see a lot, I would say you can see to much business and business mechanism, you are flowed with unimportant data, you having too many things to care about and sometime you even don't understand where this business is going. If you are a manager, then it is not a problem, but if you are CEO, then you have to think about things like this. Helpdesk Performance Metrics As more and more business are making use of helpdesks to interact with customers, both in terms of orders and customer complaints or technical questions, it is apparent that such call centers should have standardized measurements to use in determining level of performance for both the individual customer representative and the entire facility. Some of the common performance measurements which are used to track helpdesk performance are listed below. Wait time in the queue - This is usually stated in minutes on the average, that the caller is likely to experience in the wait line. Some helpdesk software will inform the caller with statements such as 'the estimated wait time is XX minutes' The caller can then determine whether or not he wants to wait for a helpdesk professional to come on the line. Business Kpi: Measurement Of Success Business KPI or business key performance indicators are also known as key success indicators (KSI) are created for the purpose of measuring and defining the progress of the organization toward reaching its stated goals. When a business goes through the process of analyzing its mission, naming those who have a stake in the mission and stating its goals, the business then ready to define how it will measure the progress toward reaching the goals. These measurements are known as key performance indicators. Several characteristics of key performance indicators are important to keep in mind in selecting them Call Center Kpi's - Getting The Most Out Of Metrics A business adage is that you can't manage what you don't measure, but given the huge amounts of data available where do you begin ? Implementing a software based CRM will allow you to rapidly collect data from a huge array of sources, while integrating this with other data collection processes such as accounting, will produce even more. So where do we start with all of this and, more importantly, at what point do we need to stop. First principles, ask yourself how is the call center performing? If you can't answer that question but have reams of performance metrics pouring out of your ears, this article is for you. Call Center Management - Problems With Kpi Measurement Using KPI's for performance measurement is a well documented, tried and tested management tool. Issues arise however, with what the metrics are actually telling us and the validity of the underlying raw data. You can see what we mean when you consider some of the top metrics commonly used to measure call center performance; call quality, service level, customer satisfaction, average speed of answer, first call resolution, employee satisfaction and so on. The fact is that many of these metrics are subjective and not qualitative. Achieving consistency across the metrics being gathered becomes even more problematic when you consider the number of different sources from which the raw data is collected. Call time is easily and accurately measured, however customer satisfaction comes from the customer themselves and one customers perception will differ from another and the same applies to employee satisfaction. Other KPI metrics, such as adherence to call center telephone policies will fall to be reported by a supervisor or other observer adding yet another source of metric data and broadening the problem of consistency with the raw data. Brand Evaluation Using Balanced Scorecard And Kpi Strong brand is the most valuable intangible asset of the company. Although brands are not listed on corporate balance sheets, they play key role in determining the company's success in the long-term perspective. Successful brands allow companies to effectively manage premium prices, reduce relative power of the trade, increase communication effectiveness, attract managerial talent, and reduce vulnerability to downturns. Scorecards or KPIs based on the drivers of brand value, provide focused and actionable measures for optimal brand management. According to the research conducted by Interbrand, one of the leading brand consultancies, strong brands account for over a third of shareholder value. Share prices of companies with well-known brands have significantly higher investment returns and lower risk rate when compared to the stock market as a whole. Measure Customer Service Performance: How To Treat A Customer Like A Customer. There are many measurements and choices of what to measure in order to decide whether an adequate guarantee of customer service is being met. However, it is unfortunate that many businesses select the wrong factors to measure or the select the correct elements to measure but make some logic leaps which means the collected data is false or misleading. A frequent error is to make the assumption that any two or more metrics can separated from the others. As an example, a business call center may measure an employee's performance level by setting maximum average times to complete a customer call. On the corporate level, management may count the number of calls handled during a specific time period and assume that more calls answered means better service. Sales Performance: How To Measure The Effectiveness Of The Sales Department The performance of the sales department of your organization is probably tied to such measurements as the total revenue or sales revenue per product. You may even have geographical information such as revenue from the Northwest or the Gulf States. But in truth, the revenue is not a totally effective tool to measure the effectiveness of the sales department. As with any key performance indicators, there need to be a combination of measures which take into account by the scope and the quantity. Calculating the revenue produced with the existing sales department is simple. It's a mathematical calculation. But, by drilling down in the key performance indicators for the sales department, you begin to get a better picture of the effectiveness of the sales department. For example, if the only performance indicator used for the sales department is the revenue for the company, the changes in revenue may have nothing to do with the sales department at all. It could be the effectiveness of the marketing campaign, or it could be the fact that the only other supplier of the product just went out of business. Perhaps the niche group that you're selling the product to just became much larger, such as a product which targets people over the age of retirement. Determining Kpi Metrics For Measuring Brand Impact On Your Business The idea of a brand is deeply rooted in the psyche of managers as being associated with the delivery of tangible products to consumers but today we are increasingly delivering intangible services rather than goods so is branding still relevant. Traditionally a business has been viewed by senior management as split into discrete divisions, sales and marketing, production, HR, IT, legal and accounting. Some divisions created revenue and b the brand identity was important for customer recognition and action needed to be taken to maximize that while other divisions created cost that reduced the brand value and this needed to be cut. Following this methodology would logically result in increased profits. This led in practice to highly dysfunctional decision making with, for example, IT staff being cut only for decreased effectiveness across the business producing reducing sales generation and increasing costs in other parts of the business. Making The Most Of Your Supply Chain Metrics To Leverage Competitive Advantage The majority of KPI dashboards are in fact overloaded with metrics and the key to getting the most out of your SCM intelligence is in choosing the most appropriate metrics that are key to providing decision makers with the necessary information to deliver informed decisions when they need it. Using dashboards that are carrying large numbers of KPI's does not deliver information to SCM managers so they can make optimal decisions. Focusing on the key metrics that identify the main source of SCM business performance is vital and reducing the number of metrics used allows managers to understand better and far more intuitively what a metric is actually trying to tell them. "Less is more" or TMI (Too Much Information) are two of the comments that you will hear from SCM experts who truly understand the components of the business supply chain from procurement, processing and through to customer delivery. In the very recent few years, with the introduction of RFID technology that allows tagging of containers, pallets and individual shipment items replete with a mass of raw data on content, models, color, specification, origination and so on , it is extremely tempting to dive in and start thinking that all this data that we are now routinely able to collect and collate can somehow be manipulated to provide SCM managers with even more information that will help them make better and more profitable decisions. property metrics,property scorecard,real estate,real estate metrics,real estate scorecard Getting your supply chain management right can give your business competitive advantage by lowering costs, greater efficiency and improving customer satisfaction by getting goods to customers faster. The impact of technology with the use of RFID tags to track pallets and shipments electronically and merging this into the stock and order management system is making the SCM aspect of a business an area of substantial opportunity for creating competitive advantage. Now that all sounds fantastic with the ability to track individual shipments through the supply chain and maintaining data on product, serial codes, description, quantity and so on. Combining RFID data with barcode information creates even more information that can be manipulated and collected. Top Ten Real Estate Performance Metrics For Your Property Scorecard Today we are in an enviable position with the technology resources available to us that allow collection and almost instantaneous data manipulation and presentation for management. We are now in a position of tracking metrics for our property scorecard that a few short years ago were simply not possible. Unfortunately this massive information collection capacity leads to other problems such as information overload and developing a true understanding of what the metrics are telling us. Ensuring that real estate managers are developing real skill to unleash the potential that metrics and a property scorecard gives them is still an issue, not only using the scorecard to track performance but to use the KPI's to forecast business health and prescribe solutions for problems diagnosed. So, without any further ado, here are the top ten real estate metrics for your property scorecard: Get Rid Of Browser Cookies Web cookies are text files that are sent by your server to a web page and then sent back each time you visit that particular site. The term came from a well known idea in Unix computing called the “Magic Cookie.” They are used for tracking and browsing behavior. A good example is Amazon. If you place items in your shopping cart and turn the machine off without paying, the cookies will allow your items to stay in the cart until you return to shop again. Keep Your Identity Safe - Data Leak Prevention Identity theft can happen to anyone at anytime. Usually this happens when someone steels personal identification from you such as a Social Security number, a credit car number, or a bank account number without your knowledge or permission. These types of theft involve such crimes as fraud, and other crimes. These crimes take on many forms. Thieves may rent an apartment, obtain a credit card or establish a telephone account in your name. Sometimes you may not even find out about the theft until it is too late. The only way to tell about the theft is by looking on your credit card statement, reviewing your credit report and noticing charges that you didn't make, or even having been contacted by a debt collector. Thieves skilled at identity theft use a variety of ways to obtain your information. Rummaging through trash looking for bills or other paper with your personal information is one way they steal. They also will pretend to be a financial institution and call you, send spam, and use pop-up messages to entice you to reveal your personal information. Occasionally they will complete a change of address form to have your mail sent to another location. There is also the old fashioned way of stealing your purse, wallet or even your mail to obtain your identity information. Once they have this information the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and anything is possible. Keep Your Identity Safe - Data Leak Prevention Identity theft can happen to anyone at anytime. Usually this happens when someone steels personal identification from you such as a Social Security number, a credit car number, or a bank account number without your knowledge or permission. These types of theft involve such crimes as fraud, and other crimes. These crimes take on many forms. Thieves may rent an apartment, obtain a credit card or establish a telephone account in your name. Sometimes you may not even find out about the theft until it is too late. The only way to tell about the theft is by looking on your credit card statement, reviewing your credit report and noticing charges that you didn't make, or even having been contacted by a debt collector. Thieves skilled at identity theft use a variety of ways to obtain your information. Rummaging through trash looking for bills or other paper with your personal information is one way they steal. They also will pretend to be a financial institution and call you, send spam, and use pop-up messages to entice you to reveal your personal information. Occasionally they will complete a change of address form to have your mail sent to another location. There is also the old fashioned way of stealing your purse, wallet or even your mail to obtain your identity information. Once they have this information the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and anything is possible. Clear Browser Cache - Why And How The idea behind clearing your browser's cache is simple, cache equates to space and every computer needs as much space as physically possible in order to operate at its optimum performance. Speed is the key to the kind of computer human relationship that prevents irritation. Clearing your browser's cache is straightforward and should be carried out regularly. How straightforward is clearing your browser's cache? This example uses Explorer 6 to describe how to clear a cache but anticipate that the majority of browsers will follow the same processes. Worried About Leaking Data? Protection Is Available Every person who uses a computer that is connected to the Internet needs to be concerned about their computer's data leaking out to cyberspace. No matter what size your business or if your concerned about your personal computer data being threatened. There are several ways to ensure data protection from theft. Data protection is one of the most important challenges being faced today by both the home computer and the business computer. Several important tools available to protect your data are: firewalls, virus protection software, and backup software either onsite or online. One of the most important tools to protecting data leakage is yourself or your employees. Often valuable data will be lost through laziness, accidental loss by people who are careless, or other plain user actions. To protect yourself from such losses you will need a layered security system. It Safety: The Burning Thing To Think Over In order to understand what we do to for IT-safety, we have