Its a sad fact that most Small and Medium sized business owners invest in IT to keep their business operational.

There is often a strong ‘if it aint broke, dont fix it’ mentality and it’s a perfectly natural way of thinking, but one that will ultimately cause your business to fall behind a) your competitors and b) new business entering your sector.

There is a perception that “technology costs to much” or “technology is expensive” and this is because it is crystal clear to see how much you are spending on your IT in your P & L.  What is less clear however is how much it is costing you doing it “your way”.  This cost isnt on your P & L and this is why technology gets put last and not first.

No matter what technology you decide to implement it will not be successful if you still have broken operational processes……

Now dont get me wrong Technology will not fix everything, in fact if I’m going to be completely honest implementing new technology is complicated, really complicated, particularly when the business needs to keep moving.  I dont believe any airline upgrades its engines mid flight!  No matter what technology you decide to implement it will not be successful if you still have broken operational processes within your business.  Technology is here to solve these broken processes which means what?…………you’ve got to change your processes at the same time (sorry).

Implementing new technology requires a new mindset, its a chance to re-imagine how you are doing things from the ground up.

Business owners who have doubled down on tech are growing 5x faster than laggards

Just because something is hard doesnt mean it shouldn’t be done.  Just because you dont completely understand it doesnt mean you shouldn’t look at it.

Whether you are looking at a new CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software or business wide ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software the success doesnt depend on surveying the market to find the right solution (most of them are pretty good nowadays), the success actually comes from adopting the solution properly.  Dont stick in new tech and hope it will fix everything, understand everything the CRM or ERP software can do and think how can we use this in our business.  Formula 1 constructors aren’t just happy to have a car in the race, they go over and over every detail to see how they can win the race, this is how you need to approach it.

Success of any IT system depends on company wide adoption

For example lets say you are looking at some new Project Management software.  You might look at a couple of pieces of software and go with one of them, one or two departments will start using the system, everyone will use it differently and others will revert back to spreadsheets.  In this example the Company has brought the software but not adopted it and therefore it is not going to achieve anything.

You really need to get the employees on board with the software as a real priority.  Employees are comfortable in the status quo and like knowing there job each day when they turn up to work so resistance to change is really common.  It can be the fear of change, learning a new system or worrying they will look stupid that causes this resistance but whatever the cause is you need to understand this resistance early on before it gets in the way of adoption.

Those business owners that do put technology first are recording up to 5 x growth vs those who replace technology to stay operational.

Technology must be treated with as much importance as HR, Operations, Manufacturing and Distribution

Technology must have a seat at the decision-making table in any business (even if you dont understand it).  Technology isn’t helpful for decisions that have been already made. Wrapping technology around a broken manual process only proliferates failure. Technology cannot be an afterthought.

 

 _________________________________________________________________ 

Leap IT is here to take your businesses IT to where it needs to be.  We have been delivering IT Managed services throughout Birmingham, The West Midlands and across the UK for over 20 years and on behalf of more than 300 businesses.  We work closely with you to really understand what your business needs so that we can make sure you always receive the best advice and achieve the best value. 

With a breadth of solutions spanning IT Support, Communications, Cloud Computing and Print we see that you IT is completely covered from end to end.