Technology can drive you crazy and lose you money

When I speak to small business owners and managers and tell them what I do, I find a common reaction. Technology is driving many people crazy. We are faced with so much of it, it provides us with a lot of functionality and yet most of us are frustrated by it.

there are many people who enjoy the toys and enjoy working with technology and solving the problems that they create. However, most of us want to get the value the technology provides, but are frustrated with what we have to put up with to get it.

Every website that we have to sign in to requires an ID and password. That makes sense from a security perspective/ But the format and structure of these ids and passwords is totally different, and in order to maintain security, we have to memorize them. Who can memorize an unstructured combination of letters, numbers and special characters? And they are different for every site and application. Talk about making life difficult.

Then we can go to the challenges that we have with the way software works. Significant improvements have been made with common functions in most windows applications, in that they mostly look the same and work the same, but what business value came from the restructuring with Vista? We have the same functionality and a totally different format! This forces us to learn all over again and makes us feel stupid!

Then we have the common problems that we encounter from time to time: software failure. Although software is much more reliable today than it was a few years ago (reboot was the most effective instruction), we still get failures. Most of the failures are introduced by the software that's added to your computer. Since we all have a different set of needs, our computers reflect this and we have a different set of software. In a past life, I was a software developer and supported large mainframe systems. We had a comprehensive set of tests that we ran to see how well this software worked together. No small business can aford this today, and even though some large businesses try, they are only partially effective.

So how do we cope? We have to work with computers. We do get some value from them. We have to learn how to manage computers, to minimize the frustrations and focus on the value that they provide.

There are four levels of managing computers:

1. At the foundation level, we want our computers to run effectively, be stable and not cost us lost productivity. Check out the articles at http://www.thevirtualcio.ca/ for some ideas on addressing this issue.
2. At the business level, we want to be sure that we are getting the value from the software that we buy. My article on business process can be a starting point.
3. The real value comes from the data that you collect about your business. This happens when you are getting effective use from your software and you analyze the content of what you have collected. This data is the first place I look when I start to work with a company, and also the one that is the least used.
4. Your technology mindset is the most important. How you approach technology, your frustrations and your actions will determine the value that you get. I found this blog entry on Don't Let Technology Psych You Out! that can help to address this last item.