In the era of technology, every entrepreneur is well aware of the fact that Technology is the key contributor to overall success. Technology helps you in increasing productivity, in organizing your overall business activities. But, do you know how to choose the right technology for your business? How to decide that it is suitable for me or not?
Yes, Choosing the right technology for your business is a challenging task. With a large amount of established and evolving technologies, choosing the right technology, without having a clear idea of business needs will make the process a laborious task. The following questions will help you out to choose the 'right' one :
Q. What is the ' need of an hour '?
Do you any technology already in place?
Why do you want to replace it with the new one?
We need to find the loopholes with current technology. Simply, conduct a technological survey of your business. Based on the result of the survey and targetting easier process flow considering the future requirements, we are able to find the exact need and the areas of improvement.
Q. Is it 'suitable' for my business?
While purchasing or selecting a new one, select one that helps the business grow and suits your business, today and tomorrow. Take a look at available technology, which suits your pocket, business environment, training needs, manpower requirement.
There is always a risk that whatever technology you purchase could become outdated faster than you anticipated. To counteract this risk, there is always the option of leasing technological equipment in order to stay up-to-date with more sophisticated technology.
The technology that you choose to implement needs to be scalable.
Q. What is the exact need of the business?
It is crucial that you think in terms of your business needs, not what you think it wants.
Know in which business department, and in what way each department will make use of that technology. An easy way of doing this is to base your decisions on the nature of your employees’ work. Classify them depending on their work environments, whether it is office-based, home-based, or field-based. That way you know who needs an office-based technology and who requires a portable one.
Q. Are you ready with a Backup Plan?
Yes, Technology fails. It's a fact.
Every entrepreneur needs to work on the backup and recovery strategy, first and select the new technology. Many small business owners or founders take it lightly and creates a huge problem for themselves, only.
Backup plans may include backup power supplies, hardware, and cloud storage, and no matter how small your business, can save you devastating downtime.
Q. Have you chosen the authorized person/distributor?
Always deal with the right and authorized person, only. It may be related to any technological issue, installation, troubleshooting, upgrades, or any specific support. Understand the fact that it is an investment of money, not the wastage of money.
Also, decide a protocol for staff to report any IT-related or any type problems and make sure that your employees are going to follow it.
Q. Have you invested in training?
Never compromise on training.
If nobody knows how to use the technology, effectively then you will not able to use the technology effectively and to increase productivity.
Answers to these six questions will give a clear idea, about what business needs and which technology is right for your business.
Apart from this, there is one more mantra for entrepreneurs: Think outside the box.
You may like a particular package, but there may be other, more industry-specific software available to your business that is likely to make things run a lot more smoothly.
However, each software application, database management system, or technological tool has its pros and cons. What’s important is that the chosen technology has the basic capabilities to deliver a requested functionality.