Nerds On Site - Edmonton/Red Deer

Home
Canada
Edmonton, AB
Nerds On Site - Edmonton/Red Deer

Nerds On Site delivers ProActive I.T. Services/Solutions for SMEs through our Flat-Rate Pricing... Nerds On Site | Edmonton/Red Deer

Who We Are:
Local Nerds.

Global Knowledge. We have hundreds of Nerds worldwide that can aid each of our clients in reaching their technology goals! There is literally nothing we cannot do with technology! NerdCare – tired and frustrated with failing technology? Ask us on-going month-to-month technology support, and never be frustrated again! To learn more, visit our website or blog. We believe in empowering our clients so that they can start to get more from their technology investments.

11/01/2026

New research from SysAid, built on answers from 718 IT pros, puts a number on something most of us already feel: 35 percent. That's the average share of working time that disappears into manual, repetitive work.

Thirty five percent sounds abstract until you do the math. On a five day week, that's roughly a day and three quarters spent on password resets, access changes, and copying the same fix from one ticket to the next.

The part that bugs me is who gets stuck with it. The rough quarter of respondents in the 40 to 60 percent range aren't slacking. They're often the people who could automate the whole mess in an afternoon, and they never get the afternoon because the queue doesn't empty.

My take is that most teams start with the wrong question. They ask which shiny platform to buy. I'd start with two weeks of tickets, sorted into piles. Anything that keeps showing up is your automation list, and it's usually shorter than people expect.

Close to 40 percent of shops also listed tool consolidation as a leading goal for this year. That tracks with what I see in the field. If your user data lives in five systems that don't talk to each other, automation turns into a scavenger hunt.

New research across 718 IT professionals reveals how much working time is lost to manual, repetitive tasks, and what high-performing teams are doing differently.

10/31/2026

A quarter of people using 16 or more collaboration apps say they miss important messages or tasks. For people on 6 to 15 apps, the number is 15 percent. Those figures come from Yomly's 2026 roundup of workplace collaboration stats.

When a team is struggling, my first move is to look at their app list. Nine times out of ten, someone added a tool to fix a missed handoff, and now that handoff lives in three places instead of one.

What fixes it in practice is less exciting. Write down who owns each decision. Pick one home for each type of update. Run a quick daily sync that ends with blockers named and an owner for each one. Then ask whether each app still earns its spot on the team's screen.

Which apps does your team open every day, and which ones only get checked when someone pings you about them?

Explore 60+ workplace collaboration statistics on teamwork, tools, productivity, and hybrid work trends shaping modern organizations in 2026.

10/30/2026

Most content teams don't have a writing problem. They have a tab problem.

One tab for keyword research, one for drafting, one for images, one for scheduling, and somewhere a spreadsheet tracking which one is actually up to date. I've watched smaller teams lose hours every week just moving work from one tool to another.

I came across a comparison of Charigent against Jasper that takes the all in one approach. The idea is you research a topic, draft and check the article, generate the images, and schedule the social posts without leaving one workspace. The base plan starts at $29 a month and covers research, drafting, images, and social scheduling.

What I appreciated is how upfront they are about the upgrade ladder. WordPress publishing and the website widget need the $69 Pro plan, and connecting outside AI accounts needs Business at $149. Honestly, that's the fine print I'd read before committing to any tool, whatever it's called.

The real question isn't which tool writes the nicest sentence. It's how many times your work gets copied from one place to another, because every handoff is a chance for something to slip.

How many tools are you juggling to get one piece of content published? Be honest, I promise I won't judge. Much. 😂

Jasper alternative for content marketing teams: research keywords, draft and check articles, generate images, and publish, in one workspace from $29/mo.

10/29/2026

Clear beats clever. That's the line from a Quire post on communication and collaboration that stuck with me, and it matches what I see on IT projects.

The post cites McKinsey research saying better collaborative communication can lift team productivity by 20 to 25 percent. I'd take any single percentage with a grain of salt, but in my experience the slowdowns on IT projects usually come from fuzzy ownership, not weak skills. Two people can both think they own the same ticket, and nobody is being lazy. The roles just never got written down.

Before you buy another tool or add another standing meeting, see if everyone on your team can answer three things: who owns the work, when you check in, and where questions go. If those answers need a glossary to make sense, they're too complicated.

Tools only help after those basics are settled.

Communication conveys information; collaboration moves the work. The 5 skills that bridge the two, plus the real productivity lift of getting it right.

10/28/2026

36% of startups founded on Carta in 2025 had just one founder. That's up from 31% the year before, and solo founders are now as common as two, founder teams.

I'm not surprised. Plenty of people I talk to would rather run a lean operation with a laptop and a few good tools than manage a team of ten before they've even found a customer. Smaller teams can move fast and keep costs under control.

But here's my caution from seeing this stuff up close. Going solo doesn't mean going it alone. You still need someone to challenge the plan, someone to catch the mistakes you're too close to see, and a regular check in to make sure what you're building is actually moving forward.

The data also has a reminder for anyone counting the wins. A business application isn't the same as a business formation. Census projected about 30, 438 employer businesses would form within four quarters from December 2025 applications. Filing the paperwork is the easy part, and the article is careful to keep those numbers separate for good reason.

If you're a solo founder, what's the one thing you wish you'd set up earlier? A mentor, a tool, a routine? Tell me in the comments.

