We could never imagine life without our smart phone to check the weather, navigate to new destinations, take photos, pay bills, google, send emails, oh and of course, make and receive phone calls too!
When it comes to making decisions about how much and which technology to purchase to support our business, we find ourselves drowning in an ocean of choice. It can be difficult to cut through the glossy brochures and marketing hype.
If investing in technology for your business is a more difficult decision to make than which smart phone to purchase, consider the following guiding principles.
- Know what you are wanting to achieve – whether it is team productivity, automated processes, data protection, business intelligence and more, there are many technical tools available to meet a range of business needs. Be clear about your needs and goals because one size will not fit all.
- Follow a set of standards – standards will minimise risk of data breaches. It will offer good IT governance, mitigate IT risks and keep your business secrets safe and secure. We can advise on the standards relevant to your business.
- Think about your business’ future – invest in technology that helps you manage for today’s issues and plan for tomorrow’s business opportunities.
- Ensure you have access to reliable IT support – a common cost cutting measure is to manage IT issues in house. Ironically, in-house IT helpdesks are not faster than external managed service providers. Why? in-house services tend to be very lean with a one to many ratio. Typically, these tech savvy people perform other duties in addition to troubleshooting IT issues for the whole organisation as required. Whereas, outsourced IT support services have larger teams and offer faster solutions because this is core business and it is what they do all day, every day. They are set up and experienced in a range of solutions and able to source replacement parts and devices more quickly too.
- Don’t put IT into the “too hard basket” – no longer does the use of IT give your business competitive advantage. It is business as usual and the way work is done and supported. Without information systems, businesses would not be able to keep up with competitors and unlikely to survive longer term.
- Give yourself IT peace of mind – you are not in the business of IT. Your business is to ……sell flowers, run a gym, help sick patients and so on. Just as it is important to have a shop front, a website, an address and phone number for people to contact you, having dedicated IT support you can count on, that are available 24/7 and resourced by technically qualified people, ….. is as fundamental as running your business.
Take the stress out of managing IT. Leave it to the experts. If you need advice, we are a phone call away.
(Post inspired by Rightsize)
