.This is the first VAT change in many years and the first since many Internet Business were created. The first for many people out there.

Already we are seeing customer who are having to work hard to accomadate this change even when they have their business well prepared to cope with changes. But as many of us from Hero have been IT traininers as well as consultants we know there will be Many MS Excel spreasheets out there where folk instead of having a single place to enter the VAT will have simply added into a formula. How many and what impact that could have we don't know.

Worse still is that some databases may have been developed witht he VAT hard coded in, instead of being in a place where it is easy to change. This means the program will need to be altered and redeployed, hopefully at the cost of the developer.

I certainly urge everyone to check their systems and see the possible impact as the clock is already ticking and there is not much time to get the systems right.

This goes to show how important it is to both choose the right developer and also to make sure you staff are trained up as well as possible on the software they use. This is whether it is Microsoft office of Bespoke software. As trainers we saw many bad happens in people using MS office software simply because they did not know another way. Make sure you staff use their software correctly so they are as efficient as possible with it and don't fall into any traps which could have repercussions in the future.

Any we are all off to check our code, there was always one day we might have been feeling lazy!!!

Certain shops were so busy yesterday that you would not think people were cutting back. The first one day sale for many years in Marks and Spencers caused massive queues.

But shoppers have got wise in the last few years, they know that the Sales will come and many peopl nowwait for them. For once the retail industry has been forced to follow, not lead ,and in these times the shopper has even more power.

They put on the Sales to drive people into their shops and buy. But Why do they need to do this? Well obviously because people are not buying.

But why are they not buying? Because they are waiting for the Sales!!!

In the last few years people have got used to the fact that shops now will have sales before Christmas and many people will wait for them so even if the shops don't want to they are, in a sense, forced to.

If you offer sales or discounts then make sure you track the usage of them, track the trends. This information can tell you how well it is driving sales, what works best, but as important are checking if these promotions are causing your customers to hold off buying until there is a Sales on.

So my question to you is does your Database application record all the sales and promotional information? Do you know what promotions and offers work and what don't?

And if not why not????

If you are in retail are you also tracking your competitors Offers? Because there might be a trend to when your sales go down and your competition has a sale

In marketing we often talk about it being a numbers game. The more people you market then the more responses you will get. Well I was amazed at the article on the BBC Website

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7719281.stm

1 in 12 million Spam emails gets a result!! And yet they still reckon spammers can make a fortune, but they do now think it is not as easy as they thought it was.

There are two things I wanted to comment on. The first was protecting your networks and computer from being used as part of a SPAM Network. You should make sure you IT provider or department has made sure you are safe from this. I once worked at a company that was being used as a relay and not only did it bring the server down it could have meant the domain was black listed which would have meant no proper emails getting through.

The second thing is it does show that if you get the better information then you get better responses. So make sure you have a good database of contacts and is cleansed to make sure you are not trying to chase clients or prospects who are not logger there,!!!

Half way through the last lap of the Brazilian Grand prix I thought it was all over. Lewis Hamilton was sixth and there looked no way he would make the pass to get him the points needed to be World Champion. But Mclaren knew different because of the information they had. Their computers were telling them that Lewis was going to catch Timo Glock.

Modern Formula One teams rely on their information today. They take data from the weather man, the engine, the drivers, the tyres and the track temperatures and crunch that information to allow them to make the best decisions possible for their drivers.

They knew it was going to rain in the last few laps. They knew the temperatures would fall away in the tyres and they would lose all grip, and all the other data said bring Lewis in and get him on the right tyres while Glock’s team just took a gamble despite the information they had. It might have paid off another day but this time it went Lewis’ favour.

More and more sports are gathering as much information as they can and seeing ways they can make that information give them the edge. I was in reading in the summer of how at the start of training Lance Armstrong would have all sorts of tests to see what state of fitness and health his body was in. From those tests they would design his training program to get Lance from where he was to where he needed to be for the Tour de France.  As good as he was there is still so much science and raw information crunching behind it.

So can gathering information and analysing it give us the edge? Well for most businesses it can. In our own business every day we are learning the more we can gather and manage data on sales, marketing and projects then the better we can sell and more important the better we can deliver.

McLaren an Lewis Hamilton will work even harder next year to gain another world title. They will gather even more information and use it to squeeze every drop of performance out of the car. If we do the same then we can get the most out of our business, job or department.