Small and Medium sized businesses (SMEs) have the same range of technology options open to them as large corporates. The corporates have the budget to invest, whereas many SMEs do not. Where the SMEs have an advantage is with agility.
A small business owner can walk into a tech retailer, buy a product, and adopt it that day. That really is agile business. Medium businesses would probably trial the product, evaluate, and then consider rolling it out to a relevant group of users. A large corporate would take many months to trial, evaluate and eventually roll out to hundreds or even thousands of users.
Investing in technology can reap rewards. However, many businesses see technology, hardware, software licenses costs as overheads and not enablers. Look at technology in a positive light when considering purchasing:
“Because of my mobile phone, I have access to my contacts, which means when I am in London I can plan a new ad-hoc appointment when someone cancels at the last minute.”
“Because of my cloud storage, I can collaborate with my clients online, and share information about my project for them.”
“Because of two factor authentication, my customer’s data is better protected from a hacker.”
There are many technologies to evaluate, or if you are already using them, reevaluate as things move on rapidly in the world of technology. Mobile phones or smart phones for example. Are you properly synchronsing your contacts to your device? Have you setup remote wipe, so if someone steals your phone, or you lose it, you can remotely wipe all the data? Is your calendar synchronised? Are you carrying around some PDFs of your presentations slides, brochures, or flyers?
My recommendation is every six months look at all your devices, computers, servers, data, files, records and consider “is this the best solution to help my customers?”