WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

Recruitment is often a deeply frustrating, time consuming and expensive activity. That can be even more of a problem where you are unfortunate enough to make a mistake in your selection with the result being you have a “wrong person for the job” challenge to resolve. In many cases, much of the trauma and cost associated with this type of activity can be avoided with the use of best-practice approaches at the outset. However, recognising and avoiding the pitfalls requires considerable expertise. Saudi Technologies has exactly those skills, courtesy of our extensive background in recruitment campaigns and employment consultancy. Of course, we can’t tell you in isolation specifically how we could save you money – we would need to examine your exact circumstances. That’s why we invite you to contact us without delay.

Either – whichever our client decides, with our help, is the most suitable solution for them. In fact, there are several other potential options too.

We will always be as flexible and responsive to our client’s needs as possible. In fact, we offer many different types of engagement and pricing models. Not all will necessarily be equally suitable in all situations. For example, open-ended consultancy requirements may be better suited to rate-per-day type arrangements, whereas the provision of an IT solution might be handled under a fixed-price service.

Change programmes in business always involve various degrees of risk. That is the inescapable flipside of trying to derive benefits. One of the commonest causes of ROI disappointment when major change is undertaken arises from a failure to identify and manage risk factors while the change programme/project was underway.

Many post-implementation reviews undertaken in the context of project collapses (these are sometimes colloquially called “project post-mortems”) cite a failure to identify and manage risk as being a very significant reason for the project’s demise or poor ROI. We have methodologies that to help identify and manage-out risk while major change programmes are underway. These are underpinned by the expertise and experience of our personnel.

Remember, risk is always easier and cheaper to manage-out when identified in the earlier stages of a change programme than further downstream.

This stands for “Search Engine Optimization”.

It is a term that encompasses a large number of different techniques, all designed to make a website be more likely to catch the attention of the major search engines.

As a very crude example, a potential client’s search for “XYZ” on the internet might return tens of thousands of pages of response. Many potential clients will only look at the first and possibly second pages of that response. So, if your “XYZ” site only appears on say page 6, you have only a very small chance of ever being seen by your potential customers.

SEO aims to ensure that your site features (called “ranks”) as highly as possible in those results. Please note – although it is important or even essential, SEO alone isn’t the answer to your site’s visibility.

Also, the application of SEO can take some months to show an effect.

The search engines rate more highly, those sites that they detect to have regularly changing informative content.

That factor is one strand of SEO, in that many sites will now have regularly updated articles, blogs and videos. That is called ‘dynamic content’ because it changes regularly.

Every time you add something new (it doesn’t have to be blogs and articles), the engines will notice and that will help your rankings in search results.

Note that your content must be unique. Simply cutting-and-pasting content from other sites won’t work, as the engines will see that your content is duplicated. Cut-and-paste might also leave you exposed to copyright claims too.

BPR stands for Business Process Re-engineering.

Every business operates on processes. One example might be what you do to process an invoice from a supplier from the moment it arrives through to you paying it.

In many companies their processes, manual or automatic, have evolved organically over time and were never originally designed. Their growth may have been influenced by factors such as departmental demarcation lines, personal ambitions and so on. The end result can be processes that have elements of inefficiency or illogicality in them.

Many companies have purchased IT solutions and tried to make them fit their existing ‘way of doing things’. This can be cost ineffective and highly inefficient because if you automate a sub-optimal process, you do not get a good process as an outcome – you simply get a faster bad process.

BPR aims to maximise the potential of IT to revolutionise your business by taking a long hard look at existing processes and changing them where appropriate to more fit-for-purpose approaches. This is usually highly advisable before installing new technology, if you’re to maximise your return on investment.

In order to protect your business and its critical data (plus IT systems), you should have some form of DR plan in place. This may be a requirement of your insurers, auditors and stakeholders.

It essentially means a documented plan of action that you would immediately activate if your business premises were destroyed or severely damaged by any event.

DR Plans usually involve many components, only one of which is IT. So, you may have identified an alternative physical site you could move your personnel to very quickly so they could continue your company’s business.

Specifically for IT, there may be many different models for DR you could adopt. If your business is not time-critical or tightly controlled by legislation, you may be able to accept DR provisions that guaranteed to be able to restore all your data and IT systems within 3 days of a disaster.

In other cases, such delays might be unacceptable, such as in banking. There, the bank might specify all its systems and data must be fully accessible and working within say 15 minutes (or less) of a disaster to their normal site.

