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How
to get the Most out of your Technology Investment If you’re
a small business owner, whether you work from home on your own, or have a few
employees, you’ve likely invested a lot of time and money in your computer
systems. Naturally, you want to receive the greatest benefit from your investment.
Computer crashes, lost files, incompatible software and duplication of effort
all hurt your business, and can make your customers wonder. One of the most
common questions we hear at The Technical Group is: ”how can I get the most
out of my technology investment?” The best way to do this is to create a
stable, secure and reliable computer environment that works for your unique business
needs, and to remove duplication from your business systems. Getting the
most out of your systems is really not that difficult. First, make a list of all
your computer systems and how they relate to your business. That’s the easy
part. Next, you need to develop a strategy to easily manage issues such as the
deletion of critical data, a catastrophic computer failure, a virus infection,
physical or virtual theft and environmental disasters such as fire or flood. The
following guidelines will help you create a thorough assessment of your business
needs, and will assist you in designing an effective and secure computer environment:
| ASSESSMENT PHASE |
1. Make a detailed
list of all technology systems you use, categorized as follows:
- Service providers (Internet service provider, phone company, etc)
- Software
applications (e-mail, word processors, spreadsheets, accounting, databases, etc)
- Computer
network services (file storage server, e-mail server, database server, website
server, etc).
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| 2.
Document the core business functions of each of the systems on
your list. |
| 3. Determine
how long each system can be down until your business is adversely affected.
For example, would sales orders would be lost if the office e-mail Internet connection
were down for 2 days? How about if your employees couldn’t do their work? |
| PLANNING PHASE |
| 4. Document your
current recovery strategy for each system if an outage occurred today.
What precautions and measures have you taken to protect your most critical systems
and processes from disaster? |
| 5.
Review each recovery strategy in detail and adapt them to help
better protect your business. |
| TESTING
PHASE |
| 6.
Thoroughly test each part of your recovery plan to determine
its effectiveness. We can’t stress enough the importance of testing your
systems | The finishing touches? Hire a professional to fix
up those systems that crash regularly, ensure that your virus software is up to
date, and verify that regular data back-ups are being done, are working, and stored
off-site. These 6 steps well help you create a stable, secure and reliable computer
environment that will provide you with the foundation to get the most of your
technology investment. Now that your systems are safe and sound, you’ll
want to streamline your internal business processes. Start by searching your list
of systems (steps 1 and 2 above) for any overlap of data entry or functionality
(i.e. are you entering customer or supplier information in more than one location,
or maintaining pricelists in multiple applications?). Once you’ve identified
any duplication, it’s time to investigate ways to share information across several
systems. It’s much more efficient for your accounting software, e-mail system
and contact management application to share one master version of your customer
information than it is to have several people keep this information in several
places. You’ll be amazed at the gains to your business that this kind of
systems coordination can bring. We admit, going through the process of systems
development can seem like a daunting task for today’s over-worked small
business owner, but the investment can really pay off big time. Your business,
and your customers, will benefit from your having a stable computing environment
that’s in perfect alignment with your business systems and your unique business
requirements. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Stoll is the founder
and president of The Technical Action Group Inc. (TAG) that helps small to medium-sized
companies that depend on computer systems to conduct their business. By TAG assuming
the burden of managing their technology and keeping all systems running at their
optimum, these companies can stay focused on their core business. For more information
please visit http://www.TechnicalActionGroup.com
or email JStoll@TechnicalActionGroup.com
.
NOTE: You may “reprint” this article online as long as it remains complete
and unaltered (including the “ABOUT THE AUTHOR” information), and send a copy
of the reprint to
JStoll@TechnicalActionGroup.com
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