| When to Expect Problems with New Technology |
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I'm going to do something few people dare to do. Tell you the truth about technology. Technology eases the labor and takes away some of the pain, but it doesn’t relieve the duty. Technology helps with the job but doesn’t do the job. That’s your task. In order for you to understand how technology can help you, it’s not necessary for you to learn the technical jargon, the nerdy part of technology. But you must comprehend the impact of technology and the ways it can transform a squirt gun into a cannon. To cash in on technology, you must be in close touch with your needs. Technology will help you meet them. You must know how best to utilize the technology in which you’ve invested to get the maximum benefit for the money you’ve put forth. You’ve got to recognize hype for just what it is and solid science for just what it is. Now that you have a better picture of what technology is and can do, let's take a look at ways to misuse technology and set ourselves up for unforeseen problems and costly mistakes. Top Technology Mistakes: 1. Using software built to serve another industry. Just because your friend Bob happened to run across some free software that worked somewhere else, does not mean it will work for you. Each organization has specific needs that will need to be addressed. That means large amounts of customization and time to get software built to do something else up to your standards. 2. Old data used as a foundation to launch a new database driven system. Trying to clean up and move old data that may be in multiple locations (like different people's workstations) will take longer than starting from scratch with a program to gather new, fresh data. If the old data is less than a year or two old and is regularly updated, some process should be put in place to capture the most critical pieces. Otherwise, I hate to say, your old data is probably worthless and will just clog up a new system. 3. Blaming the system for "human factor" issues. Technology and the data it moves is only as good as what live humans record into it. Blaming the technology for missing or inaccurate figures or reports is ridiculous if there is no system in place to get the correct information into the system in the first place. 4. Not taking into account an organization's culture. No one likes to go on a trip they will not return from. Just as few people will embrace technology if they think it will replace them. Getting staff to buy-into a system is the only way to make it work. Training and support are critical and must be consistently available. Mis-reading an organization's culture where a system is put in place that no one will use is the biggest obstacle to technology ROI success. Show people what technology can do for them, such as save time, make their work more enjoyable, or whatever the benefit is and they will embrace it. 5. Integration at all costs. New technology is built to make integration into other technology easier than ever before. Problem is, sometimes it's just not worth all the hassle. I've worked on projects where the only goal was seamless integration between the selling systems, accounting system, contact system, and service system were all connected to one database. It was achieved but at a high cost. The maintenance and upkeep were extremely time consuming and costly. If we had left certain pieces that were really not all that critical out and focused on the areas that gave the most return, we would have had a much better system that was less costly to run. Figure out if the end goal is really worth it. Then figure out just how much resources will be taken to make it happen. If the cost is too high, scale back. Starting simply is never a bad choice. 6. Thinking technology will replace people. Yes, technology replaces many pf the manual and time consuming tasks of business but that just means your staff has more time to handle all the complicated things that were falling through the cracks. Thinking you will be able to switch from more expensive senior staff to less experienced staff after the system is up and running is a fallacy. Although certain jobs may be eliminated, new ones evolve from the new way of doing business. It is also important to remember, when you embrace technology-the hardware, software, wires, switches, etc, you must also embrace the maintenance and support. It's a package deal. Even though you may be getting the pieces separately. 7. Not getting feedback at the start from the people who will be using the system day in and day out. If you leave all your technology functionality to 'techies' with little input from the future users, you will get a system that is clumsy and key-stroke intensive. I remember a situation where new technology was put in place to make the sales process easier. Problem was it did not take into account a real live sale. There were so many windows and questions to answer that most sales people ended up by-passing the new system and handling cash directly out of the drawer with the intention of going back at the end of a shift to put in all the transactions. A nightmare was created because no one took the time to find out that the sales person had only 30 seconds to make a sale, not the 2 minutes the techies envisioned. In this case, the entire system had to be scrapped and rebuilt to accommodate the situation. An expensive lesson. 8. Not putting together a plan. If we are willing to map out the simple things in life like a vacation, why do we leave the big, expensive things like technology to chance? Without a written technology plan, YOU WILL work harder, miss opportunities, and spend more money. You will also be less prepared for obstacles along the way. Every step you take to define what you want and what you need to get it, increases the chances that you will actually pursue your goals and achieve them. So, where do we go from here? Now that these areas have been identified you can put steps into place to keep them from happening. If you take nothing else from this article, take this--start simply, start right now, be realistic. By Samantha Rufo, nxtConcepts.com Need help implementing a new sales or marketing program? We've got two suggestions: a) Check out our free marketing templates and tools on this site. There's ton's of them. You might want to bookmark the site now, you could be here awhile. Just become a registered member (it's free) of the myMarketingGuide.com website and you can download hundreds of other articles, templates and more. Don't worry, we respect your privacy. |
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