You can be tech-savvy without knowing how to code, fix a computer or build a website. Find out how to apply this skill as a business owner.
As an IoT consultant, I’m
passionate about the idea of more business owners becoming tech-savvy.
Before we get into it, let me tell you, it's not all about
the tech. What it's really about is understanding how your business operates
and discovering how you can apply technology and other systems and processes to
that business to make it run more effectively.
You'd be surprised by the number of organisations out there
which try to do this but don't really succeed. They spend hundreds of
thousands, even millions of dollars putting in a system that really doesn't
address the needs of their business. After launch, the team doesn’t really use
it, they use probably about five percent of the technology and generally things
don’t work from a profit-building perspective.
A lot of large multinational organisations resort to using
platforms like Microsoft Excel to run sales pipelines and understand how their
business actually operates to the point that there are critical business
systems that are reliant on Excel or Microsoft Access. When it works, it is
fine but while these platforms have their place, using them can be risky.
Now, don't get me wrong, Excel is a really powerful tool.
But it can mislead you in terms of how things work. And it's also a personal
tool that doesn't scale well. When you wish to share all that information
within the context of a larger organisation, this is where things get messy.
Sure, there are options to share content via platforms like
Office 365, but this is only point-in-time data and having multiple people
making updates starts to get challenging. You have to go to extreme lengths to
ensure everyone has the current version or you resort to a shared workbook
which is highly susceptible to data corruption. It’s not a great situation to
be in when you are dealing with the mission-critical data that is used to run
your business.
The other issue occurs when this spreadsheet is customised
with a whole bunch of macros, formulas and other smarts to drive your business
processes and decisions. What happens if the genius who created this tool
leaves your business? Not only is it likely you'll find it difficult to make
updates, but you run the risk of locking your business into a certain set of
processes that become too hard to change.
Solving this problem, and others, in order to improve
business productivity, reduce complexity, remove critical points of failure,
will give you back one of the most valuable, yet rare commodities in
business--TIME.
Can’t code? You can still be tech-savvy
If you don’t know your way around a modem or a piece of HTML
code, don’t worry.
It is regaining time that is the real purpose of becoming
tech-savvy.
The strange thing is that achieving this and transforming
into a tech-savvy business isn't really about the tech. It is important, of
course, but there is no need to become the next Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or Steve
Jobs. These guys are unicorns and people like this do not come along often.
Their stories are edge cases, they're the people who are really specialists in
their fields.
For everyone else, well, we just need to understand a little
bit more about knowing one end of a smartphone from the other or how we could
leverage the technology that makes apps to solve a simple problem.
How being tech-savvy makes a difference
I just dropped my daughter off at school care. The sign-in
sheets are still paper. With a very simple app, they could make it even easier.
Touch a few buttons, put in a pin number...boom, you signed someone in and the
carers are saved from transcribing those enrolment details to send off to the
government because it's already logged in the system.
From there, the daycare centre could tie that into some sort
of dashboarding system or back-end database, which is where things can start to
get really clever.
With the right software, they can create little triggers to
do something else when a certain piece of data is present. It’s a simple
"if this, then do that" piece of automation. This could be virtually
anything; send an email, post a comment on Facebook, turn on some lights, play
some music or update another system.
So when these conditions happen, we can start to connect
everything in. This is what it's about, to become tech-savvy.
The daycare team doesn’t need to know how to build an app.
They just need to be clear on how an app can help them achieve their goals of a
more efficient, better-organised operation.
Finding tech solutions: It’s all about OUTCOMES
You’ll notice I haven't talked about how you do that from a
technical perspective. That's not actually so relevant if you’re a business
owner. What you need to do instead is understand your business processes and
how you can map them against various systems or various outcomes which will
give you the advantage.
That's the critical thing here. Whenever you go and talk to
a consultant or a vendor, the very first thing they are going to ask you is
what you want. But most business owners don’t know, or they want a better
version of what they have rather than seeking opportunities to grow and
transform.
And there's nine-tenths of the problem. If you don't know
what's possible, you don't know how to explain what you really need.
When you're answering a vendor or consultant’s requirements
questions, most of the people are asking and looking for your technical
parameters. They want to know how many buttons you want on the screen, or
what fields you want.
Many business owners simply want this stuff all to work like
magic, or at least the way the demo system does as presented by the sales team.