to pay attention to its base - computer safety. And we should remember that there are any not important parts of our data, even if it is just benchmark, we have to do everything to protect it from hackers. The majority of hacker frauds are possible because of existing software vulnerability. More and more harmful code appears in Web. This code implements to the computers, makes planned actions and continues the further spread. Nowadays such vulnerabilities are sought intentionally, by the hackers as well as by the producers. The first are trying to use bags in order to get access to the information resources, the second are trying to keep own reputation and clients' information resources safe. E.g., if in 2004 the ratio of frauds was 1 fishing to 943 e-mails, in 2005 the ratio was 1 fishing to 304 e-mails. Document Vulnerabilities With Windows Xp - Improve Your Security XP users still outnumber Vista users and that is likely to continue for quite some time as business users await their software refresh cycles to come around before upgrading to the new operating system. Meanwhile, the personal user market holds back and waits for any issues with Vista to be taken care of before parting with the hefty price tag for the new OS. With that in mind, it makes a lot of sense to revisit the XP security basics for maintaining security and avoiding getting hit by an online nasty.. The release of Service Pack 2 (SP2) attempted to deal with some of the more common security issues presented to users. A major loophole that was addressed was the vulnerability from opening a document from the Web by clicking on a hyperlink which opens a document containing malicious code and which then gains access to the users machine. Notwithstanding the efforts of Microsoft to enhance document security, it is incumbent on the user to be aware of the inherent risks of opening Web based documents. It Security Measurement - How Well Are My It Security Dollars Being Spent ? A stark simple reason for a relatively low budgetary priority for IT security is the simple fact that the vast portion of an IT budget has to be committed to maintaining infrastructure and users followed by development of these same systems to meet ever increasing business demands. IT security has always fallen a long way down the totem of priorities however the requirement to safeguard IT resources from external and internal threats has caused a shift in approach in recent years. The issue becomes how do businesses know what actually generates the best return for the dollar spend on security? Given the abstract nature of IT security, performance can only be reasonably measured in a relative fashion by assessing trends and benchmark standards against industry peers. It is only once a track record of metrics has been established that a business can look internally at how well it is spending IT security budgets and what the loss expectancy is from threats to security of the IT infrastructure. To attempt to implement IT security metrics without proper control over the process and identification of the KPI's that will comprise the balanced scorecard will only contribute to the plethora of data being collected, but do little for contributing to the business itself. The highly technical nature of the IT function and the even more elaborate area of IT security does not lend itself easily to being understood by non-technical managers while IT management themselves have often failed to embrace the need for a business case for allocating a budget. Can The Most Recently Accessed (mru) Docs Be A Security Hole? Are recently accessed files a security problem? Unfortunately, the answer is YES. The first task the intruder will face when need to crack sensitive files on your computer is to find them. The key will be the list of most recently used files (MRU), which is available in almost any program and in Windows. During your casual work it's a great time saver, as you don't need to find file to open, but when someone else have an access to your computer it became a dangerous security hole. Is there any way to get rid of the list of recently accessed files? Actually, yes and it is quite easy to do. First, you should get the name of file (files) that you want to remove from recently opened list, then you should find the place where the list is kept and then you should remove the particular record. Housecleaning Your Computer Hard Drive: Wipe Disk Free Space From the earliest beginnings of computer usage the issue of how to prevent private or sensitive information from being recovered has been discussed. People used to be careful about putting files of this sort into the recycle bin, then emptying the recycle bin. It has become more apparent now though that is procedure does not prevent the access to any and all information which is or has been stored on the computer at any time in its history. Another method commonly believed to eradicate private files is the process of defragmentation. Then the experts assured computer users that even defragmentation was not enough to permanently remove information from the computer. In essence the statement has been made that the only truly effective way to permanently destroy the information stored on a hard drive is to completely destroy the drive. Brand Metrics - How Do You Measure The Performance Of Your Online Brand? Online marketers have always enjoyed an advantage over their offline counterparts in that it is simple and easy to track visitors and their behavior on the target website from a simple mouse click of a visitor. Traditional online brand metric tools have utilized the "click-to-sale" philosophy of how a website should be positioned and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has grown up as an online industry to make websites rank higher for the search engines. In recent years this has slowly been changed as brand advertisers have also latched onto the power of social networking sites that look to engage and provide a fusing of the traditional television/radio style media in an online context. No longer is it enough to simply saturate a website with keywords in order to increase search engine ranking and by that, increase traffic. The emphasis is increasingly on delivering not only traffic with the money to spend on your product but also on delivering information to search engine users that is directly relevant to them. This requires a more sophisticated approach to web marketing that takes us away from the click-to-sale model and weakens the use of brand metrics as a performance measure. File Compare Tools To Servive If you've ever been working with files in your software program and suddenly realized the data changed in a way you hadn't planned, it is often due to an error in data entry, coding or even programming files. In the past, in order to find out where the difference, error or change had occurred, you would need to do a line by line, or sometimes word by word comparison of before and after files in order to correct the problem. This process can be very time-consuming, especially where there are lines of programming code which must be reviewed individually or pages of mathematical formulas which must be checked. Sales Potential - Using Kpi's To Measure Sales Performance Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) are performance metrics that management use to help make effective decisions to guide a business and enhance performance. Common sales performance metrics include total sales revenues, number of sales, average order value, repeat sales, sales for year-to-date, and so on. These metrics on their own only provide part of the story however, and as a sales or business manager you need to be able to understand what the metrics actually represent and how they are affecting your overall business performance. Looking at KPI's in isolation is not of such great help, but when you are able to look at trends and the relationships between metrics and how these integrate to form a complete picture, you are well on your way to unleashing the power of the metric. Certain sales metrics provide more information than others, for instance gross sales is quite an accurate and absolute indicator however it does little for providing information on it's own, particularly if you are looking to maximize profitability with a diverse product range. Similarly, it is of little use if you are looking to direct sales efforts by incentivizing sales of certain product lines that provide the greatest contribution to the bottom line. In short, you need to use a range of KPI's to provide a fuller picture of overall sales performance. Performance Of Sales Department: A Measurement Of How Well The Salespeople Are Selling Sales revenue is usually considered to be one of the most important measurements of how well a business or organization is succeeding and that may be true in part, although a more accurate measurement of the company's performance would be the net profit before taxes. However, even this figure, i.e. net profit, has little bearing on a question about how effective the sales department is in doing their job of sales. In order to determine effectiveness of the sales department or any other department, the company must look at a different kind of measurement. The first step in the process is necessarily the development of the objectives for the entire company, usually determined by such methods as the Balanced Scorecard process. This requires an understanding of the difference between measuring revenue and determining performance measurements. Depending upon the size and complexity of the organization this could be a simple or a difficult process. Once the company has determined how progress toward the goal of a better bottom line will be measured, then some more specific performance indicators for the various departments can be developed. There may be performance indicators for the marketing department, the call center and the sales department. Each of these can be isolated so that the department is only being Killer Presentation: How To Design Your Own The first, and probably the main goal of any presentation is to sale. That is what most presentation authors forget about. Sure, presentation must looks nice and sure, it must be a little funny, but its main goal is to sale your product, your business your consulting service or something else. So how to design presentation that not just show something, but sale it? There are some key principles, which will bring you right to the successful presentation. Measuring The Return On Investment Of The Hr Function Traditionally measuring a Return on Investment followed a fairly standard calculation method - look at the profit generated and divide that by the value of the assets being utilized in creating that profit. Pretty simple until you start applying the calculation to non-profit generating divisions such a HR. Using traditional ROI we would logically conclude that the HR function needed to be cut but we know that HR provides value to the business. So if we know that value is being created by the HR function how do we get to that value and how do we then manage HR activities to maximize that value for the benefit of the business as a whole? How To Generate More Revenue With Your Powerpoint Presentation Online Representing your product online is as critical as sales process itself. What do you do in real-life if you want to sale something to some company? Yes, you call them, assign an appointment and then show them your presentation designed in PowerPoint or some other tool. What changed today? All changes are about time, if you will sell fast, then you will be able to get more profits. We are making our presentations more vivid, we are trying to add more graphics and audio to make it looks really great. Keywords Niche Marketing Strategy Have you ever needed to promote a product online? It was really easy five years ago, but today you will deal with great number of competitors, SEO optimizations, internet marketing professionals, etc. Is there a chance to will search engines battle, if you have low resources? The answer is - YES! You can win if you will not try to fight large companies and competitors with almost unlimited resources. You chance is to win in a very tight segment of market, people can this segment "niche". Why it is important to dominate in niche, not in the whole market? Because it is easier and cheaper, if you will be able to dominate in a certain niche, you will have a base for the future market attacks, more over you will be able to generate revenue fast, right after business start-up, as your goals will be to fight a very tight niche, not the whole market. Deleting A File Doesn't Mean It's Deleted Forever So How Do You Securely Erase Data From A Computer? It is a common misconception of PC users that once they have dropped a file into the recycle bin and emptied it that that is it, the file is gone for good. Wrong! The Idiots Guide To Showing Hidden And Password Protected Files On Windows Getting Windows to show the hidden files on the PC is pretty straight forward; here are the sequences of Windows clicks and options you need to follow to get up the hidden files: 1. In Windows Explorer, (for this select "Start"=>"All Programs"=>"Windows Explorer") 2. Select "Tools" and go to "Folder Options" 3. Click on the "View" tab 4. On the "Hidden files and folders" tab, click on "Show hidden files and folders" The Difference Between Deleting And Shredding Data May Mean The Difference Between Securing Your Bank Account And Becoming An Identity Theft Victim! Users think that placing a file into the recycle bin and then emptying the contents is all that they need to do to delete a file. Performing the right mouse click and selecting delete for a file also makes the file vanish and you are safe. You'd better think again - the information is still there you just cannot see it because performing a file delete in Windows only acts to tell Windows XP not to display the file on your desktop or in the folder contents on your PC screen. Ezine Article Submission Secrets So what is the secret? Search engines are always trying to generate the most relevant search results in response to your query, but the problem is that it's hard to identify what results are relevant. The most popular search engine, Google, suggested a great way to find out if results are relevant or not, it combines different factors, but the most important is checking the number of back link. If you have a web-site and many people link to it, then search engine will think that it is relevant. Is everything so simple? Actually, no. It's not hard to get many back links by submitting web-site to on-line link catalogs. But this method will bring even bad web-site in the top of search results. It worked a year ago, it works today too, but search engines are trying to fight with this issue and the possibility of getting high in search results for sites like these is getting lower. Why search engines do this? Because having many back links is easy and everyone with enough money can get these back links. Measuring Marketing Performance Toolkit There exist many definitions of marketing, in fact, too many. Together with the progression of the Internet, and consequently the development of new marketing techniques, technologies and stratagem, new definitions of marketing are appearing in large numbers. However plural and diverse the definitions of marketing may be, the essence of the said remains intact. Marketing is still no doubt the unique function of the business enterprise and no prosperous business is possible nowadays without effective marketing. Most businesses believe that marketing effectiveness is expressed solely in numbers. Apparently, there are aspects (metrics) of marketing effectiveness that can be quantified and measured. The first and foremost goal of marketing is to create customers. Consequently, the effectiveness of this aspect of marketing can be evaluated by the number of new customers, new leads of a company or, in