Having worked in web IT operations for some years I have had interact with and lead initiatives with a number of network operations center (NOC) organizations. What has consistently struck me is the focus on a few statistics related to immediate problem resolution while ignoring other mangerial operational metrics that can be used to understand the nature of the various problem origins and identify ways to eliminate them. Here is a list of key performance indicators (KPI) I feel every NOC should track to help their managerial staff make better decisions.
Incident / Ticket Management
Total Incidents
Incidents open
Incidents Closed
Incidents reopened
Mean time to notify
Mean time to Isolate
Mean time to Resolve
Avg incident create to resolve duration
Avg incident resolve to close duration
% duplicate incidents
% incidents auto generated
% incidents auto resolved
% incidents caused by changes
% incidents caused by change management issues
% incidents causing changes
% incidents created by Tier 2
% incidents created by Tier 3
% incidents escalated
% incidents linked to problems
% incidents linked to testing errors
% incidents misrouted
% incidents caused by data integrity issues
% changes audited with errors
% changes causing incidents
% incidents linked to lack of training
% incidents received by email
% incidents received by phone
% incidents resolved by Tier 1
Change Management
Changes created
% changes rejected
Changes implemented
% high risk changes
Avg change implementation time
% emergency changes
% changes implemented within target time – critical
% changes implemented within target time – high
% changes implemented within target time – medium
% change failures due to change management review issues
% changes – post implementation feedback
% changes – post implementation review
% changes – process compliance
% changes audited
% changes audited with errors
% changes causing incidents
% changes causing problems
% changes implemented without back-out plan
% changes implemented without testing
% changes requiring scheduled outages
% changes specified inaccurately
% changes with incorrect data
% changes without sign-off
Tier 1 – Service Desk
% calls abandoned
% calls answered
% registered support users logging service requests
% users registered for it support
Avg call abandonment time
Avg call answer time
Avg call talk time
Avg cost per call
Avg service requests per user
Avg daily incidents handled per service desk agent
Number of incoming calls
Customer satisfaction – service support
Surveys sent
% survey response rate – service support
% calls converted to service requests
% Tier 1 support positions unfilled
% Tier 1 support trained
% IT support with industry certification
% IT support staff turnover
Routine Service Requests
Service requests created
% service requests resolved within target
Avg service request create to resolve duration
% service requests auto generated
% service requests caused by changes
% service requests caused by data integrity issues
% service requests caused by virus
% service requests dispatched
% service requests linked to lack of training
% service requests received by email
% service requests received by telephone
% service requests resolved by first level support
Avg service request resolve to close duration
Avg service request cost
% of calls converted to service requests
% of service requests resolved on initial contact
% of service requests resolved by second level support
% of service requests resolved by third level support
% of service requests resolved by knowledge base
% of service requests escalated
% of service requests misrouted
% of service requests reopened
% of service requests void
% of service requests requiring onsite support
% of duplicate service requests
This list is by no means complete, but even in this limited form it can be especially powerful if the KPIs are measured per, engineer, tier, group, and/or subsystem for additional analysis detail. Even so, it is a long list and will have to be modified to your needs and possibly automatically integrated into your monitoring and ticketing systems for the minimum intrusiveness and maximum acceptance and compliance. It should provide a starting point for any team that wants to have a better understanding of its mission and also for the company on the whole that needs to more quickly isolate, fix and reduce operational problems in both the long and short term.
Over the past decade the increasing availability of reliable high speed globally connected networks and the decreasing cost of affordable computing power has facilitated the acceleration of a number of trends in services, technology and the processes that support them. It will have a profound impact on IT operations staffing and project management.
Technology
Appliances: The need to understand the intricacies of many applications is being diminished as vendors create purpose built server systems with preconfigured software with web interfaces. Firewall, load balancer, wireless, authentication, intrusion detection, mail delivery, and administration systems are often available on platforms built on this model.
Convergence: Speedier hardware and more adept software have also made it possible to create single devices with multiple discrete roles. Load balancers, firewalls and VPNs functionality that used to be separate now often reside on the same device. Both phone and storage systems now operate using shared network equipment and voicemail can be retrieved from your email system.
Virtualization: In an effort to maximize utilization efficiencies and provisioning flexibility, the transparent sharing and movement of software locations, and the data paths it uses, has been facilitated by increasingly faster hardware and more capable support systems. Virtual circuits, virtual LANs and virtual operating systems are now commonplace.
