Tip of the Week: 5 Ways IT Adds to Business Success

Of all reasons that a business doesn’t leverage IT, the one that makes the least sense to me has to be their size. There’s just a reluctance to adopt more than what - for whatever reason - is “enough” for a business of their capacity.

I really find it confusing. It isn’t as though more technology solutions, designed to make a company’s tasks easier, are going to make these tasks harder. If anything, adding the right technology will help to increase the business’ capacity. Maybe it’s because the employees of a business are afraid that their jobs will be at risk if a machine can do them - and they’ve never considered that someone still has to tell the machines what to do.

Regardless of the reason, it is important that anyone in charge of making decisions for a business understands the true benefits that modern IT solutions can deliver to all parts of their operations.

For instance:

Benefit 1. Money Management
Let’s face it, without money coming in, no business can operate for long. So the ability to properly manage incoming and outgoing cash flow is pretty crucial. Sure, a simple spreadsheet can be used to accomplish this, but this also requires some serious hours to be invested to keep this document updated.

On the other hand, the right IT solutions can eliminate a considerable portion of this requirement. This allows you to save time, reviewing your finances instead of managing them.

Benefit 2. Collaboration
One of the problems with most ‘tried-and-true’ business solutions, like paper files in a cabinet, is the fact that they make teamwork a little more difficult. After all, with paper files, they require the people involved to be gathered in the same room, either huddled over a single page--making life difficult--or each working on a different printed sheet, using up resources and risking that some crucial insights won’t make it out of the meeting.

However, there are IT solutions, like cloud computing, that not only keep these kinds of documents secure, they also allow your team members to work together on a document, wherever they happen to be (more on that later). As a result, all insight and progress is saved in one place, accessible to any who need to work on it as a team.

Benefit 3. Efficiency
Businesses have a huge amount of work to attend to, regardless of their size. Anything that can help that work be done faster should be a welcome addition. Whether that speed comes from analyzing how time is being spent and optimizing it, managing tasks through digital tools to ensure that all responsibilities are filled, or any other way, should be motivation enough to adopt the solutions that enable these benefits.

Benefit 4. Mobile Work and Telecommuting
Remember how technology solutions were able to enable collaboration, wherever a user happened to be? This is due to the mobility that many solutions can provide. Smartphones are more and more able to communicate with those devices, making it possible to work from effectively anywhere.

Other solutions can allow an employee to work from home, offering some additional productivity benefits and perks for employees.

Benefit 5. Customer Service
Finally, the right technology solution can assist your business with its all-important customer service needs. You could apply a method to assist customers in need of support automatically, saving time, as an employee can step in with a clearer idea of the situation - assuming the employee needs to interrupt what they were doing at all. If you run an appointment-based business, you can put the ability to schedule a time in your client/customer’s hands if you want, establishing availability and automatically having it update as it changes.

Of course, this is but a brief sampling of what the right solutions can do if properly leveraged. Make sure you read some of our other blogs and service descriptions to learn more about what we do, and reach out at (509) 534-1530 when you’re ready!