case of telemarketing, the number of completed calls. Another significant metric of effectiveness is the number of new products purchased by existing customers since the objective of any enterprise that intends to stay competitive in the market is not only to create new customers but to value and retain the ones they have already. Marketing Performance Measurement With Better Metrics With the intensive development of communications there appeared a great many diverse definitions of marketing. Whatever the definition marketing is regarded the unique function of business. At present no successful business is possible without effective marketing. One of the corner-stones of business Philip Kotler defines marketing as human activity directed at satisfying needs and wants through exchange processes. The marketing activities commonly include market research, new product development, product life cycle management, pricing, channel management and promotion. Article Submission Works Better Than Links Exchange Why use article marketing and not some other kind of marketing? To answer this questions we need to list first the types of online marketing that are popular today, then we will be able to compare results and will find out in what case article marketing works better than any other kind of marketing. Let's start with article marketing itself. First, what kind of investment you need to do? You will need to write an article for submission purpose and you will need to submit it to 100+ web-sites or just to few major ones. The costs for copywriting service start at 10$ per 500 words and depend a lot on quality of the article. As for submission you can do it yourself or find really cheap options, for instance you can submit to bulk sites for just 10$. What about results? You will have an article listed on hundred of sites, that tells about your niche, and you will have a link which points to your site. There are good chances that Google will treat this page and the link as useful. As link comes from article which is related to your web-site topic. Key Marketing Metrics: Are Your Marketing Strategies Effective? The importance of knowledge regarding key marketing metrics can't be denied by anyone who understands the concept of marketing theory. Yet, many marketing people, particularly ecommerce marketers don't regularly obtain, study and learn from several of the most basic key marketing metrics. In fact, a recent survey found that only ten percent of the companies surveyed had a budget intended specifically geared to measuring key marketing metrics. Key marketing metrics are a relatively new role in the structure of a successful organization. It is intended to measure the gap between the strategy for marketing the product or the business and its execution and the final results of that strategy, whether effective or not. Measure Marketing Actions: How Well Are Your Advertising Methods Working? The capability of determining how effective are the activities involved in marketing and to prove that value to the bottom line of the company is more important than ever before for professionals in the field of marketing. Marketing personnel must be able to place quantification markers on the effectiveness of existing programs and to trace and judge the return on the investment made in marketing over a period of time in order to be able to document that the budgets for the department or group are worthwhile. In perhaps no other area of business activities, marketing personnel must have quantification so they will know whether the investment is providing expected and anticipated returns. Marketing definitely is a business activity that requires tracking in real time. Manage Call-center Performance With Business Metrics Today's call center is not something about phone calls, it's a separate business that can... no it MUST generate revenue. It must provide company with fresh ideas, must help company to get new customers and archive business goals, it must work 24 hours a day, live response must be accessible within few seconds. Finally, the operator's response must solve customer problems immediately, must save customers that wished to cancel service and must generate revenue. There are various viewpoints on call center - operator view point, customer view point and management viewpoint. Customer wishes the problem to be solved. Operators' job is to solve the problem, actually operators' job is to find correct information quickly and provide it with customer in an easy to follow way. What about management? These people always make things working properly. So what is the best thing that call center manager can do? How to manage call center efficiently? The Balanced Scorecard approach is the best answer to these questions. Real Estate Customer Relationships Perspective It's recognized that a company's success is based not only on financial measures which, although important, are not indicative of customer, employee, or quality problems or opportunities. Besides costs and revenue, businesses looking for long-term profitability have to take into consideration customer relationships, employee skills and collaboration items. Leading companies tend to focus on a balanced approach to performance measurement to assess processes and identify which of them needs improving before it turns into a serious problem. Customer relations is one of the perspectives to choose measures of key importance. Calculating Contact/call Center Roi: How Do You Measure The Value Of Customer Satisfaction? A number of factors must be taken into consideration when calculating the contact or call center ROI. There are variances in how the call center is set up, such as where it is located, whether it is in house or outsourced, what the level of response is, whether the customer is able to speak to a live source or is simply referred to another location within the company. As companies become larger and larger, it is unfortunate that the contact people who are in the customer service business often know less and less about what is actually going on with the business. Measuring Roi On A Call Center Investment Traditional ROI calculations use the level of profit generated by an asset divided by the value of the asset and expressed as a percentage. That's fine but when we seek to ascribe a value to non-profit generating assets we need to look at ways in which we can quantify the value that the call center is contributing to overall business operations. Call center data management and manipulation has lent itself particularly well to KPI metric and Balanced Scorecard methodology. KPI/Balanced Scorecard techniques are a mainstay of the management of any call center and using the metrics that are being produced from these management information tools allows to start calculating an approximation for ROI. Hr Kpi - The Use Of Balanced Scorecard Metrics In Managing Human Resources HR is a crucial supporting function whether you have a team of 2 or 2,000 and business managers need to get the very best out of their people if they are to get the very best business performance. KPI's typically lend themselves to monetary or physical metrics such as dollar value of sales or number of widgets produced by a team or region. KPI's or balanced scorecard metrics (the two are essentially one and the same) provide management and decision makers with an overview of business performance and software based solutions give a dashboard type presentation that allows users to "drill down" to view performance at the micro level. Applying KPI's to non-monetary functions such as HR, that do not produce a tangible dollar benefit or a physical item in production still lend themselves to KPI analysis. We just have to look at what these business units (taking the HR department as the example) are actually producing in terms of training days delivered, staff turnover ratios, sick days taken. If you view the HR function as producing an indirect benefit to the business operation (which you will do if you are allocating the cost of the HR Department out to operating divisions) then it will follow that simply looking at training days delivered is not a useful measure of contribution to business performance. Combining training days delivered to the sales force coupled with increases in sales revenue would be a better metric that seeks to represent the correlation between training and improved revenue. Measure Training Performance. Tips And Tricks. Training is an area where performance metrics has been missing the point during the past years. This brings about a situation where either the wrong measurements are being selected to determine whether the training program is effective or training may be ignored in any real sense when planning for company over all business performance. Businesses can not control what they can't measure, so it's critically important to find and use the correct performance measurements for any investment which the organization makes, including that of training, which is certainly one of the most important investments which will be made by any organization. Real Estate Management Processes No matter what particular type of real estate your business has evolved ? residential, commercial or industrial ? a successful business model primarily focuses on real estate performance metrics, which help to streamline financial and operations processes. Monitoring the factors that affect the business particularly enhances the ability to improve the whole portfolio performance. Appropriate performance measures can include calculation of rates of return, space quality and comparison to market, unresolved transactions, monthly feedback by staff, accuracy and completeness of property records, quality assessment of properties, client surveys on staff performance and occupancy patterns. Real Estate Financial Perspective Businesses that can effectively manage utilization and costs associated with the assets get substantial benefits and boast effective company performance. Efficiency is the primary quality measured in the Financial Perspective, and with the Balanced Scorecard used as a measurement system, it particularly means that the strategy execution should lead to improved results. Planning real estate processes should be focused on the strategic importance of occupancy costs to define, manage and measure them. It will provide information of business's true profitability and lead to more accurate valuation of real estate assets. Compare And Merge Tools Will Help To Change Blog Template And Modify Htm Files Various compare tools designed to help businesses and individuals to get valuable information out of two versions of the same document. Software designers use compare utilities to check the code, highlight changes and write version info. Legal professionals use compare tools to analyze changes made within documents. Educators can compare student job against original key, quality assurance specialists use compare and merge tools to learn more about changes. There are a number of compare tools, some are freeware, other very expensive focused on a very specific task. The key difference between tools is what kind of documents can compare tool handle and in what way. 2007 Website Awards -what Is The Best Web-site? In the 2007 website awards ceremonies it is hard to say who might take the award for best website or any other category. The idea of conducting website awards ceremonies and giving out awards to websites around the web seems a bit strange as there are very few established industrial standards on the Internet. There are websites however, who distribute and create website awards for the purpose of creating publicity and improving public relations between the website and the public at large. The specific target of all this public relations effort in the facilitation of website awards is for the benefit of the consumer at large, since the consumer is of course the target of all advertising and marketing efforts. By creating this buzz and fanfare around website awards, website promoters can increase their exposure and profile to Web surfers and Internet inhabitants. Webmasters rely on these awards ceremonies to boost their visibility on the Internet and increase traffic to their websites, which is the all-important lifeblood of the commercial Web site. By utilizing these website awards and other gimmicks and techniques webmasters can increase pay and converting traffic to their websites. Article Marketing As Search Engine Friendly Strategy A business company can provide content to the newspaper or magazine free of charge and get its contact information printed with the article. This paper-print form of article marketing enables firms to obtain press space. Even more beneficial form providing publishers with free content and advertisers with free advertising is online article marketing. Article marketing campaigns serve to promote business sites. Free distribution of well-written interesting and informative articles with "bio boxes" and "by-lines" incorporating references and contact information can seriously contribute to enhancing the business credibility and gaining targeted customers. Prevent Data Leakages In Your Company With New Security Policy Locating sensitive files is one of the most important tasks of computer security audit and forensic data recovery. Security experts need to make sure that sensitive files are not available for third-parties and are kept in a secure way. Computer forensics specialists need to find these files for research purposes. Another problem is possible security leakages that security expert should prevent. What is the best way to securely manage files. The most important aspect is clear understanding of tasks that your company face. First, it's necessary to elaborate a security policy.

