Bulletin Board

A collection of eight short articles about technology. Topics include a free online consumer buying guide, predicting project costs, online psychologists and network security.

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Buyer Be There
For Mie-Yun Lee, it started with the pit-marked business cards. It was 1992 and Lee, a research associate at consultancy Corporate Decisions Inc. (CDI), was helping her employer set up a new company. It was her job to buy business cards, but the kind of printing process she chose made the company's large logo appear acne-scarred. "It was money down the drain," she recalls.

Lee's experience is repeated every day in small companies everywhere. Lacking procurement functions or even experienced office managers, those businesses feel their way in the dark when it comes to buying office gotta-haves. "If we had had a resource to help us, we could have saved hours and hundreds or thousands of dollars," she says.

So Lee and a CDI colleague, Gregg Kavet, created Beacon Research Group Inc. (BRG), in Watertown, Mass. The company provides purchasing advice on everything from networking equipment to health plans. Rather than testing everything internally, BRG relies on the opinions of its customers, chiefly CEOs and other decision makers in companies with fewer than 250 employees. "Lab testing definitely has its place," says Brenda Chin Hsu, BRG's vice-president of marketing, "but trying to capture the real-world experience is very important to us."

BRG solicits frank opinions about the products they love to love...and hate. It then correlates that data with respondent demographics to get a sense of which products work best for which types of companies.

For the first few years, BRG worked solely through print vehicles, most notably a subscription-based magazine called Business Consumer Guide. But Lee and Chin Hsu envisioned a more interactive service. And so, last August, BuyersZone was born.

On BuyersZone, which is free to users, would-be purchasers select one of 34 categories--color printers, say--and answer a series of questions. The site shoots back a list of vendors and models that meet their requirements. Users can then contact the manufacturer or a nearby distributor through the site.

One of those doing both his research and buying on the site is Mark Bremer, managing partner of Stax Research Inc., a contract-analyst firm in Cambridge, Mass. Using BuyersZone, Bremer identified--and found a local distributor for--the perfect copier in one hour instead of the usual 10. And he's got lots of company. In its first three months on-line, BuyersZone facilitated more than $2 million worth of business. --Leigh Buchanan

It's 1998. Do You Know What Your Y2K Status Is?
The millennium will overtake everyone at the same time, but from the way small companies are treating it, you'd think they'd been granted an extension. A recent study shows that 84% of companies with fewer than 100 employees have done basically squat to ensure their systems are Y2K-compliant. And about one-third of those companies rely heavily enough on computers to expect significant problems when the zeros turn over at midnight, 2000.
Source: The Gartner Group

Real Time
Indigo Technologies Ltd. was shooting itself in the foot. The Toronto-based custom-software house charges its clients based on projected costs, but the company was doing such a lousy job of projecting those costs that it sometimes undercharged by a factor of four.

"When we undercut by that much, we wind up swallowing a lot of the cost," says Gene Goykhman, president and cofounder of the $400,000 (Canadian) company. "We had to get that situation under control."

Time and budget overruns are persistent evils in many industries, including software development, but Goykhman didn't consider them necessary ones. The trick, he believed, was to calculate to the minute how long each employee was spending on each task and to use that information to formulate quotes anchored in reality.

After failed experiments with paper time sheets (too easy to ignore) and commercial time-management packages (too tough to access), Indigo Technologies decided to build its own solution. The chief requirements: that it be painless to use and that it let the company "analyze what we had done and where we went over," says Goykhman. One designer and two developers set to work on the project. Six months and about $10,000 later, TaskMaster was born.

TaskMaster, which runs on Windows 95 or Windows NT, sits on every desktop in the company. Whenever employees switch tasks, they click on an icon, and a message pops up: "What have you been working on?" The workers then select an activity--meeting with a client, testing the product, creating documentation--from a 15-item menu. When they're through with that activity, they click on the icon again, and a built-in timer tells them exactly how long they spent on it. Employees then begin another task, and once again TaskMaster's clock begins ticking.

TaskMaster automatically sends E-mail to management each day with reports of how much work has been done on every part of every project. Goykhman emphasizes that those work reports are not used to monitor employee industriousness. "Our environment here is very flexible, and we don't care how much people work on any given day," he says. "We are very careful to keep the Big Brother aspect out of it."

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