NxBizSuccess » Sustaining Business

Enabling a Virtual Office

Tonia Franklin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:54:38 +0000

By Randy BargerPublished: October 1, 2009
Posted in: 2009 Fall, Technology, Expand Omaha Magazine

In today’s economy, companies want to cut costs while maintaining current productivity levels with possibly fewer employees. That’s a tall task, but new technologies are allowing companies to create virtual, online working environments that are secure and easy to use while providing better performance and functionality than a traditional computing environment.

In a traditional computing environment, all employees physically come to an office to work on computers purchased, configured and managed by the company“s IT staff.

This computer management is a huge undertaking that“s necessary to keep data safe and computers running smoothly. Personalization and flexibility are sacrificed for security and performance.

The alternative is to deliver computing desktops and applications online to any computer – anywhere, anytime – that remain physically separate from an end user“s computer, transforming it into just an access point or terminal.

For more of this article, please visit http://www.expandomaha.com/2009/10/enabling-a-virtual-office/

Economic Gardening

Tonia Franklin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:14:15 +0000

Chris Gibbons, Director of Business & Industry Affairs for Littleton, CO discusses the opportunities and challenges in economic development rooted in growing jobs through entrepreneurship rather than chasing jobs by recruiting companies from outside. This is an adobe connect webinar courtesy of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension. (http://www.extension.org/) To access this webinar, simply click on the title below.

Economic Gardening

Health Care: What If Rural Really Mattered?

Tonia Franklin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:22:37 +0000

After August’s rancorous health care debate, it seems time to return to the question, “What would it look like if rural really mattered?” Making health care coverage affordable for the rural self-employed should be a driving force in the reform debate. Over half the jobs in rural America are tied to small businesses or self-employment – on family farms, ranches and Main Street businesses. As a result, rural people who own or work for those businesses are twice as likely to be underinsured as urban Americans.

Angel Romero-Keister opened Cravings Café in Lyons, Nebraska, last year. Her husband and their son have health insurance, Angel does not. They could not afford the additional premiums to include her. A so-called “pre-existing condition” made purchasing coverage for Angel on the individual market virtually impossible. She has become a vocal advocate for reform. She has helped organize local and statewide events in Nebraska and has traveled with other small business owners to Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress for strong health care reform legislation.

Likewise, Larry Harbour, an entrepreneur from Broken Bow, Nebraska, has spoken out for health care reform. Larry’s story was reported by National Public Radio’s Howard Berkes in June. Larry opened LB Custom Chrome and Detail to good success, but he knows the cost of individual health insurance for him and his wife – as much as $12,000 to $20,000 in annual premiums – is a serious economic threat to their business. But they also risk financial devastation if they remain uninsured. As Larry told Howard Berkes, “If anything were to happen to my wife and I, the business is sunk … . Every day, we wonder when it’s going to happen – if something’s going to happen, are we able to afford that?
Angel and Larry, like so many other self-employed rural Americans, have taken great financial risks to start their businesses in our rural communities. We hold them up as examples of rural America’s drive and entrepreneurial spirit, and rightly so. They have done what we asked of them. They’ve taken a leap of faith, staked a claim in their communities, and worked tirelessly to make good on that commitment.

If rural America mattered, we would not allow a dysfunctional health insurance system to kill off the entrepreneurial dreams of rural America’s family farmers, ranchers and Main Street business owners. And we would see broad agreement about what reform can and should do – starting with instilling competition in health insurance markets by creating a national health insurance exchange buttressed by a public health insurance plan.

That should be where our vision for health care reform begins, for Larry and Angel’s sake and for the future of rural America, which is so intertwined with their entrepreneurial dreams.

Contact: the article’s author, John Crabtree, Media Director at the Center for Rural Affairs, at johnc@cfra.org or 402.687.2103 x 1010. Find out more about the Center at their website, www.cfra.org. This article is from the Center for Rural Affairs’ October 2009 monthly newsletter. You can sign up for the free newsletter at http://www.cfra.org.