SIGN UP FOR FREE   Sign Up for a free account or learn more. Submit Articles Member Login Top Authors Most Popular Articles Submission Guidelines Ezine Notifications Article RSS Feeds About Us Link to Us Contact Us Privacy Policy Terms of Service   Most Recent Articles How To Keep Files Secure? Cryptography, File Wiper, Internet Privacy It is well-know fact that files deleted in Windows will be recoverable. So anyone who have access to the computer will be able to undelete file and the content of the file. It seems to be the problem of top-secret organizations and agencies, but in fact, end-users also must consider this problem. Notebook computer might be stolen or lost. In this case the most vulnerable is information that looks like deleted, but is actually available for covering. Another problem is internet activity. Any Internet browser leaves a lot of traces, including the links to visited sites, used loggings and sometime password. This aspect may lead to identity theft problem, when someone could take a lot of information about you from your PC, from browser cookies. Removing Records About Recent Documents Is As Important As Clearing Web-browser History Recent documents is a security risk everyone should consider. What are recent files? The list of recently opened files appears in various kind of software products. The list of recently opened files helps us to find recently opened or edited documents quickly. But this is a security problem too. Any one can quickly scan your computer and see what files you was working with. It's not a problem, if you can guaranty no one else have an access to your computer, but for some reason people concerned about security use file shredders to wipe data, clears regularly browser cookies and cache files, empty recycle bin when there is still enough free space on hard disk. Your Files Are Your Knowledge Base, So How To Make Important Data Both Accessible And Secure?! First, let think about some basic ideas. When you name your file, try to use long name that explain the key idea about the file. Don't name file "Doc1", use some idea specific name. Consider designing some folder structure, try to divide information into different types, consider using some standard folder structures for some certain cases. For instance, if you work with projects, then you can create a template folder structure, which will have a subfolder "people", subfolder "docs" or sub-folder "resources". The efficiency of your knowledgebase depends on how fast you can find file you need. So, it's a good idea to use some file search engine, which will be able to help you with file searching. What one should now about files and file system to do efficient search? Compare Function Of Ms Word Vs. Third-party Compare Tool Sometime we need to compare files, in order to find out differences and learn more about modifications that were made within documents. The common task is to do comparison analysis fast and provide accurate results. Further requirements depends on what is compare done for. For instance, quality assurance specialists need to find changes and analyze how these changes will affect other documents. Manager might need to check someone's job and provide report about project progress. Web developers are interested in comparing web page files to highlight changes that were made. Find Compare And Merge Tool For Your Very Needs Compare and merge software is a must have tool for quality assurance specialists, for web-masters, software developers and many others. So, how to choose compare and merge tool? Sure, diff tool you need depends on what is your final task. If you need to do a version control of software source code, then it's reasonable that your compare and merge tool should have a syntax highlighting function for your programming language. It Is Better Than Mind Mapping With Pen And Paper! Mind mapping is a concept based on semantic maps, using this concept one can create a nice looking chart, which will represent goals, ideas, resources - anything. To create a mind map you don't need anything, but the pen and paper, but if you wish to do it faster, more accurate and if you need result to be nice looking, then you should consider using mind mapping software tool. Is Information Flow In Your Company As Good As You Think It Is? Searching files can be really fun if you have your files at your finger tips. If you ever faced the problem, when you remember you have information you somewhere on your hard disk, but you cannot get it on time. It's common problem today. People are creating more and more documents and it's important to be able to find necessary information quickly. Let's think why we face this problem? There are several reasons. The first is about growth. Electronic documents workflow growth every day, month and year. It's a well-know estimation, that the average number of managed documents growth by 10% every year. We are getting too many documents to manage! If You Don't Do A Backup Then You Have Never Experienced A System Crash One day I had may hard disk crashed, I need to reformat it and to install the Windows again and install all the programs and copy all the files from the backup drives, I was missing some data that was located on the desktop just before the computer crash, so I decided to try file recover utility. It was not hard to find some freeware tool which was working for about 15 minutes analyzing the partition of the hard disk. Once the analysis was finished it showed me the files which were available for recovering and the prognosis about recovering quality. Well, file names were destroyed as I has to fully reformat the hard disk and even change the size of partitions, but the actual content was available for recovering. File Compare Tool For Software Developers What do software developers need from a file compare program? Why do they need to use it? The answers are simple, but it's really hard to do the right choice. First, let's divide software developers into these who work with code and these who manage the process. Both roles are related to the editing code and there are two different viewpoints. All You Missed About Compare Tool Are there any facts about compare and merge software that end-user might miss? Sure! For instance, it's not hard to find a absolutely free compare tool. I'm sure you already have it, there are some diff command in both Windows and UNIX systems. But it's a better idea to use some programs with well designed interface, rich feature set and inexpensive. What tool to buy depends on your requirements and consider investing in the tool which will support all your possible business roles for your long business life. Automation In Quality Control Quality assurance is a wide range of methods which provide businesses with expected results. It's know that working with quality is one of the possible way to improve the product and as a result number of products sold. It's a good idea to improve quality assurance with information technologies, getting tests results as an electronic document will enable improve the total efficiency of quality service. The key idea about improving quality assurance with IT technologies is automation. You need to have attention of your employee only in some certain cases, where it's actually needed to do a human check. The task is to automate other processes, which can be performed by computer. Laptop File Security - 3 Rules To Follow Every time I purchase a new laptop with updated OS, more hard disk space, more RAM, nice-looking design I think about possible security problems I might face. It's not a desk PC, which is placed at home or office where the access is limited, laptop is a portable device, which is easier to lost and it can be stolen. So, it's a good idea to think about proactive security measures that can be performed to prevent security accidents. Search Information Like Professionals Do - Use File Masks And Search Syntax Do you know what file mask is? If you are a computer specialist, I'm sure you do and you know a lot of ways how you can benefit from this. But if you are not a computer guru, I'll tell you few secrets, that will really help you to make any search much more effective. First, let's think about what the mask looks like and why we need it. Assume, you are looking for file "file2356.doc", I guess, you have not remembered the name, but you might remember some part of the file name, for instance that it starts with "file...", so if you search for this file over the local disk, then you can specify the file mask: "file*", telling that the file name started with "file" word. Pdf Files Toolkit PDF file format was designed to represent documents in the same way on all computers. Great idea? Yes! Actually, this format also suppose to be non-editable after PDF file was produced. Again, it is good? Yes, if you don't actually need to use this document for further action. So when use PDF document format and when not to use it? If you what to protect your document against changes, if you wan your document to be easy readable at almost any computer then use ... html web-page file format! Well, it's not a joke, as html format is used much for wider than PDF format. For instance, if you have saw any computer without web-browser installed? And can you guaranty that all computers will have an Acrobat Reader? I'm not sure about it. Integrate Compare Tool In Dms Third-party file compare tool is something you need to do a document version control, e.g. finding changes that were made and giving some comments about changing. The kind of comment might be "approve" or "reject" or probably some comments that will give an idea about what modifications were made and how do they affect the further process of development of some tool. It's quite easy to use compare tool as a stand-alone application, but nowadays it is necessary to integrate all tools into document management environment that you already have. It Security Scanning Overview As long information is the most valuable resource of the company, then it's obvious that when we talk about auditing security, we should focus on IT security audit. Getting information about the security procedures in your IT department is critical to your business. Are there any common IT security issues that we should pay attention to? IT security auditor should check that the information you are using is securely kept and managed. Comparison Tools In Action It is important to know where a user's data is stored, and how it is being used. With file comparison, a person can quickly obtain all relevant information regarding a file, detect if any changes have been made to its overall data, and highlight any differences between two or more files. File comparison, for those unaware with the term, is a computing term for the automatic comparing of data between files in a file system. The comparisons are displayed to the user, and can be used to accomplish tasks for revision control and in networks and file systems. File comparison abilities are usually found in word processors and text editors. Managing Files Is Easy - Just Need To Know How When operating a computer, it is important to know where one's most important files are. Searching for files is a common daily practice that any PC user performs constantly, if not daily. It is also equally as vital to maintain files in an organized and structured manner through the use of file management tools. Through the use of today's operating systems, file searching and management keep a user's file system running smoothly. A large number of users rely on standard Windows operations to maintain the task of file searching through Windows Explorer. For basic file searches, this is usually an ideal means to find specific data. For more complex searches, however, Windows Explorer is perhaps not as sophisticated to perform such tasks. Software Tools For Comparison Of Images Unless you are an expert software and computer systems guru, compare images tools is not something an everyday person thinks about. This tool is another way to protect your data from leaking and keeping your data safe. The first thing a person needs to do is decide their specific needs for this type of software. Microsoft, and PDF files all have these capabilities. If you are looking for more in-depth comparison tools, then these tools are available. The questions you need to ask yourself is what is your intention, and what do you need to accomplish? Do you need to compare two or more folders and find out what files have been changed, altered or deleted? If that's the case you'll need a more specific type of program. There are tools available that will allow you to see files and folders side by side on your desktop. They also allow you to synchronize files, replicate folders, perform backups and do file and folder comparisons. These programs will allow you to compare source codes which will keep file and folders in sync, and compare program output and validate copies of your files. The side by side view makes it very easy to spot differences among the files. Comparison of files based on size timestamp and cyclical redundancy check is another way to check and compare folders and files. File Search And Management Software A file manager is actually a computer program that helps to organize and manage several file systems, such as database file systems, disk, network, transactional and other file systems on the computer. An efficient file management system lets you speed up common tasks like creating, opening, viewing, editing, searching files and many other activities. A typical file manager exhibits your files in a tree-like hierarchy. Some file managers even give you backward links, letting you get back to your first step, thereby completing the task more efficiently. Yet others let you work with network connections, like searching and editing files saved directly on the Net, such as FTP, NFS and the like. Local Disk Search Tools There are many extensive searches that can be done to help you locate files. You can search by using the tab on the start menu. Then you can pick whether you want to search by file name, type of file, date of the file, by keywords within the file, or by the size of the file. There are numerous ways to find a specific document or file you need. Some symbols can help you search easier. Use the wildcard symbols * and ? To help specify what you need. The * also ca be used to look for certain types of files. If you want all wma files, then search for *.wma. ? replaces any character in the file name. For example, if you are searching for files on Zimbabwe, but are unsure of how to spell it, you could type in Zimbab??. Does Presentation With Pictures Work Better? What about using graphic if your PowerPoint presentation? Does it make sense? I'm sure you heard something like "our graphics will make your presentation looks professional" or "make it vivid", but you still must understand why you use or do not use graphics in your presentation. The first fact is that pictures are easier for visual perception than text, but pictures will not contain as much information as text will. So, use pictures to add some life to your presentation, to point on key concepts and ideas. Data Leak Prevention - Protect Your Business Most businesses and other enterprises have access control devices in place such as access control lists, defined permissions, encryption, or firewalls, just to name a few. Yet authorities confirm that these devices are not as effective as one would hope, given the vast amount of materials which circulates via the internet. Probably the majority of these breaches occur because most control features in IT systems and other company directed security measures are focused on those villains who attempt to come into the company records from the outside. Most companies are less aware and thus more subject to violations of electronic access due to inside access, whether malicious or accidental. Last year, a Global Security Study reported that a staggering 49% of companies stated they had experienced a breach of security from internal sources. Specifically, of this group, the majority of incidents (31 percent) were caused by a virus or worm experience, nearly one third were through deliberate fraud by an insider. another 18 percent reported data leakage. Nearly all the the respondents reported concern about employee misconduct in regard to data systems. Document Comparison - Eliminate Time-consuming Process Whenever a business or organization is working with a great many documents, it's important to have a means of ensuring that changes in those documents are identified and logged. When multiple changes are made in a working copy during the course of negotiations, or legal settlements, it's important that all changes are tracked so that the most current form of the document is the one which is being used and contains the agreed upon terms, conditions and wording. Changes may be made in an online document by the owner, by the reviewer, or by other contributors to the end product. To do the document comparison process manually is both time-consuming and difficult. It can require a staggering amount of time and energy to review and document each change. First the changes must be determined by looking at a printed document. Then the modifications in the original document on line must be cut and pasted from the modifications copy. Sometimes there is a process of merging two documents which must be done with further comparison and possibly further editing. Pdf Search Engine: 2d Searches PDF, which is an acronym for portable document formant was initially developed by Adobe Systems beginning in 1993. Its primary purpose was to represent two dimensional documents in a way that was independent both of the device and the display resolution. a pdf file can typically be read by most web browsers on most devices. PDF files include the complete description of either a two-dimensional or with Acrobat 3D, three-dimensional documents. Currently pdf files are considered open standard. Preparation for submission as an ISO standard is in process. Over the years, pdf files have become the accepted way of capturing and storing two and now three dimensional images. Governmental jurisdictions, colleges