I am not advocating that going green is not good for the environment. I am just amused at the notion of so many jumping on the band wagon to promote products when the company really does nothing adhere to green initiatives in any other way than their green branding is meant to build sales. Jump on the political correctness train, what it can hurt if it increases your customer base.

Well, we do believe in green initiatives. You can certainly reference our landing page (www.penlandcorner.com) to see our strong statements on practicing green initiatives. Given the above, some explanation is in order.  You see, we do believe we should concentrate on making the world a better place for generations following us.  We do believe in clean air, modest consumption, and recycling. But at the end of the day, we believe that going green means reducing costs. Its that simple. Our clients engage us for a variety of reasons, and green initiatives are included.  What this ends up resulting in is that the green initiatives means designing IT centers and telecommunication strategies to significantly use less energy; optimize solutions so less maintenance and resources need to be applied. If you wish to categorize this as green under the political correct definitions, fine. But we categorize this as pure cost savings that can be applied straight to the bottom line or to facilitate growth and subsequently more jobs for our economy.

Call it “green”, OK. We call it great business sense, and that’s why we at PCC practice green consulting. It is good for our clients bottom line in cost savings and for the environment.

Web 2.0, as defined by Wikipedia, is

Web 2.0 is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web.

It is most closely associated with social networks Facebook and twitter, blogs, and web-based applications.   At the same time mobile devices and networks have made tremendous gains in data handling capacity, sophistication, and speed.  It is a nexus of high speed mobile networks and social networking, location based services (LBS), where I want to focus for this article.

While location based services such as fleet tracking have been around for a while they have historically been too expensive for most businesses to use.  Enter social networking.  Location based social networking applications like Loopt and Google’s Latitude may be instrumental in bringing LBS to a broader range of businesses.  Both of these web applications use the GPS chip in today’s cell phones along with mobile data connections to provide detailed geographic information about the cell phone user.  Ostensibly they are friend finder services.  You want to know where your friends are? Just pull up the application on your phone and it will show you their location on a map.  The applications also let you text message these friends.  Like all Web 2.0 applications they are open and collaborative.  They let the users decide how to use them.

It is  the openness and low (in some cases, free) cost of these applications that can make them useful to our clients.  For example, suppose you run a business that has people in the field.  It could be vending machine restocking or copier repair.  In all likelihood you field folks have cell phones.  You could uses these LBS applications to dispatch or keep track of your field people.  If one of your technicians need a part for a broken copier he could pull up Loopt, see what other technician is close, and call or message her to see if she has one on the truck.  That is much better than running back to the shop for a replacement.  Your technician wastes less time and you customer is up and running faster – everybody is happier.

This is just one example of how Web 2.0 can solve business problems.  Let us help you explore other ways new technologies can benefit your business.

For those who are unfamiliar with this service, a bill audit is fairly straightforward.  The audit is a comparison of the service provider invoices received by the client against the service providers internal records.  If errors are found we work with the service provider to correct the error going forward and request refunds on past over-billings. 

While this may seem straightforward in theory it is extremely complicated in practice.  The service provider’s customer records are written in an arcane codes called USOC codes.  The reasoning behind the USOC is best left to another time. Suffice it to say that everything in the network has a USOC code.  The combination of elements into features and features into saleable products that appear on an invoice is what make it complicated. 

There are a couple of reasons why we recommend the audit as a starting place in a cost savings program.

1. According to a Gartner Group study of a few years back upwards of 80% of all bills contain errors.  There are a number of reasons for this ranging deregulation of phone service to the myriad of incompatible billing systems brought on by the wave of mergers of the past few years.
2. The bill audit has no direct cost to the client.  Penland Corner offers  bill auditing on a contingency basis.  Our fees come out of the refunds and savings we find as a result of the audit.  No refund, no fee.
3. It is a logical starting place for a cost savings program.  It simply makes sense to get an accurate assessment of  current services and their costs before we start making changes.

We recommend that all of our clients get a telecom audit to establish a baseline and anytime major changes are made to their service.  It is the best way to stay on top of communications costs.

This blog is for you, our clients.  If there is a topic you would like us to discuss please let us know.