What You Need to Know to Properly Set IT Goals for Your Business

Businesses often need to add and remove technology to fit their needs, and most of the time these actions make a marked difference in the way that their organizations are able to do things. One problem you may have is with the identification of the business processes that would be aided by technology investment. Today, we’ll briefly discuss how to best identify your business’ IT goals.

What Are Your Operational Goals?

The best way to know what technology to spend your capital on is to settle on what your operational goals are. You see, technology can aid a lot of different processes, but without a plan of attack, you can really waste a lot of money trying to deploy unnecessary technology. 

The small businesses that fail to capitalize on the strategic value of their IT often have operational problems that are being ignored and that can have a major impact on their business’ success or even its sustainability. That’s why it is so important to know what your overall business goals are so that you can fit the right technology into your business.

Let’s look at four types of business technology that can help your business get more productive. 

Automation

There are plenty of tools available that can automate several business-critical tasks such as paying bills, responding to customer and prospect queries, and scheduling your staff. Additionally, there are even valuable automated programs that can help you better manage your organization’s social footprint.

The best part of investing in automation is that the ROI for such technologies typically pays for itself quickly by reducing human error, waste, and spurring on productivity. Saving time and money is at the core of any automation investment. 

Productivity and Collaboration Tools

Productivity apps that have integrated communication and scheduling tools make it possible to have tools on hand that allow your workers to do more in less time. That is really the key to building an efficiently run business using IT. Today there are tools out there that not only are great for productivity, but are integrated with other tools that make it very easy for workers to focus on their jobs and not the job. 

There are tools today that are not only accessible from anywhere (as they are hosted in the cloud), but they can also work with communications tools such as video conferencing and VoIP, marketing and sales software, and business management tools to give employees everything they need to successfully collaborate and be more efficient and productive. 

Protect Your Business

Technology is cool, but sometimes it can cause some very big problems for your business. One of these problems is your business’ cybersecurity. With thoughts about cybersecurity spending shifting, there are some strategies that are imperative to keep your business secure from threats. They include:

• Endpoint protection - setting policy that works to secure entrypoints onto your network is essential to keeping threats off your business’ network. Today, there are some very sophisticated attacks, and being able to detect, analyze, thwart, and contain attacks is extremely important. 
• Employee training - phishing attacks account for the majority of cyberthreats companies encounter. Ensuring that employees are cognizant of what constitutes a phishing threat, and what to do (and not to do) with it once it is received is paramount to keep data and networks secure. 
• Encryption for remote connections - If your business relies on remote workers, keeping the connection they use secure is extremely important. You never know what your staff has on their PCs, and if you don’t want to find out you need to find a reliable remote access software or outfit each member of your remote team with an enterprise VPN. 
• Mobile device management - The smartphone has become more important than ever for businesses, but any environment that is being used as much as most people use their mobile devices needs to be secured against. 

These four platforms will go a long way toward helping your business maintain security of its digital assets. 

Take Advantage of CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a system that can help you organize and manage everything from customer contact information to specific marketing strategies. When you have a variety of data all connected together in a CRM system you have the tools available to target and bring in new customers. You can also more precisely target existing customers. A CRM platform organizes information such as what services and products your customers purchase and exactly how they’re using them.

If you look at technology as the key to building your business, the IT professionals at Preferred can help. Give us a call today at 708-781-7110 to learn more about how you can properly invest in your business’ technology to get the business you want.