Technology moves quickly and change can leave your business behind if you are not ready to embrace the brave new world of opportunity. Concepts like Big Data and the Cloud are widely discussed in business periodicals and at conferences and, while your company may be willing to jump in with both feet, your team may not have a clue how to start. That’s where the experts come in.
When a business contemplates a new software product, software re-engineering or any type of large infrastructure and technology upgrade or migration, it is hard to know where to begin. There are so many factors and types of technology involved in the business landscape and your internal IT team may not feel prepared to take on a large scale review or upgrade or a totally new type of project that requires cutting-edge skills. Perhaps your team feels capable of taking on the challenge but lacks the resources and the time to get the job done. What happens then? Typically, the business puts off the project and suffers the consequences with increased downtime, costly patches, missed opportunities for increased revenue and other negative impacts.
It is a sad fact, but it’s true. Poorly structured, badly maintained data is useless to a business. Imagine spending all day, every day adding critical information to your business knowledge library and not being able to access the data in a meaningful way. That is the unfortunate truth for many organizations.
When a business conceives a software application or a web presence, it is often more concerned with what the user or site visitors sees on the front-end. It must be appealing and attractive. But, the real magic happens behind the scenes and without good content management, what the visitor sees may be incomplete, inappropriate for their needs or badly organized.
You started your business with high hopes and you find that you have more ideas and more plans for expansion and growth than you can handle with your existing skills and team members. If you are a start-up or an entrepreneur and find yourself in a constant state of creation with little to no resources to make your dreams a reality, you might want to consider a technology partner.
If you keep up with business and technology publications, you have probably heard the phrase ‘Digital Transformation’. So, what exactly IS Digital Transformation? It is the process of incorporating digital technology into workflow, activities and business tasks, creating new ways of working or modifying current processes and culture to create a more effective, streamlined and fact-based environment where business users, team members, managers and all employees can thrive and where customer focus can be clarified with clear, accessible information and direction.
Digital Transformation is all the rage but support for digital transformation may be in short supply. When a business begins to look at this type of initiative, they may not understand the depth and breadth of the required changes. The business will have to look at existing technology and determine the need for upgrades and changes. Organizations will also have to look at data literacy of business users and try to find ways to streamline, automate and apply technology to workflow and processes and tasks. If the business is to succeed in the digital transformation arena, it must take a step-by-step approach to build the technology and the foundation and to change the business culture to support data-driven decisions and collaboration.