and university research archives, medical records and many other applications have been converted to pdf files so that full retention is available and searchable. This allows massive amounts of information to be protected and stored in much the same way as microfiche and microfilm used to be retained. However, the use of the computer for preparation and storage of the files means that almost anyone with a desktop has access to the information. No longer is it necessary to have a bulky microfiche or microfilm reader in order to view the images. Compare File Software - Find Better Tool Within Various Compare Utilities Whatever the source code language, C++, C#, Visual Basic, Object Pascal, Java, Perl or any other, the ability to compare file or compare text contents accurately and quickly can make the difference between delivering a project on schedule and on budget or a project management nightmare. In this article we shall examine some of the compare file utilities available on the market. Active File Compare from Formula provides a compare file and compare text solution delivered in side by side windows with highlighted code lines if they differ. This utility also provides the facility to manage changes being made by several authors and includes a file manager which manages folder contents when loaded, saved or copied. Compare Folders Utilities - - Eliminate Manual Checking And Save Your Time How many times have you saved a document to a disk from your office PC to take home to work on and then had to do the double take to see which document is the current one and what changes have been made at the office by someone else ? How about when there are multiple users accessing documents stored centrally and saving the current version to their local hard drive without you knowing which version is the one you need to be contributing to ? Compare folders and compare directories utilities are essential tools for team management and your own data management when multiple devices and users are accessing and changing data. When you are looking at compare folder utilities here are some questions to ask when selecting a solution and identify some of the features you will need. The primary function of compare folders and compare directories utilities is to ensure that disparate files and documents are synchronized and replicated across team members and then properly backed-up. Doing this manually is not only time consuming but prone to error, and both of these can prove to be extremely expensive. Look for utilities that offer a visual display to compare folders and compare directories so you can see the differences highlighted, dated and by whom the alteration has been made. This will make it far easier for you to manage and focus in on any issues that may arise. Search Microsoft Office Files, Create An Ms Word File Database Instead of having dozens, hundreds or perhaps thousands of MS Word documents, importing them all into one searchable database will stop endless hours being lost searching for information through even the most organized set of directories and folders. There are a number of software solutions on the market that will not only allow you to import MS Word documents but also .pdf files, html and web documents, emails and others. This approach has already been seen by many public email providers such as Google, who are including a search tool for search text strings of your email store in exactly the same way as you perform an internet search. Once you have compiled a Word document database, it becomes relatively simple to search the database for information enclosed in the disparate files and documents with many solutions offering the ability to tailor searches on varying parameters aside from search text strings. Wildcard characters and fuzzy searches will allow users to find information based upon intuition rather than absolute knowledge of the information being sought. Balanced Scorecard Software: Redefining The Measure Of Success The concept of Balance Scorecard has been utilized by businesses and organizations since the early 1990's Over the years, it has gone through many iterations, with some sometimes significant changes in character by users. Initially the concept was intended to measure the activities of the company in terms of its vision and strategies rather than solely on a financial basis. The comprehensive view of the performance of the business forces managers to target the performance markers which measure success. Because it balances financial objectives with customer viewpoints, employee perspective and process planning, these measurements become the framework of future success. Software which assists in the formalization of the balanced scorecard principles helps managers focus on the questions at hand and how to develop successful strategies and measurements for the future. Compare Excel Spreadsheet: Measurement Of Errors, Ideals And Progress Because Excel spreadsheets are the standard for any mathematical calculations, it is fairly common for many different worksheets to be developed over time which will have roughly the same format or will attempt to capture the same information. In this instance, if there is to be comparison of the same information over time, there are only two ways to approach the data collection phase. 1. You can link the two worksheets manually and prepare a third worksheet which will display the difference between the two either as a positive or negative change. This generally requires a significant amount of manual checking and linking and the information is only as good as the attention to detail present in the one who is preparing the report. You could also perform this same series of steps but without linking the two worksheets in Excel How Do I Compare Folders And Files On Different Machines That Should Have The Same Contents? Imagine you are part of a team working on a project that has files all over the place in folders stored on different machines, perhaps on the server and a few of the clients. One member is writing up the technical manual, another team member writes up the training guide, another pulls both of these text files down because they are road testing the guides against the machine that is being developed. In this article we are going to look at some options for you. The big question is, how do you make sure that all of these files and the project folder are always up to date and everyone is working on the same material? Balanced Scorecard Design Toolkit Balanced Scorecard concept is about measure and control. The first step is to determine the goal of Balanced Scorecard: it should help to measure and control the performance of business unit. The next step is to assign a target performance values and develop a plan to archive the target results. The final step is controlling the performance, re-thinking business and separate business processes. Balanced Scorecard must be a document packed with performance information. That’s why it is the best way to share management and business goal ideas with colleagues. Robert Kaplan and David Norton in early 1990’s suggested performance measurement perspectives: Financial Perspective, Customer Perspective, Internal Processes Perspective, Employee Learning and Growth Perspective. These perspectives are must-use basic groups. Even if it’s necessary to describe the business unit that is not involved in sales, financial perspective must be taken in account. Using these four perspectives is a guaranty that all aspects of business will be considered carefully. How Many Key Performance Indicators Should Be Taken Into Account To Manage Business? Managing large business is a hard task as CEO should take into account a lot of factors that affect or may affect business. It's important to see what business was in the past, what business is now and what it is going to be. On of the approaches to managing business is developing key performance indicators which will tell how the business is working, where the problems are and what can be done about this. Business performance indicators base on metrics as a way to measure performance in numbers, for instance, if CEO should evaluate and manage it security within a company, then "Security Controls" metric should be developed to determine the efficiency of closing significant system weaknesses. You Company Is Growing Fast? It's A Time To Think About Possible Information Leakages. Do you know all possible ways to take information out of company so that no one would know about this? I'm sure, even there are some certain security rules there are still some possible ways for information leakage. Let's think about how can we control this process. First, it's necessary to understand that there no any absolute means about security. Even if USB port it blocked, it's still possible to write some data to USB, if there is system that controls outgoing mails, then it's still possible to use some trick that intruder might use to send out important data out of the company. Get A Valuable Feedback From Your Presentation It's quite easy to prepare presentation and do a speech, actually you will still need some skills, but there are many people and services willing to help you with slides. Some suggest you a custom tools, which will simplify the process of PowerPoint presentation development, other suggest to buy a nice looking graphics, so that your presentation will look professional. What do you miss? If you have the most successful slides in the world you will still need to prepare a nice speech and make people who listen to you believe what you talk about. It's really important not just to talk about the topic, but get the feedback. Kpi Start-up - Learn How To Design, Fill With Data And Use Key Performance Indicators KPI term is for key performance indicators, the KPI concept is about measuring and controlling business performance focusing on the most important performance indicators. Does this concept works? How to make use of it? There might be a number of viewpoints on KPI, and this concept can be used on various level of organization. For instance, CEO might use KPI to measure and control business, also, some managers can design and use KPI for their department. World-clock: What Time Is In Japan Now? Computer clocks are they for fun or for profit? I guess both. If you are doing international business, then I'm sure you'd like to know what the time is now in Tokyo, I know it's easy to calculate the time difference, but I guess it's not what most people like to do. That is the reason why most market traders put the analogue clock on the wall to see what the time is. People like to have visually appealing clocks and it is confirmed by what Microsoft company is doing now. Old days there were just clocks in system tray, telling the time in format "10:41", for now in Vista you will find nice looking analog clock with looks more like wrist-watch clock that digital clocks. Balanced Scorecard Vs. Kpi Balanced Scorecard concept reefers to the theory of metrics linked by the specific rules, where the total value is calculated using specific formulas. Balanced Scorecard is talked a lot about, but there are some applications of Balanced Scorecard concept which are sometime overlooked. For instance, combination of metrics, used in Balanced Scorecard can be easily used for benchmarking, e.g. comparing your product or service against competitors. What metrics should be used to compare your product to your rival's solution? There are many opinions, but the most reasonable answer sounds as: "Why should I reinvent something new, I can use the same metrics as I use for my business". Performance Managed Customer Support Service Customer service is not something which will generate you a sales directly, but customer service is something that is really important for any business. Actually, good customer service can generate you a sales as good as a well-trained sales agent does. The question is: how to make a customer serviced that will generate sales? The answers must focus on measure and control. One must measure and control the performance of call center trying to identify potential problems and good solutions, it's important to find and share both - good and bad experience, it's important to make a training process perfect, it's important to make the control process better than ever, as it's very easy with up today technologies. Measure And Control Human Resources Performance The business success is about taking right people to the right place on right time. So what is the problem? Actually, if you need to manage not one, but five employees or better five groups of employees, then you face the problem of measuring and control. It's hard to tell whether one group is performing better or not, it becoming hard to compare one employees success against other one, it's hard to see the unique features of people. So what the solution is? The key metrics and key indicators, which will tell you how to manage your stuff right. There are two approaches I suggest to take into account when thinking about human resources (HR) at your company. First, you can think in terms of process, second you can think it terms of how do employees affect the whole business. Metrics To Measure And Control The Performance Of Sales Department The salespeople and company sales force are those who actually generate your income dollars. Sure, it's important to have a good product, support which can respond fast, pretty design and make people write about your company in magazines, but still the most important part is to get the resulted leads converted into actual dollars. It's quite easy to organize the sales department. For instance, you can hire someone who have experience in managing this kind of department in other company. He or she will hire a team of sales professionals and they will generate some revenue for your business. Metrics For Talented Employees What is the most important task of any HR department? I think the one thing they can do is to find and keep talented people within company. The problem is that these people are usually not like others (that's why you want to hire they!), they do not pay much attention to salary you suggest, they don't want to have stock options and don't think in terms of profit and loose. You goal is to find these people, hire them and keep them in company as long as you can. That is the main goal of any HR department. Let's discuss how to manage talents in your company. The first task is to find gifted people, I'm sure you know how to find people to hire, but the task here is to find talented? How to do it? Well, I cannot advise much here, you will need to talk with hundreds to find the one, more over you will probably need to provide some people with test job to find the right person. But there is an indicator that you are performing well: if you will find something that is not usual and is extraordinary, pay attention to this person. Cutting Call-center Costs The call-center is theoretically the place with a lot of phones and people sitting next to each other talking at the same time. But does this is a call-center you should dream about? I'd prefer if my phone would ring just few times a day with a very particular questions, focused on my business or better sales-oriented question. There is a lot you can do to cut your call-center expenses. But the first step is to measure them and measure the performance of your call-center. It's a good idea to start with running costs. How much does it cost to run a single seat? What if you will be outsourcing some questions to a more cheaper operator. More over, there are some questions that your web-site can answer easily, for instance if you will put product brochures, manuals or frequently asked questions online, then you will save huge time. Call Center Performance Management Call Centers, or customer services receiving and transmitting multiple requests by telephone, were introduced as offshoots of telecommunications providing streamlined service for consumers