Bob Coppedge is a long time business owner in the greater Akron area and his IT company has helped many businesses with their tech needs. He just wrote a book and we wanted to find out more about it and who should be buying it.
Bob, please tell our readers why you wrote this book.
I wrote A CEO’s Survival Guide to Information Technology out of the frustration I’d experienced when we talk about the challenges and the problems that business owners have with their IT. We IT folks have a reputation of being condescendingly arrogant, overbearing, and aloof with understanding the full atmosphere of the business, and an aspect of that it is absolutely deserved. If you disagree, you must be stupid. We’re much more concerned with being accurate than being understood. Part of it is also because CEO’s don’t feel they need (or in many cases want) to take the time to understand. These are conversations I’ve had over and over again (sometimes with the same CEO, oddly enough). I’ve never known of anybody who actually wrote from the perspective of the CEO trying to manage their IT problems, except to teach the CEO about IT.
What kinds of issues does this book help a small to mid-sized business deal with?
I tried to focus on the issues most frequently ignored by CEO’s, and explain first why the issues are important, and then some (hopefully) straightforward strategies to deal with them. I do this without going deep into the technobabble.
How was the experience of writing a book?
Hoo-boy. I’ve spoken on these very topics so many times through the many webinars and seminars that Simplex-IT gives. And I’ve had so many conversations with our customers and others. Soooo…writing the book should be easy, right? But it took a lot longer than I thought it would (about 9 months). My hats off to people who churn out one book after another.
What are some problems you see that are common with business IT?
One of the biggest is the issue of abdication. You’ve got IT support (whether employees or 3rd party), and leave some critical business-facing decisions to them. I’m not talking about the technical decision…what tools and/or strategies to use to implement a certain need (like backups or security). I’m talking about the business side of the decisions. Backup Frequencies. Bring Your Own Devices. Defining the balance between Cyber Security, Costs and Productivity. The second biggest problem we frequently see are companies that have backups and other security processes in place, but not monitored or tested. We’ve estimated that about 30% of our new customers have had either failing backups or critical data that wasn’t being backed up.
Would an IT person enjoy this book? How about a manager who is not up on IT?
If an IT person is looking for specific technical strategies for small to medium businesses, I can’t think of a worse book<g>. But if they’re looking to improve their understanding of IT from a CEO’s perspective, then I think this would be worthwhile. For a manager who wants to bridge the gap between IT and their business without becoming a geek, then that’s specifically who the book is aimed at.
Please tell readers where they can get the book and where they can find out more about you.
The book is available in both paperback and kindle through Amazon (what a shock, right). Here’s a link: http://a.co/bLd9GTI. You can follow me through Simplex-IT’s twitter Simplex_IT, our blog at http://Simplex-IT.com/blog. And our YouTube channel has over 180 videos at: https://youtube.com/user/SimplexITBob
