This is the title of an article on the splendid IT Donut. It’s a no-nonsense run-down of the points to take into consideration when setting a budget and planning your purchasing, policies and practise. Well worth a look if only to see how on top of things you are, to find the areas that need a bit of attention or to scare the pants off yourself. We can help in all the areas covered, if you need a bit of advice or some practical help.
Where do the real enemies of enterprise lurk?
This BusinessZone article covers David Cameron’s speech against “the enemies of enterprise” (small ‘e’). He said all the right things – let’s support saving, investment, industry, export and trade. Investment came up again later on, and he mentioned something else a few times too: job creation.
This business of job creation came up at a meeting I attended last night, which had a speaker from the Chamber of Commerce telling us all about the new LEPs – Local Enterprise Partnerships – which are taking over from the RDAs. The thrust of the information coming from government about the LEPs appears to revolve around investment and job creation, with airy comments about million pound investments being really not such a very great amount of money.
Job creation: the be-all and end-all?
Once the stunned silence had passed, conversation exploded about how a million pounds would be an unimaginably vast amount of money for most of the businesses around the table, but also about this issue of job creation. Most of the people attending the meeting were either sole traders, partnerships or family businesses, with just a handful employing staff recruited in the standard way. For most SMEs job creation is not a priority – survival is the priority, keeping body and soul together until a reputation and successful business strategy is established.
Rural businesses and enterprise advice
Conversation then turned to the paucity of proper impartial (ie not bank-based) business funding advice in Herefordshire and that understands Herefordshire. BusinessLink and Advantage West Midlands ran courses in Herefordshire only very rarely, favouring instead Shropshire and Birmingham, with Telford being a popular choice. It’s nearly 70 miles from Hereford to Telford – that’s an awfully long way to go for a morning’s course. Herefordshire has an enormously high rate of SMEs (probably because there are so few, if not no, really big employers), and yet as far as the RDA was concerned, we barely existed. If the information we were given on LEPs last night is anything to go by, that’s not set to change.
So, seems to us that the enemies of enterprise are ignorance of local business needs and simply recognising that the wheels of commerce also grind well away from cities, together with a misguided focus on job creation rather than family-sustaining businesses not looking to get into the complexities of taking on staff without very good reason.
What a cheesy title, and not quite what I’d originally had in mind. The cliches about freedom abound, but my question is really this one, posed in a slightly different context by Carl Hopkins in this Business Matters article: If it’s free, does it have value? Discuss.
Oh okay then, since you asked. The concept of the value of free aka open source software comes up frequently in various guises, most commonly in our experience as ‘why should we pay someone for something we can get for free?’, ‘if it’s free how can there be a successful (ie reliable) business model?’ and that old chestnut of focussing on the free-of-charge aspect of open source software, rather than the freedom to do what you like with the code.
Well, taking the first question first, any reputable company providing open source software and business services should never charge for software that’s absolutely free to get your hands on, run and do what you like with (that being the point of open source). However, just because you believe in open source, or even if you couldn’t care less but want the benefits, you don’t necessarily have the ability, inclination or time to play about with it, so then you’re paying a company to handle all that for you, leaving you free to do what you do best, whether that’s running a leisure resort, doing companies’ accounts or jetting all over the world conducting market research, to name just three of of our clients’ lines of work. You’re paying for someone else’s time, infrastructure and expertise, which keeps your business services flowing smoothly. You’d do just the same with a company providing you with proprietary software-run services, but you’d probably have all sorts of jolly extra license costs on top. Just because they can.
The second old saw: the open source business model. There’s lots of complicated stuff about that here, if you’re that way inclined. There are several different ways to build a successful business on open source software. Some open source software isn’t free to acquire, but the source code is freely available to amend and reissue; some open source software houses make money from selling training and support; then there’s dual-licensing, and also freemium-style open source software. These varieties bring us to the final point:
The point of open source software, in some cases referred to as free software, is that anyone is free to acquire the source code of the program, make all manner of changes to it, and release it as a new version. This is the freedom referred to in the name, and is far more important and significant than the fact that there’s no charge – which, as we’ve seen, isn’t always the case anyway. We realise this is completely lost on people who’d have a Hitchcockian moment of Birds-like horror at the prospect of playing with code, but take our word for it that this is a Very Good Thing.
So, value in something that’s free? I’d say so. If you disagree please leave a comment and let battle ensue.