Services
Traditional outsourcing: In an effort to reduce costs, IT support and software development functions that don’t require face to face human interaction or physical contact with equipment are being outsourced to remote third parties who in turn need access to internal systems.
Web based software as a service (SaaS): Universal access to vendor managed standardized general administration software systems has reduced setup costs considerably. It has also made the price of expansion and support more linear and predictable. Forklift technology refreshes and major capital expenditures to add the ability to expand in future will be less likely to occur. There are many examples of this with any service that you can implement online such as retail banking, tax preparation, software purchase and downloading, contact management, and gaming falling into this category,
Cloud computing: Internally created strategic, customized software is being migrated to vendor facilities where automated provisioning and virtualization is used to manage the servers on which it runs. Many small businesses use cloud service providers such as Google, Amazon, and Rackspace to lower their operational costs by outsourcing virtualization to them.
Processes
RFP-lite speed sourcing: The internet provides instant transparency into market and competitor developments. IT organizations will be expected to find solutions to a new competitive landscape without the luxury of developing detailed requirements documentation, clearly defined vendor specifications or selection criteria used in traditional requests for proposal (RFP). The new paradigm will involve preselecting a few competing Tier 1 providers to create working prototypes based on high level requirements defined in an eventual contract with only key terms and conditions. Time consuming supporting details will be refined afterwards in supporting contracts. This will create two tiers of bureaucracy, one swift, the other more measured and comprehensive.
New careers: Not only do we have a rapidly changing environment, but we also have rapidly changing technology necessitating a redefinition of the staffing roles of everyone in the IT operations function. The impact initially felt by entry level desktop support staff in corporate IT is now affecting more senior staff in both corporate and web operations. The change will have to be embraced and new career development opportunities will evolve.
The Impact on Project Management and Staffing
Valued IT operations staff will be those who are flexible in their roles, generous in their knowledge transfer, aware of new technologies, able to proactively evaluate their impact to the business, confident in making sound business cases for their deployment and capable of implementations in a timely manner. They will increasingly become integration engineers with an understanding of strategic architectural principles. The days of the pure network, security, or systems administration engineer are over. Expect networking, telephony and security functions to start becoming sub-disciplines of systems administration as the application support teams take increasing control of the data path both on premises and in outsourced SaaS and cloud environments.
The stakeholders with whom IT interacts interact will also change to include a wide variety of third parties. As interpersonal interaction increases so will the need to hire staff with good people skills will become a key ingredient for success. The greatest change will be triggered by the use of cloud computing. IT staffs will become greatly involved in vendor due diligence, service level monitoring, automatic parameter driven provisioning and decommissioning, and the creation of new capacity planning models with finance departments.
The IT project manager will become increasingly technical, rising from the ranks of the engineering teams. New uncertainties will increase fear and resistance to change, not only within their teams but also in those customer and vendor teams who will be affected. Project managers, who have greater visibility into company trends through their work spanning multiple disciplines, will find themselves informally acting as mentors to the teams they support. Technical matrix management will now include an expanded set of soft skills.
Don’t think that the IT generalist will kill the IT specialist. Instead we will see the rise of multi-disciplinary specialists with long term planning and project management talents in the guise of the generalist. It will be a hybrid skill set merging the curricula of community colleges, IT certification programs and under graduate MIS degrees. Expect active corporate involvement in the same way we see it in traditional engineering and software development disciplines to meet this need.
The goal of exploiting technology for competitive advantage will fail if we don’t address the adaptability of our people and processes that support it.
Every non-profit should know as much as possible about its visitors. An excellent tool for this is Google Analytics. The information it extracts from your non-profit site is extraordinary. Your online marketing plans should always consider this or other similar valuable tools. With web analytics you can get many useful statistics and charts. These include:
Countries, cities and neighborhoods of your visitors
Daily visitor trends over time
The average time spent on your site
Most popular pages of your site
The number of pages read during each visit
Sites that refer the most visitors to your site
The pages on the referral sites that link to yours
Keywords people use to search for your site
Bounce rates, or the % of visits in which people instantly left your site.
The number of visitors that are accurately following the path you had designed to reach a target page. This uses the “Defined Funnel Navigation” goals feature.
Data on the number of clicks each link receives using overlays.
Here is a tutorial on what this tool can provide:
There are many other tutorials on this product on the web. This screencast tutorial from NewFangled.com has additional interesting ideas that could work for your non-profit or NGO. They also have a very good blog post on this topic.
