Not so long ago, IT firms around the world were raking in significant amounts of money by selling servers as well as other physical technology solutions to many small and medium sized businesses.
In most cases, it helped small businesses to upscale quickly through the latest in technology.
It goes without saying but most of these servers and IT infrastructure all needed additional management and support going forwards. However, things have changed significantly with the emergence of cloud computing which has led to the IT support model changing somewhat. This means that businesses are no longer looking to physical technology solutions but have now dedicated themselves more towards achieving business goals with the use of technology.
In our latest blog article, we will take you through three examples of why your current IT provider should be shifting the focus from IT support towards three areas that will help to drive your future business growth.
Automation
This has been the buzzword on many people’s lips for a while now with the main goal of automation looking to transform a manual process in a business to a more efficient one through the use of technology.
Here at Advantage, we’ve worked with many small businesses to automate some of their processes. The journey very much begins by inspecting tedious tasks that your workers spend significant amounts of time on.
One of the more recent examples comes from where we helped a business with ordering forms that used to be paper-based or completed via an email.
By delving deeper into these types of repetitive processes helped us to identify a number of opportunities where businesses could use automation to transform the way they worked.
In the above example, we converted this ordering form into an online one where the customer could fill in their details.
Straight away, we removed the need to send emails constantly. By having a simple online order form removes the need for manually managing the orders that come into the business via email.
Business Intelligence (BI)
The rapid growth of business intelligence tools such as Microsoft PowerBI, allows you to learn more about the different types of data that your business is producing.
Furthermore, the use of this data could enable you to make more calculated and strategic decisions as well as to retain your competitive edge. This form of intelligence starts at the different data sources your business captures or may already hold on file. You will find that most of it will be automated and collated in the background.
As well as this, a qualified BI analyst like the ones we have here at Advantage can come to your business and extract the data into a readable format that can help you to make decisions based on data rather than on a hunch.
Upskilling
If you didn’t already know, Office 365 is now so much more than just Word and Excel. You wouldn’t be surprised to learn that your Office 365 subscriptions comes with a number of apps that are ready to use from the get-go such as the collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams and many more.
With these applications at your fingertips, there has never been a better time to train your staff on the capabilities of these applications to help you to drive your business forwards.
It goes without saying but this will not only bring a whole host of benefits to your business but will help to boost the productivity and efficiency of your workforce.
Next Steps?
If you are wanting to find out how Advantage can help you transform the way you work through automation or if you are still looking for a reliable IT support provider then please contact one of our team of IT experts today.
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