My name is Ted Raymond with Allegra Marketing and Print in Scottsdale, Arizona.  IT has become an increasingly important piece of our business.  Early on we didn’t have a specific IT strategy and we kind of hobbled together a number of solutions and as we grew we realized that having a roadmap and having an integrated approach to information technology is really a best practice and is important.  Today we’re looking heavily at cloud-based solutions to lower our internal costs as it relates to time to manage, time to deploy and time to upgrade IT applications up to and including even evaluating cloud-based solutions for email, SharePoint, all of our internal communications as well as really looking at cloud-based solutions for disaster recovery, things like backup of mission critical documents, financial information and client-based information.

As we’ve grown and moved into more sophisticated campaigns the need for more sophistication from an IT perspective, particularly in staffing has become increasingly important.  We’ve had to learn about how to manage databases coming from a number of different sources, purchase lists, client house lists, organic lists that we’ve grown and then really be able to leverage that information and pull the data that is pertinent out of the information that is provided 

The second piece of that is really once the data is extrapolated how do we use it and again we’ve continued to find a need for a different kind of individual that perhaps isn’t as creative as what we’ve seen in the past, but someone who is far more technical to be able to write business logic and leverage that data in a way that really drives meaningful communication.

Data security continues to be a growing concern of ours.  We’ve recognized that we don’t have the skill internally to manage data security on our own and have had to engage some third party consultants to really look at our network infrastructure to help us understand how to keep the data secure within our building and then we’ve also began to create policies on how we’re going to handle data even after a campaign is complete, how we’re going to report it back and how we’re going to destroy the data if it’s something that is not needed anymore.  It’s definitely a work in progress and as we have gotten into larger opportunities with more sophisticated clients it’s an area that has come up far more often in conversation.