What is the “right” Information Technology for my Business?

The biggest information technology (IT) problem any company faces is how to find, evaluate and select the “right” information technology. The problem is compounded by the rapid evolution of information technology and the extensive options bombarding businesses.

I help startups and small businesses tackle this problem in the Sacramento SCORE class “How to Improve your Business through Technology”. The class teaches a framework for the discovery, evaluation and selection of technology that drives the three most important things in business; people, process and product. If people, process and product are an unfamiliar concept, one of the best and most entertaining ways to learn about this concept is to watch Marcus Lemonis on CNBC’s “The Profit”.

To illustrate the importance of people, process and product to the class, and the role information technology plays relative to these areas, I tell the parable of the tech savvy restaurateur. A young man starting a new restaurant puts together a second to none e-marketing campaign. He hires a firm to develop an interactive website showing off the physical location and menu, accounts are opened across Facebook, Twitter and Yelp promoting the restaurant and search engine optimization (SEO) is designed with the restaurant nearing the top of the major search engine results. Tremendous buzz for the restaurant’s opening is created across all of these channels and the media.

But what the young restaurateur failed to do is properly train his people and adopt technology to improve his core business processes.  The day of the grand opening a line of people is around the corner waiting for the doors to open. When the doors open the untrained hosts seat the entire restaurant at once. The servers are slammed. Due to the amount of money spent on the marketing budget, the owner decided to forgo installing a point of sale (POS) system. The servers take orders 3-4 tables at a time using paper tickets. This unorderly process subsequently slams the kitchen.

The line manager and cooks are forced to dig out from the influx of orders, and with no POS system or server training, orders are coming back missing key information such as requested sides and cooking preferences for the meat. Orders take 30-40 minutes to reach the table and many are delivered with the wrong sides, incorrectly cooked meat or cold. Patrons become upset and the first thing they do is turn to their smart phones. The restaurant is bombarded with terrible reviews on Yelp. The same technologies that effectively promoted the grand opening are now promoting the horrible reviews and driving away new business. Within a few months the owner is forced to close his doors.

The morale of the story is not that e-marketing is bad. As demonstrated it is a tremendously powerful tool that levels the playing field for small businesses.  The moral is the glitz, glam and ease of some technologies can pull us away from the fundamentals of our business. This distraction from providing people with high quality information and streamlining core processes through technology can have a tremendous impact on the quality of the product.

When advising startups or small business owners that have yet to implement information technology, I focus on three important business functions; accounting, operations and marketing, in that order. I also advise focusing on three activities that transcend all business functions; communication, collaboration and reporting. The key most companies miss is balancing the focus for immediate requirements with a long term IT strategy. Information technology should be planned holistically and designed for the entire company.

If you’re a startup or an established business looking to adopt information technology, you’ll likely find the number of options and complexity daunting. But embrace this undertaking as an opportunity. The emergence of cloud computing has broken down huge financial barriers allowing small businesses to adopt enterprise level technology. This new way of acquiring and consuming IT opens capabilities to small businesses that were unimaginable even 5 years ago.

Also recognize a lack of technology offers a strategic position over the established competition. Companies with traditional IT systems are struggling to figure out how to get out of their expensive data centers, migrate from the cumbersome functionality of outdated applications, unlock their information from data silos and retrain employees to work on the next generation of business applications. Capitalize on your blank slate by tapping into the most revolutionary technology period since the advent of the Internet.