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Richard Curtis

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Business IT Advisor, Red Arc Consulting Limited

40 points

A highly accomplished Business Manager/Consultant with extensive and proven experience of troubleshooting within the Information Technology industry. Successful reputation for solving critical problems in a wide range of business arenas, creating effective solutions and building the right teams to ...

A highly accomplished Business Manager/Consultant with extensive and proven experience of troubleshooting within the Information Technology industry. Successful reputation for solving critical problems in a wide range of business arenas, creating effective solutions and building the right teams to implement them. Skilled and experienced in both commercial and technical disciplines and able to deal confidently with people at all levels. Customer orientated with strong negotiation skills and the ability to identify and drive win-win situations

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Richard Curtis recommends this answer by Andrew Steffen

March 29, 2011

Is there really an IT talent shortage or are we just hiring wrong?

Agree with both points. Ideal situation, from an IT perspective, is an in-house IT manager familliar with the long term goals of the companies, mission critical applications and the specialized talents to carry out the company needs.
Outsourcing as a supplement to in-house talent is ... more

Human Resources

Information Technology

Talent Acquisition

Richard Curtis is now following Vishy Dasari

March 29, 2011

Richard Curtis and 2 other people answered this question

Feb. 10, 2011

Are there restrictions to IP telephony in countries where the government controls internet/phones?

The question for me is whether you are using the Internet or a Private IP VPN type service. If you are using the latter then there may still be issues with usage and connecting out to the local PSTN service is often forbidden, which is ... more

Information Technology

Government Policy

International Business

Richard Curtis and 6 other people answered this question

Feb. 10, 2011

When are you the most productive? Morning? Afternoon? Night?

I do all my writing and creative work from about 7:00am onwards and leave admin until the afternoon more

General Management

Richard Curtis and 8 other people answered this question

Nov. 9, 2010

What advice do you have for those looking to be proactive towards managing their own career today?

I'll come from a slightly different angle on this as I believe that the most important piece of the puzzle is financial security. This is really difficult to achieve but is a key element in managing a career as it enables people to take risks ... more

Human Resources

Career Development

Richard Curtis recommends this comment by benbree

Nov. 5, 2010

Career Path Challenges for Specialists Within Service Organisations

I think there are three attributes to one’s career as a specialist – money, skills, and company. The best model I find for this and one that I think IT might consider is that of a legal practice. While my only experience in this is ... more

Human Resources

Management Best Practices

Specialist Career Path

Richard Curtis and 3 other people answered this question

Nov. 4, 2010

If we keep records of chat sessions between customers and agents, do we have to tell the customer?

In the UK there is a cover all statement which states that any company recording calls makes every reasonable effort to inform all parties and usually a standard disclaimer along the lines of 'your call may/will be recorded for staff training purposes' is often included ... more

Customer Service

Information Technology

Contact Center Productivity

Richard Curtis and 10 other people answered this question

Aug. 6, 2010

What do we mean by IT / business alignment and how do we achieve it?

Another good question Michael. Business alignment across all functional areas is vital and is very worthwhile. Twenty years ago or so most businesses were aligned and functioned a lot better than today with steady robust increases in profitability. I am afraid this is another opinion ... more

General Management

Information Technology

Richard Curtis and 2 other people answered this question

Aug. 5, 2010

Private WAN or Internet VPN?

In the past I have been engaged on several implementations of IPSec based Internet VPN's which connect back in to private WAN's. The only problems encountered were that occasionally governments block IPSec but otherwise the performance and reliability were within customer spec. Most enterprises implemented ... more

Information Technology

Link Reliability

Richard Curtis and 7 other people answered this question

Aug. 4, 2010

How often do you give performance evaluations to your employees?

Michael has hit the nail on the head for this question. I believe though that managers should be aware of their business performance continuously so that if a member of the team starts to fail they can be given the support they need to recover ... more

Human Resources

Performance Evaluation

Richard Curtis and 6 other people answered this question

July 1, 2010

Why would someone need hosting with unlimited bandwidth?

Unlimited bandwidth is usually a feature for website Hosting Providers. It means that you could provide a video streaming service on your website, for instance, and not be hit by charges based on utilisation. It's a bit of marketing term really as you'll always be ... more

Information Technology

Hosting and Bandwidth

Richard Curtis published a brief

July 1, 2010

Social Networking Meet Community Networking

Information Technology

Richard Curtis and 3 other people answered this question

June 20, 2010

The ROI of the Budgets

A good budgeting process should provide the basis of forecasts to the Markets and Shareholders which have a reasonably high confidence factor of being achieved. Generally speaking the Market doesn't like surprises so if performance can track the forecasts or improve then hopefully shareholder value ... more

Richard Curtis recommends this answer by Susie Batchelor

June 19, 2010

Do LinkedIn recommendations mean anything to recruiters and employers?

It’s transparent when you see people beefing up their LinkendIn account with recommendations from friends. It becomes a numbers games vs. quality and in dept referrals. People give recommendation on LinkendIn, and expect recommendations back. It's the I scratch your back and you scratch mine ... more

Human Resources

Information Technology

Richard Curtis recommends this comment by David Cole

April 28, 2010

Reference Checking

This is a very timely discussion with the realisation of predicted upturns in hiring volumes and I feel that each of these posts are very valid - I particularly support Richard and Nik's comments on the importance of assessments, and past performance not being an ... more

Human Resources

Richard Curtis and 5 other people answered this question

April 26, 2010

I use a couple of Mac's within my Consultancy business and find that they work very well for me and I have few problems with moving documents backwards and forwards with clients who have Windows. I do run both Excel and Numbers for spreadsheets but ... more

Information Technology

Richard Curtis answered this question

Feb. 2, 2010

Cloud storage versus on-site servers?

Caty,
Using cloud storage should provide you with the capability to flex your requirements up and down quickly without the need for going through a hardware procurement cycle. Cloud storage should also enable you to drive different strategies for storing and archiving data based on your ... more

Information Technology

Servers and Storage

Richard Curtis and 3 other people answered this question

Feb. 2, 2010

How can I make sure my computer telephony integration project is a success?

Steve,
Your IT team have hopefully got the technology integration covered but a lot of problems occur because of a lack communication with the business. All I would say at this point is to involve users early on to agree on the functionality of the new ... more

Information Technology

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