Activating Google Analytics is relatively simple. First you need to create an account and then you generate the special Google Analytics HTML code for your website. Place this code at the bottom of each website page. To make it easy, most webmasters just place it in the footer of their website design template, style or theme. Each time a webpage is viewed, it sends a report back to your Google Analytics dashboard. This tutorial shows you how.
Benefits for you
Your non profit or Non Governmental Organization (NGO) can benefit in many ways from the data Google Analytics has to offer. Here are a few examples:
Create a marketing relationship with the sites that refer the most visitors to yours. If these sites are blogs, encourage them to write about your some more about your operations.
Use the maps to target specific cities or neighborhoods with direct marketing. Make those cities with the most visits to your site the priority locations in your marketing campaigns.
See whether the keywords people use to reach your site are the ones you think they should be using. Consider adding content or changing the titles of your pages to meet your keyword needs. This data can also be obtained for specific pages on your site.
Consider eliminating keywords with high bounce rates or adding more content for your low bounce rate keywords.
Use the bounce rates and visit times to determine how engaging each page is. Try to improve the rates for your most important pages such those that cover donations, volunteer efforts and the like.
Stop spending on advertising using keywords that have high bounce rates or that searches send to the wrong pages.
Use your top 10 most popular pages to place your most powerful messages or calls to action
If you have a donations page you can use the e-commerce features of Google Analytics to determine the value of your online marketing initiatives. The conversion rate of those visitors who become donors, the average value of donations and the number of donations you have received can all be tracked. If you plan your strategy correctly you can map your conversion data to geographic, campaign, and keyword factors.
The ecommerce feature can be used to determine the number of page views a visitor reads before making a donation.
Use the data on your visitors’ screen resolution, browser type , browser version and flash version as factors in designing your website layout.
You can filter out visits from your own offices in your reports so that they don’t skew the data related to your site.
Target your advertising to those sites that refer the most visitors to your site.
Consider creating a special page just for visitors that click through on advertising from a specific site. Sites like Facebook allow you to show advertising only to specific demographic groupings. Use this to see how effective your campaigns are.
Use “Navigation Analysis” to determine how people browse through your site. See whether they are making the right decision after reading your most important pages.
With “Advanced Segments” you can get all this information mentioned before with very specific filters. For example “all visitors who have stayed more than 3 minutes or viewed more than 5 pages and then ended up on our donations page”. You could consider designing your site with only these viewers in mind.
There are many other ways to utilize analytics, sign up for an account and start practicing.
Where to Add Analytics
It is important to have Analytics running on all the websites under your control. These include:
Your website: The very first place to add analytics.
Blogs: Google’s Blogspot.com and Blogger.com have analytics widgets built in. Blogs hosted on WordPress.com do not. If you are hosting your own blog, there are many themes and widgets in the WordPress.org and MovableType.org packages that allow you to add analytics widgets to their themes and styles.
Forum pages: If your website has its own homegrown social network using vBulletin,phpBB or any other software, remember to add analytics there too.
There may be other candidates. Think hard to remember what other sites under your control could use this valuable feature.
Sustainability
Remember you will find these and other ideas on the web that will describe methods of how to improve your websites. Unless you assign someone in your organization to be dedicated to these tasks and regularly report on them, it won’t be done. To have a sustainable or growing presence on the web you will need to make this analysis a regular part of your operation.
Conclusion
There are many examples on the web that outline how Google Analytics has been helpful including this one from the Rutgers-Newark Law Library for the Center of Law and Justice. With this knowledge you can view your website in a new light and make your site more useful for your visitors.
Have you ever wondered how to get your non profit or NGO on Google Maps when people do searches? This can be done using the Google Places service. It is a fast and free way to make your organization more visually accessible on the web.
What information should you provide?
A local listing can be very important for Non Governmental Organizations as it makes it easier for you to be found. There is a lot of useful information you can add such as:
Titles: The name of your project
Addresses: Add your current address, don’t make Google guess as the approximate location it provides may be incorrect. To be certain, use no abbreviations in your street name. A good feature of LBC is that it automatically places a marker on the map as you type so you visually the accuracy. Corrections can be made using the “Fix incorrect marker location” area of your listing editor.
Web Pages: Google is a search engine, so make sure your non profit has a website with meaningful information so that you can take full advantage of your local business center listing.
