Building a successful company is hard work. Apart from setting revenue goals, developing new marketing strategies, and achieving targets, business owners need to build departments for sales, HR, accounting, IT, and more. Everything that happens in those teams affect the entire company, and collaboration must be efficient and effective. However, the rapid pace of technology means that IT departments face unique challenges when implementing, optimizing, and supporting the tools of their trade.
Technology vendors have moved away from selling solutions that require hefty upfront investments toward business models that let their customers pay for IT as monthly subscriptions. This not only speeds up the pace of development, it also brings down the cost of enterprise-level hardware and software to levels that small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can afford. The possibilities for growth are endless, but require significant amounts of planning. What then can you do to ensure your IT department helps your company grow?
Create technology goals
The decisions made by your IT department will affect everyone in the company — from network maintenance to assisting employees with computer-related issues — which is why you need technicians to be experts in company goals as well as technology solutions. Educating your team on these goals ensures you don’t end up paying for unnecessary cutting-edge hardware or software. If no one in your IT department has the capacity to come up with a long-term technology plan, consider hiring a consultant.
Consider the cloud
Cloud services come with countless benefits. From hard-to-quantify things like increasing employee mobility and collaboration to dollar-and-cents things like never needing to buy another server, cloud-based systems help you save money and prepare for future growth.
Utilize digital marketing
Social media and e-commerce sites are useful channels that could help your business collect, synthesize, and use customer information and data more efficiently than traditional methods. Essentially, you can better target your audience and personalize your promotions and other offerings, as you readily have the data of your customers that are automatically integrated into the system. Additionally, you can also segment and customize lists based on customer analytics — location, spending habits, likes, shares, etc.
Upgrade your communication systems
Communication and collaboration were essential to corporate success long before the internet changed the game. To keep up with the evolving expectations of your customers, you need VoIP phones, customer relationship management software, and unified communications systems. Thankfully, a managed IT service provider can install and support these for a low monthly fee.
Security
The threat landscape continues to evolve, leaving windows of opportunity for cybercriminals to exploit unprotected systems. The best thing you can do to avoid becoming a victim is to install several layers of security, including everything from firewalls to employee training and education.
SMBs that have already adopted relevant technologies such as the internet of things (IoT), mobile tech, digital marketing tools, and strategies among others, are able to increase efficiency, improve performance, and grow profitability. In addition, thanks to the boom of outsourced IT support, early adopters no longer have to stretch or exhaust as much funds to keep everything running smoothly.
As technology continues to shape the future of business processes, it’s important that organizations learn to grasp its promise and potential in order to allow a more intelligent, automated, and data-driven business approach.
How can you integrate your business with the latest technologies? As an SMB owner, it’s crucial to start learning how you can properly allocate your technology investments. Give us a call and let ATS Tech Solutions help your company optimize your IT resources to align with your business needs and take away your technology woes.