How to Get Value from Your Technology Investments

You’ve no doubt noticed that innovation is motoring ahead and a lot of businesses are now implementing technology to help build efficient, reliable processes to improve business operations and customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, many companies hang on to outdated methods for evaluating and implementing technology and it results in substantial lost value. Today, we will go through a few ways you can get the value your business needs from its technology decisions. 

Get a Tighter Grip on Your Tools

One of the biggest challenges for the constantly evolving company is getting the software in place that will allow you to maximize your staff’s talent and get the biggest bang for your buck. Unfortunately, software is difficult to manage. If you consider that you need dozens of pieces of software to run your business, you may find that, over time, you tend to waste money on it. If yours is like other companies—where major software decisions take some time—you’ll find it more valuable to focus on results. ‘

Think about it, you spend all this time and effort on creating an environment where your staff can be productive, only to waste capital on redundant programs and unused cloud accounts? That makes no sense. Most business’ employees have a pretty good idea of what they need to do their jobs successfully. Listen to them on this issue.

Additionally, the leaner your software deployments are, the more value you are going to see from them. This means eliminating redundancy: where you don’t pay for apps that do the same thing. You control your cloud costs. You don’t inundate your staff with app fatigue. By keeping it simple, while also getting your team the tools they need to be more productive, you can keep value high in your software investments. 

Scale Implementation

Too many businesses have people who decide they want to do something and just jump into it with both feet. That is the quickest way to throw dollars down the drain. You need to take your new technology implementations step-by-step. You need to first understand how the proposed investments are going to alter your business, good or bad. The best way to do this is to stay agile and to do that, you need to avoid bogging down your operational staff with beta tests of new software. You need to strategically seek out the people that can help you ease these solutions into the operational hum-drum of your business. 

Some new software is going to take some time to catch on, and the more prepared you are to implement end-to-end processes the more efficient your business is going to be when it is time to deploy new solutions. If you want to get the most value out of your new technology investments, you will want to consider how it will affect your business now and in the future. The best investments will give you a nice ROI fairly quickly if you roll them out when they are ready, not when you want them to be.

Always Have a Contingency

When making big technology investments, you need to rely heavily on your IT people, whether they are in-house technicians, or a managed IT service provider like Preferred. Any IT professional worth his/her salt will demand that everything has a fallback plan. Implementations don’t always go smoothly, but with an agile approach, the deployment times can be faster and more conducive to bringing in substantial value. 

Having backup and recovery systems in place, as well as options that IT professionals can take to circumvent large delays in deployment can make all the difference when it comes to getting value out of your IT implementation. The more prepared you are when implementing innovative new technologies, the better your end result will be.

Deploying new technologies and building a more profitable business don’t have to be mutually exclusive strategies. Contact the IT professionals at Preferred to get help getting your business’ IT where you need it to be.