While the trends are exciting and have the ability to forge a pathway to success for many organisations, not all technology is necessary and it could even become detrimental to your business. Finding the right partner could mean the difference between choosing a technology that is perfectly suited to your business needs, or implementing costly solutions to merely keep up with the trends.
Cloud computing is helping businesses across various industries compete at a higher level. It enables companies to share, store and consume resources like never before, for a lot less too. While it has been deemed the future for business, it is important for CTOs or business owners to consider the price of adoption. It’s not as simple as most people think it is, and if the organisation doesn’t have the IT maturity required to manage this, they will inevitably find it to be a very costly exercise.
Every CIO or IT manager yearns for self-healing, automated, and intelligent systems. With the advancement in automation technologies, this is starting to now become a reality. The need to have dependency on costly support teams is not required. Automation is driven by the business through approval processes and workflows deploying the application. There is no intervention required by support and engineering teams, so the benefits are incredible – boosting productivity while reducing costs and the dependency on costly support staff.
With the newer generation entering the workforce, businesses need to take cognisance of their preferred ways of communication and evolve accordingly. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat are the new ways of communication, and for businesses to be more agile they will need to start using these tools to increase productivity.
It has become clear that adoption definitely has the ability to create business success. It is equally clear that businesses need to do their homework. Not every business needs to adopt the likes of cloud computing, mobility solutions and automation systems.
If you look at Uber, for example, it is an idea technology that requires elasticity and flexibility, making it crucial to stay in touch with the trends and consider its options way into the future. When it comes to businesses that don’t rely on these new age technologies and the benefits they provide, the need to adopt is less important. But how do you know whether to adopt or not?
There is only so much research a business can do when it comes to adopting new technologies. Sometimes the responsibility needs to be tasked to a partner that specialises in the planning, strategising, implementation and management of these solutions. Choosing the right partner is fundamentally important. They will be in charge of finding the solution that is best suited to your business, your workforce and your clients. They also have the ability to build contingency plans to keep the lights on even when things go wrong.
This era is the most exciting time in all my 30 years in the technology space. There is so much more you can do and achieve using technology. My advice to business owners is to look at the options, build a strategy and a concise plan and partner with the right people to bring it all together. There are far too many people out there who know a little bit about a lot, but very few who actually know a lot about something specialised – know the difference.
