Special Agent Correspondence
We’re currently in talks with a special agent, which is very exciting. However, she’s been asking some really tough questions. So having laboured over my responses for some time I thought I’d share them with you because actually, they’re fairly fundamental to who we are.
“What do your clients look like?”
What a question! Let’s start with who we’re working with at the moment…
Everyone we work with, like us, is trying to change the world. From the firm of solicitors who stand up for the man in the street against the government and public bodies to a waste management company who are the first people in the UK to efficiently process waste using Autoclave technology through to two creative agencies, both award-winning and both jaw-droppingly awesome.
In terms of where they’re at as businesses, they tend to have gone through the baby steps of formation and normally have some idea or need advice on how technology can help them move their business forward; either through facilitating growth or by tweaking their processes / workflow to maximise productivity.
In terms of schools (when we can get through the evil tender process – more on that another time) they’re normally looking for people with deep experience in education who can offer guidance on how technology can increase the effectiveness of teaching and learning. That could be in the shape of physical spaces such as theatres, IT suites, conference rooms or indirectly behind the scenes by using virtualisation technologies to increase server availability and reduce student and staff logon times.
“What do you leave your clients with?”
We don’t leave them, we start supporting them. We work hard to nurture strong relationships with our clients and earn their trust. We’re incredibly passionate about technology, love challenges and want our clients to be delighted with what we’ve installed or set up for them and for it to make a real difference to their business or school.
What we will leave our clients with is a clear understanding of our values and who we are. We’ll have taken time to understand their requirements and design a solution that’s right for them, without being biased by the latest offer from our favoured vendor (we pride ourselves on being vendor agnostic). We’ll have also demonstrated how committed we are to delivering what we say we will, when we say we’ll do it.
By way of an example, we were recently thanked by a client for working right through the night on an IT system migration after the backup jobs took longer than expected to run. Poor planning on our part? Possibly, but we wanted to make absolutely sure we could recover from every eventuality. We also understood that communications had been sent out to all of their staff notifying them of the change and that there were subsequent pieces of work that had been planned for after we’d finished. So we powered through, got it sorted and they loved it. In fact, they loved it so much they awarded us two further projects as we walked out of the building bleary-eyed at midday the following day!
If that sounds like you and you like the sound of us, let’s have a chat…
0121 285 7222 or 020 7183 7222
A New Year’s Resolution
I’m not a big believer in New Year’s resolutions but as I tweeted shortly after the bongs struck to welcome 2010 – writing more is something I’m going to stick to this year. Not only that, I’m going to encourage everyone here to do the same. We do some amazing work through RTS but all too often we don’t shout enough about it (and although we cherish thank you notes from our clients, they shouldn’t be the only impetus for us talking about our project work).
New Year is always a time for reflection and the last 12 months have been incredibly busy at RTS (and saw my first anniversary with the company in November). There have been times where I’ve felt we’ve been a little too ‘heads-down’ rather than participating in the wider education-technology community. We’re addressing this directly with our appearance at BETT and an additional announcement just ahead of the show – watch this space…
In 2009 we moved our entire company ‘in to the cloud’ (or for those who don’t like jargon – ‘on to the internet’). Making the move has afforded us a far more flexible approach to working with access to all of the same data and applications on client sites as if we were sat next to a server in the office. Our telephones are also cloud-based and we can connect in to the system to make and receive calls wherever we have an internet connection, a bit like Skype. All of this means we now spend more time on-site with our clients and less time cooped up in the office.
We did some great proof of concept work too; showing why virtualisation and shared storage were so important for schools, built our take on what exemplary education digital signage looks like, refined our classroom AV offering and looked at how digital telephony could be used by educational institutions to improve both internal and external communication. We also took part in our first joint venture to develop resource management software specifically for schools, which we’ll be launching at BETT.
2010 is going to be an exciting year in education technology with many schools stabilising their virtual learning platforms, seeing the increasing demand for and effects of off-site / mobile computing and looking for ways to spend wisely with maximum return for their students in light of budget constraints.
The move to the virtual world will continue to increase and a real requirement for identity federation will emerge to enable seamless user transition and reduce administrative overhead between systems. Microsoft’s Live@edu is looking promising and their move to make SharePoint 2010 available will be revolutionary. Consolidation of internal servers using virtualisation technologies will become the norm now early adopters have experienced the initial pain.
There also needs to be an end put to suppliers who continue to trail wires across learning spaces, site amplifiers on teaching desks and install projectors badly. Expect to see even more from us on the model classroom and larger, completely immersive learning environments.
Look forward to seeing you at BETT, stand W45…
Mike
