Technology is vital to the existence and competitive edge of any company. I believe that’s the great understatement of the year. Look at what technology allows us to do as compared to 30 years ago; now think back about five years. Companies continually leverage the capabilities of technology to gain that competitive edge in the market place and staying on the cutting edge of technology allows them to stay ahead of the competition. What about the small or start-up company? Leveraging the power and potential technology brings is just as important to the small and medium-sized business.
Management that excludes technology in their decision-making process could be making decisions that could prove costly in weeks and months to come. Knowing what technology to implement will affect your company’s ability to sustain itself in this present or future economy, here’s just a few examples how.
When management makes decisions, the decisions have an end result and that might be:
Increase Output
Expand the customer base.
Discover new revenue sources.
Increase profitability
Businesses would agree to the examples being used. The wrong decision (such as) would be to implement a financial application that will only experience latency when you need to add users or your data grows faster than expected increasing the time is takes to load it. It would be wise for any company deciding to move in the direction of the example given, to include their Information Technology Department in the decision-making process. To proceed is operating at a disadvantage with the possibility of implementing a solution you will outgrown as soon as it’s implemented.
Information technology professionals can guide and recommend to management possible solutions that are now used in like industries. Most technology professionals are familiar with Enterprise Resource Programs and could demo these for management. When management and technology departments function as separate entities in a company, your competitive edge and ability to meet the needs of your customers will be impacted by implementing wrong solutions.
Sustainability is the capacity to endure. Technology will give your company that capacity to do so, but you must stay current with the paces of technology. Companies that failed to embrace the internet or companies that were slow to implement opportunities the world-wide web provided could no longer sustain operations and closed.
Small companies that can not afford an Information Technology professional on their staff will find it difficult to compete, although, you can enlist the services of a college student or family member. However, they must be dedicated to helping you move in the right direction.
Knowing what technologies to implement is vital. Social networking is another series of technology platforms you can not ignore. Many large corporations are using well-known social network sites to keep in touch with and to discover new customers. Redundancy is a word familiar to technology departments because without it your company will lose thousands, if not millions when the technology fails and recovery takes days and not seconds; although seconds of down time can cost a company thousands, experienced technology professional can guard a company’s ability and capacity to endure and compete in this global economy.