Only 9% of information security professional believe their organization has effective incident response processes. The biggest issue? Well, you’re reading Process Street so you probably guessed it: the lack of standardization. Almost half of the respondents to the SANS Incident Response Survey said that their lack of a formal incident response procedure was holding them back and causing security issues.

It’s not even like preparing for serious security incidents is wasted time or that you’d be going overboard with precautions; 61% of companies have experienced critical incidents in the last two years — that includes data breaches, unauthorized access, and denial of service attacks.

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Staring at the tiny LCD progress bar of the vending machine in a lobby, I realize nothing pisses us off more than indefinite waiting times. Especially people waiting for their coffee, their cheap flight comparisons, or their computer to finish doing whatever it’s doing.

Since the creation of software, there has always been loading times. An early example comes from Bob Stahl’s way-ahead-of-its time article in February 1986’s Computerworld.

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The following is a guest post from Forster Perelsztejn. As content marketer, Forster gathers sales data at Prospect.io in order to deliver powerful and insightful advice to salespeople. Check out his Top 10 Cold Email Templates Based on 3,327,652 Emails Sent! and connect with him on LinkedIn.

An essential part of my job at Prospect.io is to help customers craft cold emails that actually get replies. Why is that? Because cold email brings business in!

Yet, you’d be surprised at how many of those emails are poorly written. Most of the ones I get are a cringefest even though they were sent by professional salespeople. For that reason, I feel it’s essential to spread the word about cold email best practices.

Use this 10-point checklist below to optimize your sales emails to make it more likely you’ll get results. After all, only around 1.7% of cold emails get a reply…

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Humans are responsible for 70% of airplane crashes, 90% of car wrecks, and 90% of workplace accidents.

But people are also a core part of business. The same factors that make humans irreplaceable — nuanced judgement, emotion, and creativity — also make humans a pain to manage.

You don’t get these problems with computers, but computers are also dumb. Mostly too dumb to carry out processes without human intervention.

Humans are the chaotic variables in your processes. Humans make spelling errors in your marketing emails, create security risks in your software, and forget pretty much anything that isn’t written down.

And it’s because of human error that businesses need processes.

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In 2014 an employee at Xchanging named Amanda Barnes created a software robot she called “Poppy”.

Poppy’s job was to help automate the tedious task of validating insurance premiums — something which could be easily done by a computer if it was fed structured data.

Before Xchanging built Poppy the robot, they were processing 500 premiums every few days. With Poppy, the same 500 items take just 30 minutes to process.

Rather than kicking Poppy out of the office in case she starts taking jobs, the Xchanging team welcomed her warmly because she saved them from laborious, mechanical work.

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The average business’ software spend has been on the rise for years now, with small and medium businesses spending a higher percentage of revenue on software than enterprises.

The average midsized company spends $13,100 per employee on IT. With some smart alternatives (and not relying on the same vendors as always), companies can cut this cost massively. In fact, in a 2017 post about the minimum viable software stack for a 10 person startup, I calculated an option that cost just $260/user/year.

That post touched on just some of the free tools small businesses need, but here I aim to cover the topic much more widely, and look at:

• Office suites
• Workflow tools
• Internal email tools
• Project management tools
• Marketing automation tools
• Team communication tools
• Accounting software
• Payroll tools
• Cloud storage
• CRMs
• Database management tools
• Software development tools

Let’s go!
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To understand the value of a style guide, you should first try working without one.

You’d get the wrong blue on your logo, jarring copy, and code that can only be maintained by a lone developer.

Writers, editors, programmers, engineers, social media managers, and support agents all need an indication of how their company wants to work, so they can ensure consistency.

The number one goal of a style guide is consistency.

Inconsistency weakens your brand image, makes your company look unprofessional, and hurts conversion rate and revenue. Once you’ve settled on your brand voice and style, the style guide is the document that enforces those values.

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No organization wants to keep an incompetent, untrained employee on its payroll.

That’s an obvious fact. However, the benefits of training are much greater than simply avoiding incompetence; trained employees are more productive, loyal, engaged, and profitable.

Those are nice sounding words, but what about the facts and figures?

Take a look:

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Merry Christmas and a happy new year from all of us at Process Street!

2017 might have been a mixed bag for most of the planet, but we had a lot of fun writing content for you, our blog readers.

We published 151 blog posts between us this year, with a little help from fantastic guest writers like Pascal van Opzeeland from Userlike, and Sam Suthar from Tagove.

Here are our top picks as well as the posts you, the readers, liked the most.

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The following is a guest post from Pascal van Opzeeland. Pascal is CMO of Userlike, software for website and messaging support. He and his team share tips about customer service and communication on the Userlike Blog.

In school, everyone looks forward to the day they can stop learning and start doing. But once inside hamster wheel of working life, many long back to the times in which they had the time to invest in their personal development.

At Userlike, we see this lack of time for personal learning as a serious challenge. The world is developing faster than ever, and the pace is only accelerating. To stay competitive, we need employees to keep up; to keep learning and stay up-to-date with their craft. Other benefits from  having a culture that stimulates continuous learning include:

• Increased productivity
• Attract and retain talent
• The ability to grow leaders in-house and reward loyalty

The best employees have an innate desire to grow, but it’s hard to free up time when your daily tasks and duties mess up your schedule. Learning is one of those high importance – low urgency tasks that easily gets pushed aside.

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