Change Management and the Small Business
David and Vlad have been talking about change management recently. It's not that I disagree, but I want to just inject a reality check into the discussion. Perhaps you've forgotten what it's like being a small business. The stark reality is that many small businesses cannot afford to do the sort of change management being advocated. The area I live and work in, South Wales UK, is a European Objective One area. That means that our GDP is less than 75% of the European average. In short, businesses are not exactly cash rich here. In many cases, just persuading a business that they need a decent computer (let alone a server) is like extracting blood from a stone. Some areas do OK, like Cardiff - capitol city of Wales. But travel 20 miles north and you're in a technology desert. Trying to persuade businesses that they need a tape backup drive, or a spare server to try out service packs on, would be (to put it politely) futile. For many businesses, a low-end server with SBS Standard is right at the limit of what they are prepared to spend. Redundancy and change management is not in the budget. One might argue that those are not the "right sort of customers" and in an ideal world I would agree, but working in an area like this demands a certain amount of social responsibility - someone has to help those businesses.
As a small business IT service provider, this is the value that we add. I consider it my job to try out updates and service packs on behalf of my customers, before I approve them for installation (I use WSUS where possible). But, there's no way I can really test updates at each customer site. If it works at my site, I install it for all my customers. I've never had a really serious problem yet. Maybe one day I will, but neither I nor most of my customers can afford to do it any differently.