Phone Numbers: This is still an important means of communication so have it ready. You may want to add numbers for your main office, donations or community outreach services.
Categories: Your business category is used to help filter listings during searches. If you make a mistake and list your non-profit as a restaurant, then your listing on the map will never show up when people search using key words such as “volunteer”, “non profit”, or “NGO”. Choose this wisely.
Hours & Payment / Photos: Add your office hours, but also upload a gallery of pictures of the location and images of success stories of your beneficiaries.
Custom Fields: Upload anything that you think would be of interest. Consider including pledge drive flyers, public health information or your press package.
Think of the very many ways in which this can help your organization. Brainstorm with your marketing team, they may think of other ideas to help make a difference.
How do you get started?
Fortunately Google has a very interesting tutorial on how to add your non profit to its Local Business Center.
Use your local listing in marketing campaigns
You can use your listing to have a great impact on the visibility of your non-profit on the web. This video should provide you with a lot of food for thought.
Getting interested? Here are some other interesting things you can use your local listing to achieve:
You can tie your listing to your Google Analytics account to get data on who is visiting your main website from your map page.
The local listing dashboard will also show neighborhoods from which people are using driving directions to reach your offices. This is excellent information for targeting your direct mailing marketing campaigns. You could consider opening an office in these neighborhoods too.
Compare the keywords people use to find your listing with those they use to find your website. You may want one to consider having each site focus on a different type of visitor. Volunteers versus donors for example.
Try adding listings for each branch of your NGO so that people can find all your locations in a neighborhood or region
Add links to your listing to your website, blog or fan page so that it becomes more visible
Update your photos on your listing so that it becomes more alive.
Conclusion
A local listing is only a part of any online marketing plan. For it to be successful, assign the responsibility of maintaining your local listing to someone and make them report on the progress they have made with it. Document what has been done so that others can take over when there are changes in staffing. Fortunately a local listing won’t change frequently, but it is a good practice for any activity you choose.
I use a 63cm Trek Madone 5.2 for weekend riding and commuting to work, but I changed jobs to a more undesirable part of town with a commute that was too long for cycling. I still craved a bike for occasional early morning spins or lunch time jaunts.
I wanted something relatively cheap (under $1000), not flashy to avoid theft, (dark colored or single toned if possible), durable, at least a 63 cm frame, wide tires for potholes, average weight, a semi-road bike geometry for comfort if I needed to do a long ride, no real need for disk brakes and no weight from shock absorbers I wouldn’t need.
I went to at least a dozen bike shops and tested models from Bianchi, Specialized, K2, LeMond, Kona, Cannondale, Raleigh, Giant and more. None had frames that were big enough, only Trek did.
The road bike lines were either too expensive or delicate for what I wanted. The Trek Cyclocross XO models were tempting, but were either brightly colored or beyond the budget. The Portland was similarly affected.
The Trek 520 was an option, but my new job is near the sea and I was concerned about rusting with the steel frame. I also was concerned about the difficulty of using the friction down tube shifters in rapidly changing traffic conditions.
I quickly learned that the Trek FX, SU, Soho and 7000 series all share the same basic frame. Some have disk brakes and others have handle bars that sprout upward to tempt you to eat an ice cream cone while riding along the boardwalk. The rest just look like road bikes without the loopy handle bars.
The Trek Soho and SU models met most of my criteria, but they were not in stock in any of the bicycle stores I visited. I didn’t have ice cream plans, so the 7000s didn’t fit the bill.
It quickly came down to the FX series.
Having significantly limited my choices I reviewed the entire line from the 7.2 FX through to the 7.9 FX. The 7.6 FX with the carbon fork and rear stays was tempting. It was lightweight, and just slightly over budget, but the 22.5″ maximum frame size was too small. The frame color also contrasted against the black carbon fiber parts, making it more noticeable. The 7.5 FX was cheaper, but only came in the smaller frame size and was available only in bright red.
My final choice was a black 25″ 7.3 FX. Similar to this one.
I agonized over the weight difference between it and the more expensive models in the line, but with clipless pedals the difference was barely noticeable on the legs. There was a pronounced weight difference between the two, but I was comparing models with different frame sizes. This really didn’t matter as I didn’t intend to do racing where a couple pounds could make a big difference.
The $500 price was right especially as I was not sure of what my riding schedule at would be. Spending a lot to have a bicycle decorate my desk area would be a waste. At least with this sticker it could be tolerable.
