The end of the year is a great time to evaluate current business practices and see where improvements can be made. Technology is one of the factors of a business that should be continually evaluated and upgraded, because it is constantly changing. In order to keep up with current technology and to be the first to introduce the latest technological features, you need to regularly evaluate and implement changes.
How current is your technology for customers?
What do customers think about your current technological features? Do you get a lot of complaints about slow mobile app times or errors with online shopping? Do customers in store complain about the amount of time it takes to check out? These all indicate areas of improvement with IT services. There are too many advanced IT solutions out there today to still have outdated customer processes.
Is technology helping or hurting your employees?
Technology can also help or hurt your employees. When employees are provided with the right tools to do the job, they are more likely to be productive and motivated. However, if the computers are constantly freezing or they continually have to call the IT consulting team to troubleshoot office problems, they are wasting valuable work time. There should also be a focus on shifting work practicing to remote settings. Over the next couple years, the ability to work remotely is expected to be something that high quality employees will choose employment based on. Currently, small company workers indicated that 62% offered employees the opportunity to work remotely and 38% did not.
Are you compliant with all IT regulations?
As technology advances, the government puts new regulatory requirements on the specific technological programs of businesses. This is not in an effort to protect customers that shop there. These specific regulations require a certain amount of security to prevent data breaches. Approximately 47% of data losses last year were due to end users deleting information, 17% were from users overwriting data, and a surprising 13% was from hackers deleting the information. As the year comes to an end, evaluate your current network monitoring and compare it to minimum security regulations.
Are you getting enough traffic from your website?
Technology is also very important to marketing. In today?s mobile world, it is very difficult to grow your business without a strong and professional web presence. With 60% of all organic clicks going to the organic top 3 search results, it is important to also evaluate your search engine optimization or SEO rankings. SEO is the act of optimizing your website to result in a higher search ranking. While network monitoring professionals and managed IT services do not handle SEO tasks, they do influence where your website ranks. Google takes many factors into account, including the quality of the website and the mobile friendliness of any mobile pages. Without dedicated network monitoring to these technological areas, you are unlikely to rank high.
Also evaluate your current IT team
After you take all of these important IT factors into account, it is important to evaluate the entire IT outsourcing team as well. As a whole, are they keeping up with your technological needs? It is possible to make minor changes to an IT plan, but revamping the entire technological strategy will usually require a new team of network monitoring professionals.
The end of the year is an important time for businesses. They can gather statistics and look for both strengths and weaknesses in the current business plan. One of the important areas to evaluate is information technology. With technology playing an extremely important role in business growth, make sure your current IT campaign is setting you up for success.
