Modern businesses have the potential to scale rapidly. From a bedroom or home office affair to a firm requiring the work of dozens of employees, your IT will be carried along with you from the time you open your very first business email account. That IT will need to change, evolve, and upgrade as you move, and the efficiency with which you do this will help you scale more effectively. Here’s how you’ll do it – upgrading your IT as you move into a new lifecycle for your firm.
Cloud
The cloud is a marvelous place. Because it outsources your storage capacity to large servers owned by the likes of Google and Amazon, it means that firms are able to scale their computing power and data usage without having to buy physical servers and more computing power or hard drive space. This is completely essential for businesses planning on scaling. So if you haven’t already, it’s time for you to push your key business processes onto the cloud – so that when you scale, you’re not held up by a lack of computing power or storage space.
Business Programs
Programs have been built to help businesses make smarter, quicker decisions for decades. Now they’re some of the most impressive suites of software in the world. But engaging with them is often a choice between several options that you cannot necessarily tell apart. As far as scaling your firm goes, there’s a simple rule you should apply: invest in software suites rather than a pick-and-mix approach. As you onboard new staff and begin your journey to becoming a larger company, you want to be able to set them up on your IT systems speedily – and it’s much easier to do that when you’re introducing them to two key programs rather than 20.
Outsourcing
Many small businesses hitting a peak in demand see that they’re unable to manage certain business processes internally. Hiring and training new employees can take months, while your business stutters in its growth because you don’t have the personnel to help you manage the new tasks coming through to your inbox. This is a key reason why businesses outsource as they grow, and you should consider outsourcing your IT management as you scale, finding a managed IT services firm that you trust to keep your business hitting its targets despite the new workload on all of your shoulders. Managed IT services companies will keep your engine ticking over as your workers concentrate on fulfilling orders and keeping customers and clients happy.
New Technologies
While the above discusses centralized suites of software as the holy grail for growing businesses, there’s another option that you should also consider as you plan your growth. New technologies designed for businesses are often built with major business milestones in mind. For instance, graded software packages are offered, with different prices, to firms that might need more than a helping hand in one particular area of IT provision. Searching online for the best-in-class business software could help you leapfrog your competition through streamlining or even automating key processes.
Automation
This kind of technology is already setting a new benchmark for firms across the globe. Automation in IT is the new differentiator – saving firms a huge amount of time, energy, and cash that they can redirect towards perfecting their unique offering. In terms of a scaling business, automation is a huge godsend. It means that, despite a growing number of customers and tasks, you’ll not have to hire more employees to fill certain roles. Customer service has been one of the first business processes to fully automate, with chatbots and automated voice call software helping cut down the number of staff you need in your firm.
Today, more and more businesses are looking to automate more complex processes too, like contract management. This is often achieved using intuitive contract lifecycle management software.
AI and Machine Learning
The other side of the most modern technology that you might consider using in your first comes in the form of AI. Now, AI is still far from the kind of applications that can make robots that talk like us, but it has been used throughout the business world on specific tasks, which machine learning algorithms tend to perform far better than humans. Most of these programs rely on your internal data to show you trends, forecast patterns and help you plan the business better. They’re well worth engaging with as you upgrade your IT and upscale your business.
Training
Finally, in order to have your entire team pulling in the right direction and offering their skills optimally for your firm, it’s important that you offer high-quality IT training to your employees. There are modules online to help them use your core systems better – and there are also companies that’ll be able to offer training across the course of a day to get your workers up to speed with the changing but exciting world of business tech.
There you have it, all the tips you’ll need to upgrade your business technology as you scale your business to its next phase of growth.