My experience with bike shops has been eye opening. There is an overwhelming desire to sell what they have in stock, especially after Christmas, whether or not it meets your criteria. I’m tall, and a 25″ / 63cm frame is a little small, yet many 59cm models were recommended. I have ridden frames that are too small; talk to my knees and wrists for the whole agonizing story.
The other thing you have to watch out for is the guilt trip you sign up for when components are discussed. If you don’t have Ultegra, Dura-Ace, or 105 then you’re a nobody. Well I had a nobody budget, and when the component cogs begin to wear down in a year of hypothetical constant Indiana Jones riding, I’ll see whether it’s in my budget to replace or upgrade them on this run-around bike. I’ve used Ultegra and 105 on other bikes. Ultegra does shift slightly better, and from the bike shop assistants perspective they are “more durable” in an unquantifiable sort of way, but for group rides with friends and commuting I don’t really care.
Light weight carbon fiber forks, frames and seat posts were the other big things I was up-sold on. When I asked about upgrading to a carbon fork on a cheap bike, they all told me that investing in lighter wheels would be much more effective. Guess what I did when the budget permitted.
The dampening effect of carbon on road vibration was another selling point. That may be true, but carbon attracts theft, and it was unlikely I’d be riding a distance long enough for its effect to be felt. A pair of gel padded shorts could work just fine on those few occasions. I already have some.
On the 7.3 FX, I swapped out the handle bars for a flat one which gives me a slightly lower stance similar to a road bike and bar ends to give me different hand positions on the handle bars. I also use clipless pedals and a longer stem. I also invested in a good saddle. Bikes are notorious for coming with cheap seats that are good enough for the showroom, but become a pain in the rear on longer rides. Everything else is stock.
I have taken it out on a number of 13 mile loops with a steep 200 ft climb over 2500 ft distance, 600 ft of climbing in total. The 7.3 FX handles it well, especially on damp roads where the traction of the wider tires is welcome. The downhill speed is slowed by the rolling resistance of the tires, but on steep slopes this is a benefit. The 7.3 FX’s stability and better braking is much more noticeable than with the Madone in such conditions. I have ridden it up a 5 mile bumpy paved mountain road rising 2000 ft. It handled capably. On the descent I didn’t have to cringe with every jarring jolt and sudden curve like I would do on the lighter carbon frame of the Madone.
My Madone has both a compact crank and a large 11-27 cassette customization to help me with steep hills, but the climbing gear ratios are slightly less favorable than that of the FX 7.3. I also feel the more relaxed stance of the FX 7.3 makes it easier to ride uphill than on the true road bike. It’s slower due to the easy “granny” gearing, but this makes it more enjoyable.
At high speeds the Madone is noticeably faster. The FX 7.3′s greater weight, wide tires, lower gearing and less efficient rider stance takes its toll. This increases the temptation to over exert yourself to get true road bike speeds on the FX 7.3. If you relax and accept the 20% speed reduction it can be quite an enjoyable ride especially as the tires absorb a lot of road vibration.
This is a very capable cost effective bicycle. Perfect for those who have made a New Year’s resolution, or those who want to lose a few pounds when they are not fully sure they will stick with the plan. It’s a bike you can park without worrying too much. With a flat bar the stance is similar to that of a road bike when your hands are on top of the road bike’s handle bars, not down in the loops. This makes it quite comfortable on long rides because more of your weight is supported with your arms, not just your rear like the more relaxed hybrids do. In retrospect I should have started with a model like this for my original 10 mile commute, but I decided to splurge on the Madone. The FX has fixtures for saddle bag panniers or racks in the rear. If I lived in a rainier climate, or the road traffic were chaotic, then I’d consider something with disk brakes. I’ve heard of people using these bikes in century rides and after experiencing it I see that it isn’t inconceivable to do so with skinnier tires. You wouldn’t win, but you’d have a lot of multipurpose fun.
If my physique allowed me more choices then I could be finicky about the subtle differences between brands. Even so, I found the experience as intimidating as choosing a bottle of vintage cabernet at a Napa winery. There was a constant battle between what I wanted and what people thought I should want. The local bike shop references to the DuraAce, Ultegra, and 105 lines of components, carbon fiber, stance and weight brought cartoonish images of sommelier’s prancing around extolling the virtues of bouquet, terroir, microclimates and chocolaty fruitiness.