Explore startup statistics on AI adoption, business formation, layoffs, team size, and the rise of smaller businesses powered by AI agents.

10/27/2026

The first claim in Zensurance's new roundup of real Canadian small business cyber claims started with a convincing email and one wrong click. A software company had a fraudster phish their way into an account and move money out. No malware, no sophisticated intrusion. The payout was $100, 000.

That's the part I keep coming back to. When I sit down with a small business owner, I'm less interested in the firewall than in who can approve a payment from a single email, and whether anyone would question it on a busy Friday afternoon.

Another claim in that batch was a managed IT provider hit by ransomware, with a payout of more than $250, 000. The people who fix other companies' systems ended up locked out of their own data.

If your insurance application asks about MFA, backups, and coverage for fraudulent transfers, go back and read your answers. Those questions matter, and a wrong answer can turn a bad day into a bad year.

Has anyone on your team ever questioned a payment request that looked off, and what happened next?

Phishing, ransomware, and DDoS attacks keep evolving, and Canadian small businesses are squarely in cybercriminals' crosshairs. Here are six real claims we helped clients recover from – payouts from $25,000 to more than $250,000 – and what they mean for your business, whatever industry you're in...

10/26/2026

Most CRMs treat AI like a cleanup crew. It shows up after the call, transcribes the conversation, and suggests the next task. Useful, sure. But the rep still walked into that call blind.

Sure Send flips that around with a pre, call summary. Before the rep dials, the platform pulls together the contact record, call history, property activity, and engagement signals, then recommends an approach. The idea is that reps stop opening with "let me pull up your file" and just start the conversation.

The other part that caught my eye is the feedback loop. Their Winning Formula uses a six month rolling average of each rep's own conversion ratios to put a dollar value on daily activity. Most reps wait 60 to 90 days to see what their work is actually worth. Seeing it weekly is a big change.

Worth noting this comes from the vendor, so I'd take the numbers with a grain of salt. Software doesn't make anyone pick up the phone, but if a tool makes the next conversation easier to start, that's worth paying attention to.

If you've rolled out a CRM with AI features, did your reps actually use them, or did they quietly get ignored?

See how Sure Send’s AI-driven CRM helps real estate and lending groups by providing pre-call insights, a daily performance framework, and real-time act...

10/25/2026

750+ CRMs out there, and most of them weren't built for your business.

That's the big takeaway from a breakdown I just read on Salesflare's blog. Every CRM is designed around a specific use case, so the "best" one depends entirely on who's using it. A B2B sales team chasing leads needs something that does the follow up for them. A large enterprise building workflows across departments needs something closer to a set of building blocks.

The trap I see a lot is teams buying the big name because it looks impressive on paper. Enterprise CRMs often come with long contracts, heavy setup, and sometimes a consultant just to get the thing running. Great if you're a big organization with the people to support it. Painful if you're a small sales team that just wants to know who opened your last email.

Pick the tool for the job you actually have, not the one with the biggest brand. What CRM is your team using right now, and does it fit how you actually sell? Share your experience below 👇

Salesflare

Here's the top CRM example per specific purpose; for selling B2B, building enterprise workflows, managing a field sales team, organizing real estate sales, doing marketing automation or customer support, managing instant messaging, and fundraising as a non-profit.

10/24/2026

Only 39% of IT teams at large companies say they've automated most of their repetitive work. The rest are somewhere between partly there and still moving tickets around by hand.

The ScriptRunner survey covered 180 IT managers and senior engineers at organizations with 1, 000 or more employees, collected between October and December 2025. The number that stuck with me wasn't the 39%. It was that 63% only have a rough idea of what they could automate next. You can't pick the right task to automate if you haven't written down the work.

Worth noting that this is a self assessment, so people are grading their own homework. I'd treat it as a mood reading, not an audit.

The pattern I'd watch for is the one that shows up after a Teams bot goes live. It gets switched on, gets announced once in a channel, and then the same people keep messaging the same engineer directly. The tool works fine. The habit never changed.

If you're planning a rollout, start by listing the requests your team answers every week and sorting them by how often they come in. Automate the boring top of that list first.

Which repetitive request would you hand off first if a bot could take it tomorrow?

Survey data from 180 enterprises shows Microsoft automation growth is outpacing governance, integration, visibility, and roadmap maturity.

10/23/2026

If intelligence becomes almost free, what becomes the scarce thing? 🤔

The Living with AI podcast from Rogues in Paradise tackles that question head on. It looks at how AI is changing work, creativity, search and decision making, and what happens when intelligent assistance is available to pretty much everyone.

My take? The bottleneck is shifting. Getting an answer is getting cheap. Knowing whether that answer is right, and what to do with it, is where people will earn their keep. Trust and judgement are going to matter more, not less.

It also looks back at history, which I liked. Every big technology shift has made people wonder if their job is about to disappear. Usually the work changes shape instead of vanishing, but the people who adapt early are the ones who come out ahead.

Worth a listen if you want to think about this beyond the hype. Which skill do you think becomes most valuable as AI gets better, judgement, creativity or people skills? Tell me in the comments.

The Living with AI podcast explores work, search, creativity, trust and human adaptation as artificial intelligence transforms everyday life.

Address

Edmonton, AB

Website

http://social.mynerd.mobi/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Nerds On Site - Edmonton/Red Deer posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.