Dennis Nelson, support systems analyst for the company, says the NetworkStreaming appliance shrinks call times by 24 percent, saving the company $5,000 a day in support costs. That has allowed Kodak Dental to grow its business without having to ramp up help desk personnel.

5. Get the news you need
Want to cut down on e-mail and deploy a quick knowledge management solution at the same time? Then deploy an enterprise RSS app to deliver timely or essential information to employees. Apps such as Attensa Feed Server, KnowHow3, and NewsGator Enterprise Server (and its new hosted RSS service) allow you to set up and monitor news feeds.

RSS is more efficient than e-mail because recipients don’t have to wade through a mass of junk e-mail to find it and corporate spam filters won’t flag incoming RSS messages by mistake, says Rick Brenner, principal of Chaco Canyon Consulting. When you provision RSS feeds internally, they can help you get new hires up to speed fast — or quickly distribute security bulletins, facilities announcements, or interdepartmental memos.

Instead of asking employees to hunt for information on the Web, managers can use RSS to ensure the flow of knowledge throughout the organization. And because the feed can follow the employees as they move through the organization, there’s less maintenance from an IT perspective, Brenner says.

“RSS also eliminates the need to keep copies of the same person’s address on several subscription lists,” Brenner adds. “So if someone changes their address for any reason, they won’t have to notify anyone. And if someone moves to a new role that requires a different set of subscriptions, they can take care of the changes without bothering the RSS publishers.”

The caveats? Managing bandwidth from both a server and a user perspective. As with e-mail and instant messaging (see above), overusing RSS can result in a productivity drain, not a gain.

6. Get a handle on your projects
Gerry Skipworth was busy all the time, but his firm’s consulting business was losing money. So in 2002 he signed up with Innotas’ Project Portfolio Management simply to find out where all his time was going. Then the vice president of IT services for systems integrator Compugen encouraged his staff to enter their data into Innotas Web app as well. The results weren’t pretty.

“We were spending too much time meeting with vendors and not enough time racking up billable hours,” Skipworth says. “We didn’t need a consultant, a project manager, and a software architect attending every client presentation. But before we could set limits, we needed to see where our time was going.”

PPM is all about visibility. “IT managers need to know they have the right people working on the right projects, and that their time is optimized,” says Innotas’ Carlson. “We give them visibility into all this information in one place.”

Skipworth says it took about two weeks to get running on the Web-based PPM, mostly gathering and entering data, and cost from $15 to $40 a month per seat. Now some 250 Compugen employees use the app to prioritize how much time they devote to projects, so the company can focus on those that have the greatest impact on the bottom line.

7. Stop micromanaging
If you can’t get your work done each day, there’s a good chance it’s because you’re busy doing someone else’s job, says Chaco Consulting’s Rick Brenner. Inexperienced managers in particular are often guilty of taking their old jobs along with them to their new assignments, which leads to micromanaging and a host of other problems.