Technology is one of the most dynamic aspects of our lives and our businesses. Technology is an ever-changing resource, and to make the most out of your business, you should leverage it wisely. By combining the right small business technology infrastructure, your business can reap competitive advantages, gain market share, secure your sensitive information (and that of your clientele), and improve your own products and services.

The Need for a Technology Assessment

Business owners and supervisors spend a lot of time assessing human capital. We like to know that our employees have the right knowledge and skills and are using them wisely. While this is a wonderful approach, you should take some time to assess your IT infrastructure and business technologies as well. The more you rely on your technology, the more closely you should be scrutinizing it. While evaluating your IT infrastructure, ask yourself, is your technology helping your operations or is it complicating them?

Evaluating Your IT Infrastructure

Often times, businesses establish IT infrastructure from the inception of the business. As technology evolves and the business grows, it is important to continually assess your IT infrastructure and business technologies. New applications require a greater amount of resources; if your hardware cannot keep up, you might be causing more harm than good by updating your applications.

Do you have clearly-established procedures?

Every business should have policies and procedures that are clearly-established and recorded. By documenting your processes, you can now use that data for evaluating your IT infrastructure. Without recording any data, you are merely taking a shot in the dark.

Once your processes are established and recorded, determine which metrics you track so that you can review them and turn the results into actionable data.

Making Use of the Data

You can use this data to discover any bottlenecks within your system, or to track your employee’s performance; are they taking shortcuts? Have they created their own procedures due to an outdated IT infrastructure? These are all common questions that can be answered via a technology assessment.

Assessing Your Hardware

Every day we see new applications pop up with greater functionality and useful features. Unfortunately, the more functional apps tend to be more resource-hungry. Lightweight, efficient programs exist but as a general rule, newer apps tend to use more resources.

Assessing your hardware is a major component of your technology assessment.

Is your hardware helping your employees, or is it causing decreases in their performance? Do you even know how old your hardware is? While you might be keen on saving a few bucks and stretching that hardware’s useful life, your savings can be offset by a loss of productivity. Another hindrance to your productivity regarding outdated hardware is security threats and the vulnerabilities of older technology to malware threats. Is your hardware running the latest updates? Be sure to evaluate and ascertain that your hardware is running the latest security patches and updates.

Are You Working with the Right IT Team?

Most small businesses cannot afford to keep IT experts on their payroll. Fortunately, that isn’t necessary in today’s world. Outsourcing your IT department to Jacksonville IT managed services experts can save you time and money. The right team can monitor your hardware and ensure that you have all of the latest security updates. An IT consultation will serve to assess your IT infrastructure and business technologies to single out any inefficiencies or bottlenecks and resolve them.

Let Techsperts manage your IT infrastructure so that you can focus on other aspects of your business while reaping the benefits of a faster network and a stable infrastructure.

How is Your Website Performing?

Most small businesses have a website, that’s a given. The X-factor is whether or not they have a sound marketing strategy. Does your website have a clear objective? If so, how are you measuring that objective? By establishing the goal and determining and tracking the right metrics, you can work to evaluate and improve your website’s performance.

Your website should be providing the visitor with information, building credibility for the business, and ultimately selling your product. Updating your site on a regular basis with engaging content is one of the best ways to accomplish this. When was the last time you evaluated your website’s performance?

These are just a few of the questions you should ask yourself when evaluating your small business technology infrastructure. While each business has their own individual needs, we find that this a great start to your technology assessment.