Does Your Technology Work for You, or Do You Work for Your Technology?
There's an app for that" is a popular expression. It also oversimplifies a complicated problem. Yes, there may be an app for many things these days, but who is to say that you are using the app, right? Nowhere is this problem more accurate than in the workplace, where we have all the tech globally but fail to grasp how to integrate and implement it appropriately. As a result, our employees burn out, and we lose productivity and the ability to do jobs well.
Here's the good news, it does not have to be this way. It requires an appropriate understanding of both the business workflows and how to connect the platforms best.
What Should Technology Mean to Your Business?
First and foremost, technology needs to add to your business. It needs to work or you - not you for it. In other words, any time you spend managing technology needs to be an investment, not a drain. That investment should be returned to you in added time or money to your business.
What does this mean? Most businesses already have that trusted "IT Person" either in-house or through a managed support provider. Most are great and helpful when there is an issue or need something installed, but how often are they coming to you with new ideas or ways to improve your workflow outside of setting you up on the new iPhone? Not as often as it should happen, but this is ok and should not be expected from that "IT Person."
Technology requires an investment - often a substantial one. If done right, this investment can be returned to you many times. The question needs to change from "How much does the project cost?" to "How much will it cost if we don't do it?"
How Can I Find These Inefficiencies?
If you are going to invest in technology, then you need to actually understand where technological inefficiencies exist in order to reduce employee burnout and improve the overall operation of your business.
Thankfully, in many cases, the method of finding these inefficiencies is right in front of you.
First, ask your employees or co-workers what they are spending their time on most of the day. If their tasks are not related to driving or finding business, they need to be rearranged. As such, you may be able to deploy technology to improve and redeploy their time.
Next, working with your staff, Identify repetitive tasks that are done daily. If these activities don't grow your business or require humans to support them, identify how technology can automate the process.
Finally, have someone pull a report on your excel documents to see how often they are modified or saved in a week, month or year. This is a common area of wasted time if the document is for reporting and/or data management. Today data is core to business success, and accurate data is critical to making the right decisions.
In many cases, there are little things that your business can do to better leverage its technology and improve your business.
Consider the following examples:
Where are there areas where you can use technology to automate or provide self-service? Often multiple users and departments need the same data and run similar reports. Centralizing data and automating the normalization of the data across the firm can have a considerable impact. Firms doing this and sharing the data with Business Intelligence (BI) tools such as Power BI have seen increases in productivity and alpha generation with less time on generating the reports. In addition, it allows for effort into business growth.
What about the maintenance of the equipment? Why are your internal teams designing your new data center, patching computers, installing software, or checking on security threats when they should be increasing business growth? Many IT departments need to give up what they are comfortable with to begin to add value. Ask your managed service provider to do this work, and if your IT team still insists, you need to find a new group. This would be the equivalent of your Portfolio Manager wanting to do the fund accounting as well. Not a very productive use of time.
If you rely extensively on digital marketing, are there areas where you can automate content creation and production? Are there ways to better use digital tools to determine what content works and doesn't? How could that improve your overall marketing efforts and lead to more revenue for your button line?
A Staff Enhancement
If technology is supposed to work for you — not the other way around — what does this mean to staff?
Ideally? Plenty.
Every business owner knows it: Staff is more burnt out today than ever. This has led to the great resignation and virtually every business expressing difficulty in hiring workers. Technology is being relied upon more than ever to keep up with business but putting a considerable burden on the employees.
Here's the thing — this isn't necessarily the end of the world for your business. In fact, if done right, it can be a great thing. We need to change the definition of success that we use for our Technology teams from "Implement Project New App" to "Improve the overall productivity of the Finance team." Changing our measurement from a state of "Complete" to a state of the desired outcome forces teams to think differently and make decisions based on the outcome instead of a timeline.
Technology cannot be just "another thing" that your employees need to train on and manage. It can't merely be a significant investment. Instead, it has to be something that provides value-added to your business. Thus, don't look at technology as a drain. Look at it as an addition. Ask yourself this critical question: Where can technology supplement or expand upon efforts in your business? Where can your staff make necessary investments in technology that can expand their capabilities and not the other way around?
So, what does this all mean to you? Make sure you talk to the right people who can advise you on your business goals and how best to accomplish them. You need someone who you trust and who can help grow your business. Most firms don't need a full-time resource in this role and should look to a Virtual CIO or your MSP to have these conversations.