Question #1: Do You Have the Right Technology to Fit Your Business’ Needs?
This is a question almost anyone that works for your company can answer, but in the grand scheme of things, are you able to efficiently produce your products and services using the IT you have in place today? If the answer is no, then you absolutely need to sit down with a technology professional and make a plan.
If the answer is yes, however, you may be surprised about the big benefits that small improvements to your IT can create. If you think your IT is ship-shape and is working optimally for your business, you’ll likely be surprised when you discover there are several productivity-enhancing options that you haven’t even considered.
There are many times where our technicians find that clients aren’t using capable hardware, relying on old software, and paying too much for their IT support. If your business isn’t proactively managing its IT properly, it will lead to costly downtime and sustained inefficiency. It’s that simple. This leads us to our second question:
Question #2: Are Your Servers, Workstations, End Points, Networking, and Security Being Maintained?
You may have a home computer that you don’t manage. You turn it on when you need to use it, and you don’t worry about how efficiently it is running, until it begins to stall, applications close for no apparent reason, and its overall performance starts to lag. If this were to happen with your work computer, you’d likely have a bit of a problem. Now think about how people you pay to work for you feel when their workstation starts to go on the fritz. You didn’t pay a premium price for that machine, and if it isn’t managed proactively, the components will likely fail sooner or later.
Expecting someone to produce results for your company on computers that don’t work properly is like asking a chef to make an omelet with a garden shovel. Sure, it may do the job, but it’s going to take a lot longer and won’t be as effective as using the right tool would. For this reason it is crucial to make sure that all of your organization’s workstations, servers, and other hardware are properly maintained, and that the software tools you rely on are patched and up to date.
It typically takes a certain degree of experience to gain the practical knowledge needed to do a job proficiently. Managing technology is no different. You have to know when to move away from a certain technology, when to embrace others, and just about everything about these complex systems in order to keep it maintained well and working for your business. Remember AOL? In retrospect, they should have used their profits to update to broadband. They didn’t, which is why we had to ask if you remembered them. Learning which technology to use and when you need to use it can go a long way toward taking your company to where you want it to go. You can do this with knowledge.
Question #3: Do You Have Access to the Knowledge Your Business Needs?
What hardware do you have? What software do you use? How much do you spend on downtime a month? How much do you spend in printing costs? Questions like these are simple ones that shouldn’t take you long to answer, but when you can’t answer them, or other basic IT questions, you typically find someone that can. At Aspire, there is one thing that we possess a lot of: Knowledge about business technology.
When a business owner comes to see us about their technology, we don’t immediately jump into the sales process. The first thing we do is ask questions. We can do a complete network and infrastructure assessment before we even start to talk about selling anything to you. Part of the value we provide is bringing business technology expertise in the way of knowledge of IT systems, and being able to find solutions to problems. If yours is like many businesses we encounter, you have complications that you’ve encountered that you don’t even consider to be problems.
The difference is that we have the experience and knowledge to provide the value you are looking for from an IT consultant. Call us today at (469) 7-ASPIRE for more information.
