How IT can help you help clients
If you're still running the Windows 7 operating system on your company computers, chances are you're going to be buying some new software - most likely Windows 10, assuming you stick with Microsoft's operating systems - next year.
Microsoft ends support for Windows 7 in January 2020.
While computers that run on 7 will continue to run, you'll probably want to have at least a beginning discussion with your IT advisor. You'll certainly want to talk about security issues, and the combination of Windows 10 and Office 365 can get pretty interesting.
Dave Davenport, however, suggests an additional topic: How you can best leverage your business' IT resources to more efficiently support the solutions your clients seek.
What's interesting about Davenport's approach is its blend of hardware and software adjustments in a manner intended to help your business provide better strategic support to clients and prospects.
Taking a serious look at your current IT capabilities; reviewing with your senior team the type of support your customers seek, and determining the type of system adjustments that may be necessary to enhance your business' ability to provide that support isn't necessarily easy.
But, hey: This is the time of year when business managements typically review and plan. We look at staffing, production, delivery, sales and service. In that context, we also should look at how IT can best support our products, services and strategies as we work to support our clients and theirs.
Davenport is president of MotherG, an Itasca-based IT managed services provider whose clients tend to populate the small and mid-size business range. While MotherG's primary focus is keeping its clients' systems running as they should, Davenport and a cadre of advisors also seek to assure that client leaders look at technology investments not just as the periodic upgrades we all eventually make (new laptops or a color printer, for example) but as tools that will help make their business' strategic aims easier to achieve.
That can take some thought. You'll need a connection with clients that provides insight to their business objectives; you'll need to assess how your IT can help you help them; and you'll likely need time to update at least some of your own business' IT equipment.
An October MotherG blog post concerning system updates includes a list of Do's and Don'ts intended to make the process easier. Perhaps the most important Do, however, comes in conversation with Davenport: Look at your potential return on investment, keeping in mind that, strategically, an IT upgrade should support your basic business goals.
Perhaps the most important Don't as you refresh your IT system: Don't push a system update out on an all-at-once basis. You may want an internal group to test your system as changes occur, so that an in-process upgrade glitch affects just a handful of machines rather than the entire system.
Give your employees, and then clients, time to adjust. Testing, and training, will matter.
© 2018 Kendall Communications Inc. Follow Jim Kendall on LinkedIn and Twitter. Write him at Jim@kendallcom.com. Read Jim's Business Owners' Blog at www.kendallcom.com.