Cybersecurity

Your Blockchain Close Encounter Of The First Kind

September 19, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

This is the third article in a series about Blockchain technology and its implications. The first, in June, was an introduction, and the second, in July, was how Blockchain works and its role in creating digital trust. This article is about your likely first contact.

As small businesses have increasingly become vertically integrated with Big Business customers, they’ve had to step up their Main-Street-Mom-and-Pop game to become more sophisticated while continuing to be nimble, quick, versatile, and efficient. With this integration, larger customers have notified smaller partners of their evolving expectations, as driven by macro events and trends.

Consequently, over the past 25 years, millions of small businesses have received letters requiring compliance with four of those macro markers: [Continue Reading]

Are You Prepared For The Next Business Interruption?

April 9, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

This year marks an ignominious 20th anniversary. On August 13, 2003, a single outage in the electric grid cascaded across eight northeastern states, putting 55 million people in the dark for days, and thousands of businesses out of business. The Great Blackout of ’03 was a catastrophic reminder that we’re all one nosy squirrel in a transformer away from an instantaneous, put-you-out-of-business event.

Two decades later, the evidence isn’t in favor of less exposure for the next 20 years. Consider this report from CNBC: “The FBI warned Russian computer hackers had compromised hundreds of thousands of home and office routers.” And this one from the Department of Homeland Security: “Russian government cyber actors have been targeting U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, including energy, nuclear and commercial facilities, since at least March 2016.” And more recently, experts allowed that the Chinese balloon that recently circumnavigated the U.S. could have been carrying an EMP, or electromagnetic-pulse device, that when detonated, essentially fries the electric grid below.

Prior to 2003, most businesses surveyed reported they were aware that a business disruption/interruption was possible, but incredibly, they also admitted they weren’t prepared for one. Thankfully, that response is different these days, as one of our recent online polls indicated. [Continue Reading]

How “The Cloud” Can Empower Your Small Business

February 23, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

One of the greatest products of human society is the marketplace. Webster defines it as a place where goods and services are offered for sale.

Over millennia, innovations took markets from local to global, and now to the 21st-century iteration – virtual. Virtual markets are powered by “cloud computing,” aka “the cloud,” and accessed via the Internet and a handy interface program presented on a screen of some size.

Historically, as trade expanded markets, products led the way because services were difficult to convey to the last mile of consumption. But technology has helped services catch up, and now digital services are delivered efficiently from the cloud. And more than anything else, this last reality is helping small businesses compete and grow in ways that were formerly the domain of larger companies.

Here are five cloud-based resource categories that help your small business operate more efficiently, competitively, and profitably. [Continue Reading]

It’s the Digital Age – Ethically Speaking, Things Here Are Different

October 20, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

As arrogant occupants of 21st-century Earth, who can rightly boast of creating exciting innovations, like the computer, talking paint, and the margarita blender, it serves us to believe we’re also the more enlightened generation.

But honesty demands an acknowledgment that contemporary applications of wisdom, morality and ethical behavior are in fact derivative of concepts first proposed long ago by the ancients.

Consider the 10,000-year-old Chinese wisdom, I Ching, The Book of Changes. Then there are the 5,000-year-old Upanishads from India. And of course, the new kid on the block, the four-millennia-old Mosaic Laws (Thou shalt not …). Indeed, no wisdom is handier than that of King Solomon, from the first millennium BCE in Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and the Psalms.

It must be noted that much of this awesome introspection and self-awareness was first contemplated at a time when receding Ice Age glaciers were still carving Scotland’s Loch Ness and the Great Lakes of North America, on the threshold of the written word.

Alas, ethically and morally speaking, we moderns are merely the new models, not necessarily the better ones. Hold that thought. [Continue Reading]

What’s Latin For Delivering On Digital Customer Expectations?

February 25, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

Why do we put locks on exterior glass doors? Why would a business extend credit to a customer with merely an illegible signature on a purchase ticket? Why do we make promises to customers based on the future performance of vendors?

Yes, there are laws and consequences that address missteps or misbehavior in all of these scenarios. But are those elements really what make us extend and expose ourselves?

Post hoc is Latin for “after the fact.” Laws, regulations, contracts, and other such elements are part of the post hoc process when Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall. They remediate, redress, and reconcile – after the fact. But as important and effective as they may be, they’re not really what drives our behavior.

[Continue Reading]

Eight Rude Truths Of Interfacing With Customers In The Digital Age

January 7, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

For the list of “Most Annoying and Pretentious 21st-Century Terms,” surely “Let’s Interface” qualifies.

It’s annoying because it grates against the way most analog humans express connection requests. For example: “Got time for lunch?” “Gimme a call,” “Text me,” or “I’ll email you.”

“Let’s interface” also furrows the brow because it sounds pretentiously geeky, which is oxymoronic since the pretentious are usually not geeks, and geeks are typically not pretentious.

But who says that, anyway? Well, before you look around, indignantly denying you ever did, the answer is …