They want the promise without the pain of building everything to deliver a
specific outcome. So instead of starting with requirements, why don't we start
with that outcome?
Who to delegate to for a tech-savvy business
Many business leaders delegate the details of providing
requirements to consultants to a subject matter expert, an SME—the person or
persons already doing the job.
The problem here is that now you are asking someone who is
not really invested in the business. It's not their business. Now they may be
great at their job and how they do things. They also probably like working
there and getting paid. But the net result is that you end up getting a
bunch of responses that really on tweak what they are doing now in order to a)
keep their job, and b) get rid of some annoying parts. This may be exactly what
you want, but does it really transform your business? Probably not.
The problem is one of context. Any answers most people from
your business will provide will be based on what they know today. The answers
are based on their current status. So they're anchoring their knowledge and
their experience on everything they do now. Their current context. And not on
your future state. Your future context.
These two perspectives are very, very different.
Looking forward, not sideways
I like to have this little mental sort of image of picking
up this anchor and throwing it out like a big skyhook onto the future.
If you anchor your requirements and everything's based on
the outcome, aka the future state where you wish to be, you can work backwards
from there and use other factors to help you achieve this result.
Another method I like to use is to anchor your requirements
based on your user or the intended recipient of whatever it is you're doing.
This helps us build a list of needs.
For example; Your customers might need a nice little website
where they can actually log in and view all their services and appointments or
some of the things that they have to do with you. Maybe it's a list of all the
things they bought from you so they can actually understand from a warranty
perspective.
Now we've got this customer need. They want to see all the
things they bought from you, so we work back from there.
Lay out the needs. You probably need a website, and hosting
for that website. You need someone to develop that, it might need a shopping
cart, and all those little aspects and features and things we need from that.
Then the hosting system probably needs sort of a database in the back end of
that to store all that records. Then you may need administrative software to
manage those records, and so on.
Now we've got a basic chain of needs. We can then work out
how and where we go to build or acquire all of this stuff.
As we look at every element within our chain, we start to
position things on an evolutionary scale from left to right. On the left, we
have things that are novel and new and the right we position things that have
been commoditised. This is how systems evolve.
Power started out as a parathion battery and now we have
massive power companies that generate this stuff for us and deliver it into our
homes and businesses. We just have to sign up for a service and we have power.
The same has happened with water. We can rent office space with little effort,
we can provision servers with nothing more than a credit card, and the list
goes on.
On the other side, we have things like artificial
intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, and other emerging
technology. And in the middle is all the stuff that is halfway through this
evolution. Now we have begun to map up what we need to build, what we need to
configure and manage, and what we just get as a service or outsource.
The challenge of being tech-savvy is not understanding the
tech, but being able to communicate all the elements you need to craft your
thing or process and then determine what approach is best to acquire all of
those components.
Where you really need to get dirty with all of that tech is
making sure it actually works well. This can sometimes be the hardest part but
it is where the magic happens. This is where you can realise that dream of
making the right IT solutions work for your business.
By undertaking a user-focused tech wish-list exercise, you
will have a wonderful map that describes what it is your business does. This
map will describe the components in basic terms and start to determine the
evolutionary stage of all of these all these things.
You don’t have to be a technologist to do this and your map
doesn't even need to be right, it just needs to describe what you are trying to
achieve. Add missing bits, move things around, expand some components, remove
others. Then collaboratively craft a picture of how you want things to work
based on the future state you want.
The best part is that most of the things you need to
actually build a tech-savvy business require little more to obtain than a web
browser and a credit card. Armed with these simple tools, you are now on your
way to becoming that incredibly tech-savvy business.
Now you can start hooking this service into other services
via systems that execute processes based on specific criteria. Suddenly, you
are saving lots of time and you have gone from an organisation or a business
that relies on paper forms and maybe a dinky little website to this Uber
tech-savvy organization that your competitors envy and your customers love
because doing business with you is easy.
Being tech-savvy is being smart with how you can apply your
technology and the systems that are available, understanding your needs,
mapping those out, and then working out what's the best way to go achieve that.
Some solutions may be complex, others incredibly simple.
Technology is simply a tool that helps you achieve outcomes in a more effective manner. It is not some magic voodoo that requires a lifetime of study to master. The art of being a tech-savvy business is mastering how to properly and clearly describe the things you want to do and get others to build it.
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