of large companies with extensive customer support needs. Normally, a call center is able to handle a considerable volume of calls at the same time, i.e. to screen calls and forward them to skilled support staff, where most issues can be resolved. Organizations starting from mail-order catalog companies and telemarketing companies to computer product help desks use call centers. Typically, there are two types of calls ? inbound and outbound. The latter suggests the agent's calling potential customers with intentions to sell or service which is amply used in telemarketing. Apart from it inbound calls are made by the customer to get information or ask for help reporting malfunction of the product. That's where the problem of management performance is acute. Performance measures and benchmarking are indispensable to any well-run call center to eliminate criticism of call centers on common themes such as non-expert operators, poor training of agents incapable to process customers' requests effectively, automated queuing systems resulting in long hold times, operators working from a script, etc. Benchmarking, typically associated with strategic management, presupposes evaluation of business processes in relation to best practice and helps to develop plans with the aim of increasing performance levels. At large benchmarking reforms all the levels of the company ? from the state of mind of the employees to that of top managers, penetrating into the whole hierarchical organization of the organization. The gist of benchmarking is to break the resistance to change by employing methods different from the currently used ones that might be less effective in order to increase certain aspects of performance. It Is Important To Measure A Performance Is it really important to measure a business performance? I think if you will even need to purchase someone's business, then you will never ask this question and the answer will be "Yes! Sure!", because if you do not measure the performance of the business that you are going to purchase you will be going blind. Then why people don't like to measure the performance of their own businesses? When you are inside, you see a lot, I would say you can see to much business and business mechanism, you are flowed with unimportant data, you having too many things to care about and sometime you even don't understand where this business is going. If you are a manager, then it is not a problem, but if you are CEO, then you have to think about things like this. Helpdesk Performance Metrics As more and more business are making use of helpdesks to interact with customers, both in terms of orders and customer complaints or technical questions, it is apparent that such call centers should have standardized measurements to use in determining level of performance for both the individual customer representative and the entire facility. Some of the common performance measurements which are used to track helpdesk performance are listed below. Wait time in the queue - This is usually stated in minutes on the average, that the caller is likely to experience in the wait line. Some helpdesk software will inform the caller with statements such as 'the estimated wait time is XX minutes' The caller can then determine whether or not he wants to wait for a helpdesk professional to come on the line. Business Kpi: Measurement Of Success Business KPI or business key performance indicators are also known as key success indicators (KSI) are created for the purpose of measuring and defining the progress of the organization toward reaching its stated goals. When a business goes through the process of analyzing its mission, naming those who have a stake in the mission and stating its goals, the business then ready to define how it will measure the progress toward reaching the goals. These measurements are known as key performance indicators. Several characteristics of key performance indicators are important to keep in mind in selecting them Call Center Kpi's - Getting The Most Out Of Metrics A business adage is that you can't manage what you don't measure, but given the huge amounts of data available where do you begin ? Implementing a software based CRM will allow you to rapidly collect data from a huge array of sources, while integrating this with other data collection processes such as accounting, will produce even more. So where do we start with all of this and, more importantly, at what point do we need to stop. First principles, ask yourself how is the call center performing? If you can't answer that question but have reams of performance metrics pouring out of your ears, this article is for you. Call Center Management - Problems With Kpi Measurement Using KPI's for performance measurement is a well documented, tried and tested management tool. Issues arise however, with what the metrics are actually telling us and the validity of the underlying raw data. You can see what we mean when you consider some of the top metrics commonly used to measure call center performance; call quality, service level, customer satisfaction, average speed of answer, first call resolution, employee satisfaction and so on. The fact is that many of these metrics are subjective and not qualitative. Achieving consistency across the metrics being gathered becomes even more problematic when you consider the number of different sources from which the raw data is collected. Call time is easily and accurately measured, however customer satisfaction comes from the customer themselves and one customers perception will differ from another and the same applies to employee satisfaction. Other KPI metrics, such as adherence to call center telephone policies will fall to be reported by a supervisor or other observer adding yet another source of metric data and broadening the problem of consistency with the raw data. Brand Evaluation Using Balanced Scorecard And Kpi Strong brand is the most valuable intangible asset of the company. Although brands are not listed on corporate balance sheets, they play key role in determining the company's success in the long-term perspective. Successful brands allow companies to effectively manage premium prices, reduce relative power of the trade, increase communication effectiveness, attract managerial talent, and reduce vulnerability to downturns. Scorecards or KPIs based on the drivers of brand value, provide focused and actionable measures for optimal brand management. According to the research conducted by Interbrand, one of the leading brand consultancies, strong brands account for over a third of shareholder value. Share prices of companies with well-known brands have significantly higher investment returns and lower risk rate when compared to the stock market as a whole. Measure Customer Service Performance: How To Treat A Customer Like A Customer. There are many measurements and choices of what to measure in order to decide whether an adequate guarantee of customer service is being met. However, it is unfortunate that many businesses select the wrong factors to measure or the select the correct elements to measure but make some logic leaps which means the collected data is false or misleading. A frequent error is to make the assumption that any two or more metrics can separated from the others. As an example, a business call center may measure an employee's performance level by setting maximum average times to complete a customer call. On the corporate level, management may count the number of calls handled during a specific time period and assume that more calls answered means better service. Sales Performance: How To Measure The Effectiveness Of The Sales Department The performance of the sales department of your organization is probably tied to such measurements as the total revenue or sales revenue per product. You may even have geographical information such as revenue from the Northwest or the Gulf States. But in truth, the revenue is not a totally effective tool to measure the effectiveness of the sales department. As with any key performance indicators, there need to be a combination of measures which take into account by the scope and the quantity. Calculating the revenue produced with the existing sales department is simple. It's a mathematical calculation. But, by drilling down in the key performance indicators for the sales department, you begin to get a better picture of the effectiveness of the sales department. For example, if the only performance indicator used for the sales department is the revenue for the company, the changes in revenue may have nothing to do with the sales department at all. It could be the effectiveness of the marketing campaign, or it could be the fact that the only other supplier of the product just went out of business. Perhaps the niche group that you're selling the product to just became much larger, such as a product which targets people over the age of retirement. Determining Kpi Metrics For Measuring Brand Impact On Your Business The idea of a brand is deeply rooted in the psyche of managers as being associated with the delivery of tangible products to consumers but today we are increasingly delivering intangible services rather than goods so is branding still relevant. Traditionally a business has been viewed by senior management as split into discrete divisions, sales and marketing, production, HR, IT, legal and accounting. Some divisions created revenue and b the brand identity was important for customer recognition and action needed to be taken to maximize that while other divisions created cost that reduced the brand value and this needed to be cut. Following this methodology would logically result in increased profits. This led in practice to highly dysfunctional decision making with, for example, IT staff being cut only for decreased effectiveness across the business producing reducing sales generation and increasing costs in other parts of the business. Making The Most Of Your Supply Chain Metrics To Leverage Competitive Advantage The majority of KPI dashboards are in fact overloaded with metrics and the key to getting the most out of your SCM intelligence is in choosing the most appropriate metrics that are key to providing decision makers with the necessary information to deliver informed decisions when they need it. Using dashboards that are carrying large numbers of KPI's does not deliver information to SCM managers so they can make optimal decisions. Focusing on the key metrics that identify the main source of SCM business performance is vital and reducing the number of metrics used allows managers to understand better and far more intuitively what a metric is actually trying to tell them. "Less is more" or TMI (Too Much Information) are two of the comments that you will hear from SCM experts who truly understand the components of the business supply chain from procurement, processing and through to customer delivery. In the very recent few years, with the introduction of RFID technology that allows tagging of containers, pallets and individual shipment items replete with a mass of raw data on content, models, color, specification, origination and so on , it is extremely tempting to dive in and start thinking that all this data that we are now routinely able to collect and collate can somehow be manipulated to provide SCM managers with even more information that will help them make better and more profitable decisions. property metrics,property scorecard,real estate,real estate metrics,real estate scorecard Getting your supply chain management right can give your business competitive advantage by lowering costs, greater efficiency and improving customer satisfaction by getting goods to customers faster. The impact of technology with the use of RFID tags to track pallets and shipments electronically and merging this into the stock and order management system is making the SCM aspect of a business an area of substantial opportunity for creating competitive advantage. Now that all sounds fantastic with the ability to track individual shipments through the supply chain and maintaining data on product, serial codes, description, quantity and so on. Combining RFID data with barcode information creates even more information that can be manipulated and collected. Top Ten Real Estate Performance Metrics For Your Property Scorecard Today we are in an enviable position with the technology resources available to us that allow collection and almost instantaneous data manipulation and presentation for management. We are now in a position of tracking metrics for our property scorecard that a few short years ago were simply not possible. Unfortunately this massive information collection capacity leads to other problems such as information overload and developing a true understanding of what the metrics are telling us. Ensuring that real estate managers are developing real skill to unleash the potential that metrics and a property scorecard gives them is still an issue, not only using the scorecard to track performance but to use the KPI's to forecast business health and prescribe solutions for problems diagnosed. So, without any further ado, here are the top ten real estate metrics for your property scorecard: Get Rid Of Browser Cookies Web cookies are text files that are sent by your server to a web page and then sent back each time you visit that particular site. The term came from a well known idea in Unix computing called the “Magic Cookie.” They are used for tracking and browsing behavior. A good example is Amazon. If you place items in your shopping cart and turn the machine off without paying, the cookies will allow your items to stay in the cart until you return to shop again. Keep Your Identity Safe - Data Leak Prevention Identity theft can happen to anyone at anytime. Usually this happens when someone steels personal identification from you such as a Social Security number, a credit car number, or a bank account number without your knowledge or permission. These types of theft involve such crimes as fraud, and other crimes. These crimes take on many forms. Thieves may rent an apartment, obtain a credit card or establish a telephone account in your name. Sometimes you may not even find out about the theft until it is too late. The only way to tell about the theft is by looking on your credit card statement, reviewing your credit report and noticing charges that you didn't make, or even having been contacted by a debt collector. Thieves skilled at identity theft use a variety of ways to obtain your information. Rummaging through trash looking for bills or other paper with your personal information is one way they steal. They also will pretend to be a financial institution and call you, send spam, and use pop-up messages to entice you to reveal your personal information. Occasionally they will complete a change of address form to have your mail sent to another location. There is also the old fashioned way of stealing your purse, wallet or even your mail to obtain your identity information. Once they have this information the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and anything is possible. Keep Your Identity Safe - Data Leak Prevention Identity theft can happen to anyone at anytime. Usually this happens when someone steels personal identification from you such as a Social Security number, a credit car number, or a bank account number without your knowledge or permission. These types of theft involve such crimes as fraud, and other crimes. These crimes take on many forms. Thieves may rent an apartment, obtain a credit card or establish a telephone account in your name. Sometimes you may not even find out about the theft until it is too late. The only way to tell about the theft is by looking on your credit card statement, reviewing your credit report and noticing charges that you didn't make, or even having been contacted by a debt collector. Thieves skilled at identity theft use a variety of ways to obtain your information. Rummaging through trash looking for