Maximizing Your Business’s Impact At Every Level

Maximizing Your Business’s Impact At Every Level

Digital Hygiene – Business Impact

 

Computers may not be organic, but they certainly bear some interesting similarities; the need for hygiene is one. Consider your hard drive. It stores information on the hard disk, but the way it is stored doesn’t have that linear quality we usually use when categorizing “physical” data.

File cabinets have things sequentially stored with a system of reference. Computers also use a system of reference, but data is stored in a holographic way—that means a particular file may not be constrained to a single location. The information is “spread out” wherever it can be fit. Such spreading leads to hard drive fragmentation.

Proper computer hygiene predicates backing up your info, wiping the drive, then reloading everything. So it’s evident that, at a basic level, you must maintain your computer systems. The same thinking applies to programs which handle many aspects of your business.

Consider a website, as an example. Your website needs to be dynamic, and function as intended. If you want it to properly represent your business, it’s likely you’ll have it designed to your specifications. A site built to meet your needs is going to have certain features, and they’ll differ as a cake baked at home differs from one bought at Wal-Mart.

Mass produced cakes have mass produced quality control, but ultimately aren’t as qualitative. Home-made cakes have home-made quality control, but are ever so much better. Your website is the same.

Finding And Fixing Errors – Business Impact

There is no oversight from a national cake maker when you’re baking at home. Likewise, you’ve got to have your own quality control when you’re designing and maintaining a website. You need to know it can handle traffic that scales up with profitability. You want everything to load and function in an easily navigable way.

In order to properly manage things like web pages in terms of hygiene, you’re going to need the right kind of logs. Logs categorize information as it comes, and in an automated way which includes all details of usage. When an error crops up, you can source, determine cause, and fix the issue. There are specific error logs which can help.

According to Stackify.com, using IIS error logs to troubleshoot functionality is essential: “Tracking application errors is one of the most important things every development team should do.”

IIS error logs incorporate four primary means of logging designed to assist you in determining where bugs are compromising your operations: Standard IIS Logs, HTTPERR, ASP.NET Exceptions in Windows Event Viewer, and Failed Request Tracing (FRT).

Each of these four logs give those maintaining a website the ability to look at problems from different angles, identifying specifically where some pernicious bug is compromising operations. When you can use an established program to check your logs, it saves you a lot of time. Time is an essential resource for any business. Conserving it and maximizing it are essential to profitability.

Upward Expansion – Business Impact

When you can curtail unnecessary time expenditure, dedicated personnel can be delegated to core business functionality; like the design of a new website. Again: digital systems aren’t organic, but they bear striking similarities. Your website is going to blossom and develop over time until what it becomes hardly resembles what it initially was.

If you don’t upgrade, you’ll hit a point where traffic begins to decline. Imagine a nineties website asking for your credit card information. Would you trust it? Neither do your clients. A garden left by itself returns to the elements; it goes to seed. Digital systems that go without maintenance are subject to similar entropic forces. So help your digital gardener out by giving that individual the tools required for the job.