New statistics from The Pew Internet & American Life Project, as reported by ClickZ Stats, indictate that Internet users who connect wirelessly are prone to “exhibit deeper engagement online” and are often more willing to blur the lines between their work and personal lives.

Now, while I’m rarely an advocate for the 24-hour work day, as organizations integrate technology to become more lean yet capable, looking at WiFi strategically is important. Whether it is installed at the office, the coffee shop downstairs, or the rooftop deck, access to wireless Internet (as well as the laptops/ PDAs to access it) can bring profound culture change to an organization, making the staff more creative and energetic about their work.

To take it one step further, new wireless WAN offerings from Verizon and other carriers gives your team the freedom to work not just at their desk or at a small WiFi hotspot but also wherever they can get a cell signal.

 Freedom from the office, or just chained to it? That’s a decision for you to make. We’d err on the side of providing access, then empowering our employees to shut it off when they need to draw that line.

Just left a very exciting conversation with one of our IT partners and a client about Windows Small Business Server. This particular client, a national trade organization on Dupont Circle, has never had a server before and always connected like many home offices do - via a peer-to-peer network. But as they grew, and travel demands increased, they need a central, accessible place to store files. They also need a way to backup and archive data, something that has been a challenge in the past. Not to mention that their POP e-mail accounts (free with their web hosting package) are unreliable at best. They wanted an integrated, easy to maintain tool that would give them security, accessibility, and reliability. And they wanted it fast.

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Flat Creek is not just an outsourcing vendor, but an integrated operating partner, managing your back office and helping you keep track of all your vendor relationships. Often outsourcing gets wrapped up in the offshore debate between IBM and Dell and… well, seems like it has nothing to do with small businesses. To the contrary, this article on AllBusiness.com points out the benefits of outsourcing for small business. Not to spoil the surprise, but the benefits include:

• Control capital costs
• Increase efficiency
• Reduce labor costs
• Start new projects quickly
• Focus on your core business
• Level the playing field
• Reduce risk

These are all good reasons to outsource some of your business operations, but ultimately it’s about giving you more control over your company and giving you more time to do what it is you really want to do. To our clients, thank you for making us part of your vision. To readers who aren’t clients, let’s talk today about how your company can move forward with a solution from Flat Creek Management.

Nicholas Carr (formerly editor of the Harvard Business Review) seems to be on board the outsourcing train, albeit from a unique perspective. His view is that IT will become a centralized function provided by utilities, much like cable or electricity. However I find it hard to imagine companies looking at computers and technology investment merely as a cost of doing business like they would the electric bill. Electricity is either on or off - there are no grades of value to the end user. Good, up-to-date technology on the other hand has a far more variable impact on company performance and employee productivity. That is the essential difference from IT and utilities - IT provides both hardware and the network. Utilities typically only provide the network.

Utilities are the means not the end. Electricity does not require hardware, whereas hardware (computers) require electricity. Even as software becomes networked, hardware investment will continue to be a huge investment for companies and they will need people to make those purchase decisions. Here at Flat Creek, obviously we would like to see that function outsourced, but it’s hard to imagine it becoming centralized even as the global economy becomes more competitive. A more relevant analogy than electric utilities might be the phone industry, where utilities provide access to the lines while independent service providers install the phones, PBX systems, etc to access the lines. While the term “computer” is becoming more ubiquitous every day, it’s a far cry from becoming a utility.

Provocateur predicts ‘end of corporate computing’ CNET News.com