There’s pressure from all sides to update the tech in your office to the latest and greatest. Often, with good reason. Usually, it’s associated with greater communication, cost effectiveness, process automation, and other time-saving factors. However, making that upgrade itself can be as significant a hurdle as the cost can. You can’t afford to keep inviting downtime into the business. For that reason, we’re going to look at how to create a technologically agile workplace that upgrades much easier.
Know someone who knows the market
One of the most frequent projects taken on by managed IT teams is integrating new tech, whether it’s managing a migration to the Cloud, of helping business owners find the right tool for a certain goal. It’s not impossible to learn how to better scan the tech market yourself, but what’s important is having the knowledge of what it’s going to take to scale an upgrade across the whole office. Putting an actual integration plan in motion is just as important as having a goal behind your new tech choices.
Get it organized
Simply put, one of the reasons that it can be so difficult to manage the tech upgrade is that your current tech is far from optimally organized. The ways in which your tech can be disorganized vary, but cabling is a frequent problem. Structured cabling from teams makes your system more forward adaptable because it’s much easier to plug things in and take things out of the overall network. Effectively, you don’t have to deal with the mind-numbing task of untangling your entire set-up and can be more agile in how you upgrade it.
Migrate to the Cloud
It might seem like it’s a solution that’s rolled out for every modern tech question, but there’s no denying that relying more on the Cloud (while it has its own access and security risks) makes the business more agile. It’s a lot easier to swap out which SaaS platform you have to log into and manage than to swap in and out new software or, in the case of Cloud computing, new hardware. Migrating to the Cloud does bring its own challenges, however, particularly from a user standpoint, which we will cover next.
Education is essential
It doesn’t matter how agile the office is and how easily you can switch in and out the actual tech tools you’re using if your team isn’t ready for them. Learning the most effective ways to teach your team to use new tech is essential. Outsourced IT services, as mentioned above, can help in that. Consider systemizing your methods of onboarding and teaching the team to use new tech to ensure that low user engagement isn’t holding your business back from the benefits that new tech is supposed to bring.
Implementing new technology is always going to take some work. But that certainly doesn’t mean that you can’t make it easier. The upgrades, partnerships, and changes to company culture and procedure listed above won’t completely eliminate the upgrade hurdle, but they can make it much smaller.
