You’ve already met IT associations of various types and with different focuses. Now, one step beyond, meet the umbrella organization that wants to federate those associations and promote professional standards to bring them all to a comparable level. That’s the stated mission of the International Professional Practice Partnership (IP3).

Where Does the IP3 Umbrella Organization Come From?

IP3 was founded by a number of existing IT associations: ACS (Australian Computer Society), BCS (British Computer Society), CIPS (Canadian Information Processing Society), IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Computer Society, and IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing). IFIP in particular is recognized by the United Nations, and positions itself as multinational and apolitical, representing IT organizations from 56 regions or countries, with a combined membership of over 500,000.

Popular buzzwords in the Information Security Forum currently include “big data” analytics and processing. However, just like the supercomputers of a few generations back were confined to (very) large or wealthy organizations, is “big data” perhaps too big for the typical smaller business?

Not necessarily. IT solution providers for SMBs can still work with them to develop business opportunities by leveraging a few basic ideas.

Easy to Generate, Less Easy to Analyze

Even if it’s not always what they want to hear, IT resellers need to get honest opinions back from their customers about how well they have been served. The problem, apart from motivation, is often one of time and resources. The ASCII Group offers a solution to its IT reseller members with a service for conducting live calls to gauge customer satisfaction, going beyond web-based surveys.

How Far Does the Service Go?

On one hand, the service from The ASCII Group can offer a similar level of quality and cost-effectiveness with the other marketing services that the group provides (ghostwritten newsletters and social media page content, for example).

On the other hand, IT resellers using the service will still need to be prepared to take action on any customer issues raised. While The ASCII Group can uncover problems, only the reseller can, and should, fix those problems.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) exists to help put better IT data storage solutions in place. But what can the SNIA do to assist in the deeper issue of which data should be stored in the first place?

A few weeks back, Joe Panettieri, executive VP of Nine Lives Media, blogged on MSPmentor.net a very important reminder to U.S.-based IT channel companies: 

Can’t create or send out your own marketing newsletter? 

The ASCII Group has detected a similar problem of a lack of marketing resources among IT providers.