If I were a competitive racer or professional cyclist, these subtleties would be supremely important, but too often I felt part of a conniving conspiracy to convert a quick spin to pick up a lunch time sandwich into the Tour de France.
So what upgrades would I recommend to new riders with this bike or entry level models in the FX series? A few months later, when your household CFO gives you permission to burn another hole in your wallet, try researching the following:
Clipless pedals and shoes: Confusingly clipless pedals are the ones with ski-boot type clips. The clip types are the ones that look like little baskets attached to the pedals. With clipless pedals and cycling shoes your foot will feel as if has been epoxied to the bike. You can not only push the pedal on the down stroke, but you can also pull it up on the up stroke. I use the mountain bike style shoes which have a rubber sole. They allow me to walk without the very unstable, noisy and silly looking waddle that road bike shoes provide. One day I’ll become obsessively preoccupied by weight, and counting every gram I’ll buy a pair of road bike shoes so I can look macho in that hot pants sort of way, but not right now. This combination can drop 5 to 10 minutes off a one hour ride. If specialized shoes are a too much too soon, or you are uncommitted to riding but want a little more zip, then try different tires.
Lighter / slicker tires: The 7.3 FX comes with 700x32C tires that are ideal for rough roads and trails of unpredictable quality. The 32mm wide tire absorbs a lot of punishment without puncturing and helps to provide a soft ride. They do make the bike slower than a true road bike and there are times when you could over stress your knees if you decide to keep up with them. I had this problem at work where a motley crew of us ride a 10 mile circuit at lunch time and the poor 7.3 FX just couldn’t keep up. I probably slowed them down by 10 minutes over the circuit while they patiently waited for me at the top of each hill. This time can be significant if you have to catch a post lunch meeting and I felt very guilty.
There are days when I feel joy should result from reduced effort. Everyone needs less pain, more gain sometimes. So I invested in narrower 700x25C tires and can now hold my head up high. The difference was definitely noticeable, a little faster with a lot less stress on the knees. I could now easily keep up with the group. I also had to buy slightly thinner inner tubes too as the old ones wouldn’t fit. Just remember that the 700x25C tire may be too delicate for riding in Manhattan, or cruising along a muddy fire road. They may also not be the right choice at the beginning of your diet, ask your bike shop for their advice.
Lighter wheels: I don’t think these are worthwhile. You need a heavy rim for commuting. The gains from improved tires will outweigh the slight additional benefit of this upgrade. If bragging rights are involved, well, that’s a different story. In the past, I succumbed to this temptation in the past on a hybrid bike. The gain from a tire change is unquestionably superior to the improvement due to lighter wheels. Lose the weight from your midriff and save the money for your “road bike fund”.
Carbon Fork: There are a some benefits to adding a carbon fork. They are a little lighter, and there is an unquantifiable assertion of less vibration. Unfortunately after market forks can be expensive, sometimes rivaling the cost of a second hand hybrid bike in good condition. If you like to tinker, well go ahead, but a better investment would be to drink less sodas and save the money for your “road bike fund”.
Summary: I now leave my hybrid at work and ride it at lunch time two days a week. The midday workout really invigorates my day. If you want a fun, general purpose bike, then make no modifications. The benefit of the hybrid is that if you start to enjoy your New Year’s resolution to lose a few pounds and choose to evolve into a more serious cyclist, then the upgrade path to near road bike performance with clipless pedals and 700x25C tires is affordable.
Bike companies buy their components at discounts of up to 70%, so upgrading components at the retail store easily becomes uneconomical especially when labor costs are included. If you feel a strong need for more improvements, just buy a new bike and forget this one. Remember, that when you do, Shimano 105 components are the best top end choice for the “not so sure, well maybe, I have a budget, I really should start a diet” road bike cyclist no matter what the sales assistant tells you. Instead of investing in a lighter bike, get skinnier tires, ask about a compact crank and get into a bike routine that helps you lose some pounds. I’m not too proud to say I have made that mistake before.
In my opinion, aluminum framed hybrid bikes with a near road bike geometry are a good choice for commuting and fun rides that could turn into longer adventures on asphalt or gravel. This is true no matter what brand you buy. The 7.3 FX was the right choice for me and my specific needs for a second bike. This could be true for you.
If you want a tough bike that can double as a commuter and long distance road bike for centuries, consider a cyclocross model instead of a hybrid or flat handled road bike. I invested in one for this reason, but due to my size I was fitted with a custom frame from Silva Cycles which was significantly more expensive.
