Have you ever asked yourself “Will this new “X” technology or delivery method make our end users more productive or reduce what it costs us to deliver technology to our end users?”
That is the ultimate question any CxO, small business owner, or line-of-business manager should be asking of themselves, the internal IT support team or any external IT consultants. That is it.
For small businesses, medium and large businesses alike, technology should be a tool that improves end user productivity or reduces the cost of delivering these services to the end users. That is it.
It really should be that simple. Almost every technology decision should be measured against this benchmark.
Small mom-and-pop businesses to large multi-nationals sometimes lose sight of what they are buying when the proposals for hardware, software, and IT consulting services start showing up.
Of course the parts and pieces needed for a given solution should be scrutinized, but focusing solely on the cost of the “stuff” might make you miss the forest for the trees.
All of this “stuff” should be solving a larger problem.
We decide to buy a new car because we want a certain end result – we need more reliable transportation, we want the freedom a car can provide, or we want to show off our success, etc.
We decide to go out to dinner instead of cooking to achieve a certain end result. Maybe it is to avoid cooking, maybe it is for the experience a great meal or nice restaurant promises, or maybe to set the proper atmosphere for a meeting or date. We are paying for an end result; we are not caught up in calculating what we are really paying for the potatoes.
Technology and IT support should be viewed through the same lens. A $10,000 piece of hardware or a $500,000 package of software might be expensive or a complete no-brainer depending upon what end result you expect to gain with that purchase.
What perspective do you take when you make a technology purchase? What “end result” are you getting with your technology investment? Were you able to buy the “end result” you hoped to achieve with your last technology purchase?
Here are eight suggestions to help you get more out of your technology investment or at least more out of your next round of purchases.
Technology is just a tool to improve business productivity or cut the cost of doing business. Too many large and small environments alike that we see look like they were built with no real plan in mind and suffer from significant inefficiencies as a result. They look like a bunch of individual technology solutions bolted together, usually with some overlap and duplication to some degree instead of a single cohesive technology infrastructure.
As a bonus 9th tip, take some time and look for the applications and equipment that are no longer in use that are wasting time and resources every time they have to be touched. Audits are great tools to find technology that is no longer in use. In some instances consolidation opportunities arise where two single purpose solutions grown in their respective silos to a point where their functionality can be consolidated into a single solution.
As a bit of a paradox, we typically find that the environments that could benefit the most from this process are the same IT support organizations that are least likely to implement them because they are all running around putting out fires on a daily basis and do not feel they have the time to do projects that will save them time.