SWK’s Strategic Technology Advisory Team (STAT) will show you how to reinvent your business to outmaneuver uncertainty and increase resiliency in any economic environment. The events of 2020 have demonstrated how severely unpredictable forces can disrupt economies across the world, but the right tools and advice have proven to be effective catalysts for adaptation. Made up of former business owners, industry experts and veteran software and IT consultants, STAT will empower you to take control of your pain points and build a solution stack that streamlines your processes top to bottom.
No technology investment should be made lightly, but manual processes and legacy systems will decrease in and eventually drain value as your operations grow and change. Adapting to uncertain times requires flexibility through automation and ensuring business continuity for your mission-critical functions. Implementing the right solutions at the right time is vital for building a streamlined application stack that accelerates your back-end procedures, protects your data from external cyber threats, and boosts the productivity of your employees.
Here are nine ways to reinvent your business to outmaneuver uncertainty and maximize your value through technology:
Clearly Define Your Business Technology Strategy and ROI Goals
Indecisiveness and unpredictable forces can generate pain points even in choosing a resolution – you must very clearly know your strategy and goals when migrating to new technology. Collecting your ROI on software and hardware can take a considerable amount of time, and can still be forfeited if your new tools are not used to upmost capacity. To capture the best value from your investment, you must have a methodical understanding of your needs, and be able to extricate where and how new solutions will produce positive returns over time.
Identify and Reduce Waste to Improve Productivity
To quantify the value of digital transformation for your business, compare how it impacts your personal life – electronic mail (email), smartphones, Wi-Fi and many more exemplify this acceleration. Wherever processes or tools can be consolidated and produce the same, if not better results, will deliver the best ROI on migrating to new technology. Reducing the costs and time consumption associated with activities like manual spreadsheet entry, hardware maintenance, and analog communication (just to name a scant few) will provide flexibility and the means to better weather disruption.
Consolidate Data Tracking and Reporting to Select KPIs
Data has been labeled the “new oil” for years, but this buzzword phrasing obfuscates the complexity of digital transformation and the challenges of realizing the value in it for your specific needs. The new normal of electronic communications can overwhelm you with information that will not contribute even a minimum to your growth objectives, preventing visibility and traceability. To select the right technology investment, you must identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that impact your operational and financial success, and adopt systems that best enable you to track them.
Plan to Outmaneuver Uncertainty with a Business Continuity Plan
One of the best ways to outmaneuver uncertainty is to plan for it, developing your business continuity and disaster recovery policies specifically around the role of your software and IT investments. Prioritize what you require to restore operations quickly (including data and network resources), determine system requirements, and build redundancies and other safeguards to protect them. Knowing which databases are the most critical and need the fastest restoration will help you narrow down the right backup solution for your BCP (business continuity plan).
Migrate to the Cloud When Scalability is Needed Against Uncertainty
The cloud allows you to host your digital resources online for faster, easier and more cost-effective consumption that eliminates many traditional implementation requirements. Your software, IT infrastructure and development environment can be delivered as a continuous service instead of a one-time installation, letting critical upgrades and patch downloads be updated in the background. With cybersecurity augmenting native role-based controls, hosting any combination of your system or data online or through hybrid set ups will provide multiple ways to scale up or down as you need.
Hire the Right People and Maximize Human Capital Management
Human capital management (HCM) is the cornerstone of your technology strategy – your users will be the frontline arbitrators of capturing your system’s value. HCM is also a key candidate for digital transformation, being a vital component of your business that requires streamlined data management and automation. With access to features like mobile apps and self-service portals, your HR team will be empowered to provide better visibility over your human resource management and ensure that every business unit provides the best value on its functions.
Focus Technology Strategy Where Compliance Takes Priority
No matter where you reside, your business must demonstrate compliance for federal and local regulations, whether labor and tax for payroll and sales or industry-specific requirements. Data privacy is increasingly ubiquitous as well as communications grow more web-based, so even your regulatory tracking databases must be double-checked when it comes to customer service areas. Operational inefficiencies here can prove even more consequential, so your technology strategy must focus on where regulation fulfillment is most at risk first to bolster business resilience.
Deploy Cybersecurity Where Endpoint Protection is Weakest
The work from home (WFH) environments many found themselves in for the first time during the pandemic stretched IT resources considerably as in-house departments struggled to adapt. Remote workers can present challenges for traditional information security models that cannot meet the endpoint protection needs of modern hosted environments. Engaging a more proactive cybersecurity solution through a SOC (security operations center) delivered as a service will enable you to capture real-time cyber incident response for your networked distributed workforce.
Leverage Software Where Automation Delivers Value
All of the above examples should illustrate that the value of digital transformation and software implementation is generated when automation produces results. This means that both individual functions and your entire technology stack must be streamlined for the best ROI on your migration, as lack of integration will still create manual processes. To get the most out of the features you choose, your system should be built according to your specific demands and your growth objectives to remain scalable for change and uncertainty.
Engage STAT to Help Reinvent Your Business for Uncertainty
The Strategic Technology Advisory Team at SWK Technologies make it their mission to ensure you the most out of your software and IT investments, and have helped many of our customers through the scenarios outlined above. Discover how your business can leverage the expertise STAT delivers to combat uncertainty by engaging the team for an in-depth consultation to review your existing processes, free of charge.
Sign up for a free consult with STAT here to uncover hidden opportunities to reinvent your business and outmaneuver uncertainty.