bills or other paper with your personal information is one way they steal. They also will pretend to be a financial institution and call you, send spam, and use pop-up messages to entice you to reveal your personal information. Occasionally they will complete a change of address form to have your mail sent to another location. There is also the old fashioned way of stealing your purse, wallet or even your mail to obtain your identity information. Once they have this information the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and anything is possible. Clear Browser Cache - Why And How The idea behind clearing your browser's cache is simple, cache equates to space and every computer needs as much space as physically possible in order to operate at its optimum performance. Speed is the key to the kind of computer human relationship that prevents irritation. Clearing your browser's cache is straightforward and should be carried out regularly. How straightforward is clearing your browser's cache? This example uses Explorer 6 to describe how to clear a cache but anticipate that the majority of browsers will follow the same processes. Worried About Leaking Data? Protection Is Available Every person who uses a computer that is connected to the Internet needs to be concerned about their computer's data leaking out to cyberspace. No matter what size your business or if your concerned about your personal computer data being threatened. There are several ways to ensure data protection from theft. Data protection is one of the most important challenges being faced today by both the home computer and the business computer. Several important tools available to protect your data are: firewalls, virus protection software, and backup software either onsite or online. One of the most important tools to protecting data leakage is yourself or your employees. Often valuable data will be lost through laziness, accidental loss by people who are careless, or other plain user actions. To protect yourself from such losses you will need a layered security system. It Safety: The Burning Thing To Think Over In order to understand what we do to for IT-safety, we have to pay attention to its base - computer safety. And we should remember that there are any not important parts of our data, even if it is just benchmark, we have to do everything to protect it from hackers. The majority of hacker frauds are possible because of existing software vulnerability. More and more harmful code appears in Web. This code implements to the computers, makes planned actions and continues the further spread. Nowadays such vulnerabilities are sought intentionally, by the hackers as well as by the producers. The first are trying to use bags in order to get access to the information resources, the second are trying to keep own reputation and clients' information resources safe. E.g., if in 2004 the ratio of frauds was 1 fishing to 943 e-mails, in 2005 the ratio was 1 fishing to 304 e-mails. Document Vulnerabilities With Windows Xp - Improve Your Security XP users still outnumber Vista users and that is likely to continue for quite some time as business users await their software refresh cycles to come around before upgrading to the new operating system. Meanwhile, the personal user market holds back and waits for any issues with Vista to be taken care of before parting with the hefty price tag for the new OS. With that in mind, it makes a lot of sense to revisit the XP security basics for maintaining security and avoiding getting hit by an online nasty.. The release of Service Pack 2 (SP2) attempted to deal with some of the more common security issues presented to users. A major loophole that was addressed was the vulnerability from opening a document from the Web by clicking on a hyperlink which opens a document containing malicious code and which then gains access to the users machine. Notwithstanding the efforts of Microsoft to enhance document security, it is incumbent on the user to be aware of the inherent risks of opening Web based documents. It Security Measurement - How Well Are My It Security Dollars Being Spent ? A stark simple reason for a relatively low budgetary priority for IT security is the simple fact that the vast portion of an IT budget has to be committed to maintaining infrastructure and users followed by development of these same systems to meet ever increasing business demands. IT security has always fallen a long way down the totem of priorities however the requirement to safeguard IT resources from external and internal threats has caused a shift in approach in recent years. The issue becomes how do businesses know what actually generates the best return for the dollar spend on security? Given the abstract nature of IT security, performance can only be reasonably measured in a relative fashion by assessing trends and benchmark standards against industry peers. It is only once a track record of metrics has been established that a business can look internally at how well it is spending IT security budgets and what the loss expectancy is from threats to security of the IT infrastructure. To attempt to implement IT security metrics without proper control over the process and identification of the KPI's that will comprise the balanced scorecard will only contribute to the plethora of data being collected, but do little for contributing to the business itself. The highly technical nature of the IT function and the even more elaborate area of IT security does not lend itself easily to being understood by non-technical managers while IT management themselves have often failed to embrace the need for a business case for allocating a budget. Can The Most Recently Accessed (mru) Docs Be A Security Hole? Are recently accessed files a security problem? Unfortunately, the answer is YES. The first task the intruder will face when need to crack sensitive files on your computer is to find them. The key will be the list of most recently used files (MRU), which is available in almost any program and in Windows. During your casual work it's a great time saver, as you don't need to find file to open, but when someone else have an access to your computer it became a dangerous security hole. Is there any way to get rid of the list of recently accessed files? Actually, yes and it is quite easy to do. First, you should get the name of file (files) that you want to remove from recently opened list, then you should find the place where the list is kept and then you should remove the particular record. Housecleaning Your Computer Hard Drive: Wipe Disk Free Space From the earliest beginnings of computer usage the issue of how to prevent private or sensitive information from being recovered has been discussed. People used to be careful about putting files of this sort into the recycle bin, then emptying the recycle bin. It has become more apparent now though that is procedure does not prevent the access to any and all information which is or has been stored on the computer at any time in its history. Another method commonly believed to eradicate private files is the process of defragmentation. Then the experts assured computer users that even defragmentation was not enough to permanently remove information from the computer. In essence the statement has been made that the only truly effective way to permanently destroy the information stored on a hard drive is to completely destroy the drive. Brand Metrics - How Do You Measure The Performance Of Your Online Brand? Online marketers have always enjoyed an advantage over their offline counterparts in that it is simple and easy to track visitors and their behavior on the target website from a simple mouse click of a visitor. Traditional online brand metric tools have utilized the "click-to-sale" philosophy of how a website should be positioned and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has grown up as an online industry to make websites rank higher for the search engines. In recent years this has slowly been changed as brand advertisers have also latched onto the power of social networking sites that look to engage and provide a fusing of the traditional television/radio style media in an online context. No longer is it enough to simply saturate a website with keywords in order to increase search engine ranking and by that, increase traffic. The emphasis is increasingly on delivering not only traffic with the money to spend on your product but also on delivering information to search engine users that is directly relevant to them. This requires a more sophisticated approach to web marketing that takes us away from the click-to-sale model and weakens the use of brand metrics as a performance measure. File Compare Tools To Servive If you've ever been working with files in your software program and suddenly realized the data changed in a way you hadn't planned, it is often due to an error in data entry, coding or even programming files. In the past, in order to find out where the difference, error or change had occurred, you would need to do a line by line, or sometimes word by word comparison of before and after files in order to correct the problem. This process can be very time-consuming, especially where there are lines of programming code which must be reviewed individually or pages of mathematical formulas which must be checked. Sales Potential - Using Kpi's To Measure Sales Performance Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) are performance metrics that management use to help make effective decisions to guide a business and enhance performance. Common sales performance metrics include total sales revenues, number of sales, average order value, repeat sales, sales for year-to-date, and so on. These metrics on their own only provide part of the story however, and as a sales or business manager you need to be able to understand what the metrics actually represent and how they are affecting your overall business performance. Looking at KPI's in isolation is not of such great help, but when you are able to look at trends and the relationships between metrics and how these integrate to form a complete picture, you are well on your way to unleashing the power of the metric. Certain sales metrics provide more information than others, for instance gross sales is quite an accurate and absolute indicator however it does little for providing information on it's own, particularly if you are looking to maximize profitability with a diverse product range. Similarly, it is of little use if you are looking to direct sales efforts by incentivizing sales of certain product lines that provide the greatest contribution to the bottom line. In short, you need to use a range of KPI's to provide a fuller picture of overall sales performance. Performance Of Sales Department: A Measurement Of How Well The Salespeople Are Selling Sales revenue is usually considered to be one of the most important measurements of how well a business or organization is succeeding and that may be true in part, although a more accurate measurement of the company's performance would be the net profit before taxes. However, even this figure, i.e. net profit, has little bearing on a question about how effective the sales department is in doing their job of sales. In order to determine effectiveness of the sales department or any other department, the company must look at a different kind of measurement. The first step in the process is necessarily the development of the objectives for the entire company, usually determined by such methods as the Balanced Scorecard process. This requires an understanding of the difference between measuring revenue and determining performance measurements. Depending upon the size and complexity of the organization this could be a simple or a difficult process. Once the company has determined how progress toward the goal of a better bottom line will be measured, then some more specific performance indicators for the various departments can be developed. There may be performance indicators for the marketing department, the call center and the sales department. Each of these can be isolated so that the department is only being Killer Presentation: How To Design Your Own The first, and probably the main goal of any presentation is to sale. That is what most presentation authors forget about. Sure, presentation must looks nice and sure, it must be a little funny, but its main goal is to sale your product, your business your consulting service or something else. So how to design presentation that not just show something, but sale it? There are some key principles, which will bring you right to the successful presentation. Measuring The Return On Investment Of The Hr Function Traditionally measuring a Return on Investment followed a fairly standard calculation method - look at the profit generated and divide that by the value of the assets being utilized in creating that profit. Pretty simple until you start applying the calculation to non-profit generating divisions such a HR. Using traditional ROI we would logically conclude that the HR function needed to be cut but we know that HR provides value to the business. So if we know that value is being created by the HR function how do we get to that value and how do we then manage HR activities to maximize that value for the benefit of the business as a whole? How To Generate More Revenue With Your Powerpoint Presentation Online Representing your product online is as critical as sales process itself. What do you do in real-life if you want to sale something to some company? Yes, you call them, assign an appointment and then show them your presentation designed in PowerPoint or some other tool. What changed today? All changes are about time, if you will sell fast, then you will be able to get more profits. We are making our presentations more vivid, we are trying to add more graphics and audio to make it looks really great. Keywords Niche Marketing Strategy Have you ever needed to promote a product online? It was really easy five years ago, but today you will deal with great number of competitors, SEO optimizations, internet marketing professionals, etc. Is there a chance to will search engines battle, if you have low resources? The answer is - YES! You can win if you will not try to fight large companies and competitors with almost unlimited resources. You chance is to win in a very tight segment of market, people can this segment "niche". Why it is important to dominate in niche, not in the whole market? Because it is easier and cheaper, if you will be able to dominate in a certain niche, you will have a base for the future market attacks, more over you will be able to generate revenue fast, right after business start-up, as your goals will be to fight a very tight niche, not the whole market. Deleting A File Doesn't Mean It's Deleted Forever So How Do You Securely Erase Data From A Computer? It is a common misconception of PC users that once they have dropped a file into the recycle bin and emptied it that that is it, the file is gone for good. Wrong! The Idiots Guide To Showing Hidden And Password Protected Files On Windows Getting Windows to show the hidden files on the PC is pretty straight forward; here are the sequences of Windows clicks and options you need to follow to get up the hidden files: 1. In Windows Explorer, (for this select "Start"=>"All Programs"=>"Windows Explorer") 2. Select "Tools" and go to "Folder Options" 3. Click on the "View" tab 4. On the "Hidden files and folders" tab, click on "Show hidden files and folders" The Difference Between Deleting And Shredding Data May Mean The Difference Between Securing Your Bank Account And Becoming An Identity Theft Victim! Users think that placing a file into the recycle bin and then emptying the contents is all that they need to do to delete a file. Performing the right mouse click and selecting delete for a file also makes the file vanish and you are safe. You'd better think again - the information is still