How does technology make your company more profitable?

[See my original Blog post here...]

In this article, I tackle the question "How does technology make my company more profitable?" and share 5 steps to understand how you can unlock the value from technology. If you are interested in how we can improve your profitability get in touch, here.

Technology is a tool, just like any other tool in your organisation’s arsenal. It is there as a resource. One that, in theory, is there to make your company more profitable, more efficient and more competitive. For the non-profit sector, it is there to increase productivity, revenue and to better help you serve those that you seek to help.

However, in the organised chaos that is running a small to medium sized business, how do you know that’s the case? How can you tell that what you’ve done has made a difference to your most important metrics? Only by understanding how and why your business is using technology can you make it work for you.

A consultant will happily recommend you implement the current technology 'must-have' and tell you no company can do without it. However, how do you know, once they have departed and the bills have been paid, that it is making a cold, hard difference?

Chances are, you had a certain set of initial requirements and your new technology has a heap of features. However, how can you tell whether these features are helping or obstructing your goals? Perhaps if you were organised, you may have mapped out your requirements and ticked them off against the features of the new system. That, however, will not be enough to show you the impact that the system is having on your business.

The process that we employ at Fairway Consulting often starts way before you’ve even thought about the actual technology you are going to deploy. We start with your business or organisational plan - if you haven’t got one we can help you create it.

5 steps to start understanding how technology can improve profit:

1. Analyse your business objectives and challenges.
2. Assess your current technology assets
3. Objectives and challenges link to the assets technology that you have
4. Create key performance indicators (KPI’s) to the linked assets and objectives
5. Measure, record and analyse

This will give you a picture of how technology is making you more profitable, operationally efficient, etc. This acts as a base from which you can improve and develop. Your next steps from here are:

1. Forming agile business innovation teams – using the data to innovate and improve;
2. Planning your digital transformation – understanding the existing and new technology that needs to be developed.

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This process is the bedrock of our transformative consultancy services: Digital Transformation, virtual CIO and IT consulting. Our service will not only create organisational value but also growth. Interested in how we can build your success? Contact me here