Very fast IT recovery as part of a DR plan is usually called “Hot Standby” – meaning it is waiting, fully updated and ready-to-go if you need it. For technical reasons, maintaining a parallel system ready-to-go is challenging for DR service providers but perfectly possible. However, it is understandably the most expensive option for DR/IT.

If the individual is being recruited to join your permanent establishment and payroll, we will ensure you only interview pre-screened highly credible candidates. However, ultimately the final hiring decision must rest with you.

If we are placing people employed by Saudi Technologies into your business, the employment decision may already have been made by us. However, our clients of course have the right to ask us to replace one of our personnel with another if they feel there is not a good fit.

An SLA (Service Level Agreement) typically defines the types of service and service performance you can anticipate from a provider of IT services post-sale.

If you have a problem with a system in such circumstances, your first port of call will be to your provider’s Help Desk. They will usually record and track your call and some may be able to diagnose the nature of the problem and offer advice as to how you can resolve it.

If they cannot do so, they will route the issue to a more qualified expert. Being realistic, you may have to accept that typically you will need to wait for a return call should that happen.

We always advise clients to be sure they understand what their potential provider’s SLA is offering before signing-up for it.

That’s because some may offer 24×7 Help Desk services which might sound appealing but if the Help Desk is populated by relatively low-skilled clerical personnel acting as message-takers, what will become critically important to you is how quickly the provider is willing to guarantee they will get an expert to return your call.

Getting instantaneous access to a Help Desk may not be of much use if you’re unable to speak to a technically qualified person for say another 2 days. For your own peace of mind, the average time to speak to an expert should be explicitly stated in the SLA contract.

Yes, we have security services that are experts in ‘anti-malware’ solutions. This is a complex and important area. Please contact us for further information.

This is a French term widely used in legalistic and contracts English plus international law. It has its origins in the Napoleonic code of the early 19^th century.

It is often translated to “act of God” but it is actually wider than that in meaning, as it can incorporate human action as well.

It is used in contracts to excuse both parties from liability under breach of contract provisions, where they were unable to fulfill their contractual duties due to circumstances beyond their control. Examples might include flooding, pandemics, or war.

If a project is sufficiently large, it will normally have a clearly identified project manager and project sponsor.

The sponsor’s role is usually allocated to the senior executive within the company who wishes to make the project happen (and perhaps funding it from their budget)  and he or she will be the one accountable to the wider leadership levels in the company for its success and delivery of benefits.

However, the project may need several senior executives in the company to cooperate in its success, through the provision of their personnel’s knowledge and their acceptance of some possible disruptions while things are changing etc.

It is commonplace for the project’s sponsors and other senior leadership levels identified as stakeholders in the project, to form a “Project Steering Group” (PSG). Their role is to monitor progress as presented by the project manager, provide strategic guidance to the project in-flight and to clear away any organisational roadblocks inhibiting the project’s successful progression.

Those functions might exceed the authority level of the project manager alone, so the PSG is often critical for project success.

This is a very complex question and the answer will be governed by your circumstances and employment law within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Do please contact us so that our HR Services experts can advise.

Yes and no. Some questions are deemed acceptable by best professional practices and others not. Some questioning may also contravene the law.

So, questions relating to an applicant’s educational background and hobbies are perfectly legitimate as part of exploring their suitability. In-depth questioning of their personal and private lives typically would not be.

Once again, due to the complexity of this area, we advise you to contact us for a further discussion.

Yes, it is perfectly possible.

We would counsel caution though. It’s often easy for a customer to see at a glance that a website has been built by an amateur as opposed to a professional. That might not be desirable. Because be it’s mirroring the professionality of the work

Also, building a website from scratch for the inexperienced can take a huge amount of time and a steep learning curve. It might be prudent to question whether or not your time and skill or that of your personnel, couldn’t be more profitably engaged in progressing your mainline business priorities.

There is no universal answer to this and it is a question that frequently leads to furious debate!

There are many different models. They sit on a spectrum ranging from entirely unstructured and without clear leadership, sometimes called “collective” by its advocates or “anarchic” by its critics, through matrix management paradigms, right up to conventional hierarchical command-and-control models of a type seen in the military.

We prefer to look at the company, its culture, its industry sector and its personnel, before making any specific recommendations.

Again, please call us for a further discussion.