In today’s day and age nothing is growing and evolving as fast technology is, and if don’t evolve with it you and and your business may be left behind. Now more than ever it is essential to know what factors and areas to direct your time and effort towards, technology is most certainly one of them.
Today i’m going over the technological factors that you need to consider in your ‘PESTC’ external scan which is part of the Business Diagnostics Framework.
Mike Thompson, my co-author of Business Diagnostics and I recorded a series of short videos explaining the key elements of our book.
The following is a transcript of my video outlining the elements of the Business Diagnostics Framework. Scroll down to find the video in this post. The rest of the YouTube videos can be found here.
There used to not be a lot of attention toward the technological aspect and the reason it didnt get a lot of attention is because technology wasn’t changing that fast. We used to have maybe a Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, you had phones and now all of a sudden there is a plethora, an almost overwhelming amount of technological changes that you need to consider in your business whether its a larger business or a small one.
In our book Business Diagnostics we’ve considered a number of factors, but ive only included five in this post, the five I find to be the most important to consider.
Office Productivity
Whether its an application or desktop software, office productivity is something that you really need to consider. There are infinite number of ways you can use them since the number of apps has exploded. I use multiple tracking, group sharing and conferencing tools myself and it has made an immense difference in my office life. However it comes with a commitment, both in equipment and the learning curve with how to use all the products.
Operations
As product life cycles have become compressed this mean businesses need to get more products to market quickly so that is discussion for operations. We know businesses that invest in operations technology to reduce their costs and speed, but their manufacturing and order processing tend to be more profitable in the end. Operations can use both software and hardware technologies to improve the logistics, warehousing and real-time locating for both back and front of store operations. The relationship between technology and operations is absolutely critical.
E-commerce
The rise of e-commerce, or blended online and in-person sales channels needs to be a careful consideration. What can you do online, and how how can you make your online presence support your in-person delivery or prompt the question: Do you even need face to face delivery and interaction with your clients?
Mobile Culture
Are you watching this video on your phone? Chances are I will when I get home. The smartphone has created a mobile culture along with numerous more opportunities for every business. This culture can create new models and mediums for to share your story, your products and run your operations. Every business needs to review whether the mobile culture is appropriate to use to and can benefit from.
Sharing tools
Of course we all share online but there are a lot of sharing tools out there too. Pretty much every piece of equipment or hardware you can get these days has some piece of sharing operation or tool built right into it, known as m2m or machine-to-machine sharing. Whether or not its appropriate to have internet in your fridge isn’t for us to say, and whether or not that’s a privacy concern, but the fact remains the question needs to be asked: Are there any sharing tools you could use and would it make sense to your operations? And if so what makes sense for you to share and what really shouldn’t be shared.
To sum up, understanding technology can make a huge impact on your business and profitability. Its not always easy and you shouldn’t try to layer technology on top of difficulties with it the operations, but you need to take a look at it in order to keep your head above water.
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