there you just cannot see it because performing a file delete in Windows only acts to tell Windows XP not to display the file on your desktop or in the folder contents on your PC screen. Ezine Article Submission Secrets So what is the secret? Search engines are always trying to generate the most relevant search results in response to your query, but the problem is that it's hard to identify what results are relevant. The most popular search engine, Google, suggested a great way to find out if results are relevant or not, it combines different factors, but the most important is checking the number of back link. If you have a web-site and many people link to it, then search engine will think that it is relevant. Is everything so simple? Actually, no. It's not hard to get many back links by submitting web-site to on-line link catalogs. But this method will bring even bad web-site in the top of search results. It worked a year ago, it works today too, but search engines are trying to fight with this issue and the possibility of getting high in search results for sites like these is getting lower. Why search engines do this? Because having many back links is easy and everyone with enough money can get these back links. Measuring Marketing Performance Toolkit There exist many definitions of marketing, in fact, too many. Together with the progression of the Internet, and consequently the development of new marketing techniques, technologies and stratagem, new definitions of marketing are appearing in large numbers. However plural and diverse the definitions of marketing may be, the essence of the said remains intact. Marketing is still no doubt the unique function of the business enterprise and no prosperous business is possible nowadays without effective marketing. Most businesses believe that marketing effectiveness is expressed solely in numbers. Apparently, there are aspects (metrics) of marketing effectiveness that can be quantified and measured. The first and foremost goal of marketing is to create customers. Consequently, the effectiveness of this aspect of marketing can be evaluated by the number of new customers, new leads of a company or, in case of telemarketing, the number of completed calls. Another significant metric of effectiveness is the number of new products purchased by existing customers since the objective of any enterprise that intends to stay competitive in the market is not only to create new customers but to value and retain the ones they have already. Marketing Performance Measurement With Better Metrics With the intensive development of communications there appeared a great many diverse definitions of marketing. Whatever the definition marketing is regarded the unique function of business. At present no successful business is possible without effective marketing. One of the corner-stones of business Philip Kotler defines marketing as human activity directed at satisfying needs and wants through exchange processes. The marketing activities commonly include market research, new product development, product life cycle management, pricing, channel management and promotion. Article Submission Works Better Than Links Exchange Why use article marketing and not some other kind of marketing? To answer this questions we need to list first the types of online marketing that are popular today, then we will be able to compare results and will find out in what case article marketing works better than any other kind of marketing. Let's start with article marketing itself. First, what kind of investment you need to do? You will need to write an article for submission purpose and you will need to submit it to 100+ web-sites or just to few major ones. The costs for copywriting service start at 10$ per 500 words and depend a lot on quality of the article. As for submission you can do it yourself or find really cheap options, for instance you can submit to bulk sites for just 10$. What about results? You will have an article listed on hundred of sites, that tells about your niche, and you will have a link which points to your site. There are good chances that Google will treat this page and the link as useful. As link comes from article which is related to your web-site topic. Key Marketing Metrics: Are Your Marketing Strategies Effective? The importance of knowledge regarding key marketing metrics can't be denied by anyone who understands the concept of marketing theory. Yet, many marketing people, particularly ecommerce marketers don't regularly obtain, study and learn from several of the most basic key marketing metrics. In fact, a recent survey found that only ten percent of the companies surveyed had a budget intended specifically geared to measuring key marketing metrics. Key marketing metrics are a relatively new role in the structure of a successful organization. It is intended to measure the gap between the strategy for marketing the product or the business and its execution and the final results of that strategy, whether effective or not. Measure Marketing Actions: How Well Are Your Advertising Methods Working? The capability of determining how effective are the activities involved in marketing and to prove that value to the bottom line of the company is more important than ever before for professionals in the field of marketing. Marketing personnel must be able to place quantification markers on the effectiveness of existing programs and to trace and judge the return on the investment made in marketing over a period of time in order to be able to document that the budgets for the department or group are worthwhile. In perhaps no other area of business activities, marketing personnel must have quantification so they will know whether the investment is providing expected and anticipated returns. Marketing definitely is a business activity that requires tracking in real time. Manage Call-center Performance With Business Metrics Today's call center is not something about phone calls, it's a separate business that can... no it MUST generate revenue. It must provide company with fresh ideas, must help company to get new customers and archive business goals, it must work 24 hours a day, live response must be accessible within few seconds. Finally, the operator's response must solve customer problems immediately, must save customers that wished to cancel service and must generate revenue. There are various viewpoints on call center - operator view point, customer view point and management viewpoint. Customer wishes the problem to be solved. Operators' job is to solve the problem, actually operators' job is to find correct information quickly and provide it with customer in an easy to follow way. What about management? These people always make things working properly. So what is the best thing that call center manager can do? How to manage call center efficiently? The Balanced Scorecard approach is the best answer to these questions. Real Estate Customer Relationships Perspective It's recognized that a company's success is based not only on financial measures which, although important, are not indicative of customer, employee, or quality problems or opportunities. Besides costs and revenue, businesses looking for long-term profitability have to take into consideration customer relationships, employee skills and collaboration items. Leading companies tend to focus on a balanced approach to performance measurement to assess processes and identify which of them needs improving before it turns into a serious problem. Customer relations is one of the perspectives to choose measures of key importance. Calculating Contact/call Center Roi: How Do You Measure The Value Of Customer Satisfaction? A number of factors must be taken into consideration when calculating the contact or call center ROI. There are variances in how the call center is set up, such as where it is located, whether it is in house or outsourced, what the level of response is, whether the customer is able to speak to a live source or is simply referred to another location within the company. As companies become larger and larger, it is unfortunate that the contact people who are in the customer service business often know less and less about what is actually going on with the business. Measuring Roi On A Call Center Investment Traditional ROI calculations use the level of profit generated by an asset divided by the value of the asset and expressed as a percentage. That's fine but when we seek to ascribe a value to non-profit generating assets we need to look at ways in which we can quantify the value that the call center is contributing to overall business operations. Call center data management and manipulation has lent itself particularly well to KPI metric and Balanced Scorecard methodology. KPI/Balanced Scorecard techniques are a mainstay of the management of any call center and using the metrics that are being produced from these management information tools allows to start calculating an approximation for ROI. Hr Kpi - The Use Of Balanced Scorecard Metrics In Managing Human Resources HR is a crucial supporting function whether you have a team of 2 or 2,000 and business managers need to get the very best out of their people if they are to get the very best business performance. KPI's typically lend themselves to monetary or physical metrics such as dollar value of sales or number of widgets produced by a team or region. KPI's or balanced scorecard metrics (the two are essentially one and the same) provide management and decision makers with an overview of business performance and software based solutions give a dashboard type presentation that allows users to "drill down" to view performance at the micro level. Applying KPI's to non-monetary functions such as HR, that do not produce a tangible dollar benefit or a physical item in production still lend themselves to KPI analysis. We just have to look at what these business units (taking the HR department as the example) are actually producing in terms of training days delivered, staff turnover ratios, sick days taken. If you view the HR function as producing an indirect benefit to the business operation (which you will do if you are allocating the cost of the HR Department out to operating divisions) then it will follow that simply looking at training days delivered is not a useful measure of contribution to business performance. Combining training days delivered to the sales force coupled with increases in sales revenue would be a better metric that seeks to represent the correlation between training and improved revenue. Measure Training Performance. Tips And Tricks. Training is an area where performance metrics has been missing the point during the past years. This brings about a situation where either the wrong measurements are being selected to determine whether the training program is effective or training may be ignored in any real sense when planning for company over all business performance. Businesses can not control what they can't measure, so it's critically important to find and use the correct performance measurements for any investment which the organization makes, including that of training, which is certainly one of the most important investments which will be made by any organization. Real Estate Management Processes No matter what particular type of real estate your business has evolved ? residential, commercial or industrial ? a successful business model primarily focuses on real estate performance metrics, which help to streamline financial and operations processes. Monitoring the factors that affect the business particularly enhances the ability to improve the whole portfolio performance. Appropriate performance measures can include calculation of rates of return, space quality and comparison to market, unresolved transactions, monthly feedback by staff, accuracy and completeness of property records, quality assessment of properties, client surveys on staff performance and occupancy patterns. Real Estate Financial Perspective Businesses that can effectively manage utilization and costs associated with the assets get substantial benefits and boast effective company performance. Efficiency is the primary quality measured in the Financial Perspective, and with the Balanced Scorecard used as a measurement system, it particularly means that the strategy execution should lead to improved results. Planning real estate processes should be focused on the strategic importance of occupancy costs to define, manage and measure them. It will provide information of business's true profitability and lead to more accurate valuation of real estate assets. Compare And Merge Tools Will Help To Change Blog Template And Modify Htm Files Various compare tools designed to help businesses and individuals to get valuable information out of two versions of the same document. Software designers use compare utilities to check the code, highlight changes and write version info. Legal professionals use compare tools to analyze changes made within documents. Educators can compare student job against original key, quality assurance specialists use compare and merge tools to learn more about changes. There are a number of compare tools, some are freeware, other very expensive focused on a very specific task. The key difference between tools is what kind of documents can compare tool handle and in what way. 2007 Website Awards -what Is The Best Web-site? In the 2007 website awards ceremonies it is hard to say who might take the award for best website or any other category. The idea of conducting website awards ceremonies and giving out awards to websites around the web seems a bit strange as there are very few established industrial standards on the Internet. There are websites however, who distribute and create website awards for the purpose of creating publicity and improving public relations between the website and the public at large. The specific target of all this public relations effort in the facilitation of website awards is for the benefit of the consumer at large, since the consumer is of course the target of all advertising and marketing efforts. By creating this buzz and fanfare around website awards, website promoters can increase their exposure and profile to Web surfers and Internet inhabitants. Webmasters rely on these awards ceremonies to boost their visibility on the Internet and increase traffic to their websites, which is the all-important lifeblood of the commercial Web site. By utilizing these website awards and other gimmicks and techniques webmasters can increase pay and converting traffic to their websites. Article Marketing As Search Engine Friendly Strategy A business company can provide content to the newspaper or magazine free of charge and get its contact information printed with the article. This paper-print form of article marketing enables firms to obtain press space. Even more beneficial form providing publishers with free content and advertisers with free advertising is online article marketing. Article marketing campaigns serve to promote business sites. Free distribution of well-written interesting and informative articles with "bio boxes" and "by-lines" incorporating references and contact information can seriously contribute to enhancing the business credibility and gaining targeted customers. Prevent Data Leakages In Your Company With New Security Policy Locating sensitive files is one of the most important tasks of computer security audit and forensic data recovery. Security experts need to make sure that sensitive files are not available for third-parties and are kept in a secure way. Computer forensics specialists need to find these files for research purposes. Another problem is possible security leakages that security expert should prevent. What is the best way to securely manage files. The most important aspect is clear understanding of tasks that your company face. First, it's necessary to elaborate a security policy.

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