When most people think about IT, they think about computers, email, printers, internet problems and things that have stopped working.
But technology can also help with plenty of everyday business problems that don’t immediately feel like IT.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is simply tell us what is annoying your team.
You don’t need to know what the answer is first.
Featured photo by Mario Gogh via Unsplash.
Start with the problem
We often see businesses trying to work out the solution before they talk to us.
They might start looking for a particular piece of software, a new printer, a camera system or a tracking product because they assume that is what they need.
Sometimes it is.
But it is usually better to start with the problem.
- “These brochures take forever to print, sort, staple and bind.”
- “Someone spends half a day every month putting the same document packs together.”
- “Our team is filling out paperwork and somebody has to enter it into another system later.”
- “We keep doing the same manual task every week.”
- “There has to be an easier way of doing this.”
- “We need to know where our vehicles are during the day.”
- “We have equipment moving between staff and it is hard to know who has what.”
- “We want to put a camera at a site out in the bush.”
- “We need internet at a location where there isn’t much infrastructure.”
Those are all useful conversations to have as part of a good managed IT relationship.
Photo by Wesley Tingey via Unsplash.
It doesn’t have to be complicated
The answer does not always need to be some big technology project.
Sometimes there is already a simple product that does exactly what you need.
Sometimes you already own the software and just aren’t using the right part of it.
Sometimes a different printer or finishing option could save hours of manual work.
Sometimes a mobile connection, camera or tracking device can solve something that has been frustrating the business for years.
And sometimes changing the way a process works is enough.
The goal isn’t to throw more technology at the business.
It is to find the simplest way to make something easier.
A printer problem might not really be a printer problem
Take printing as a basic example.
You might have someone spending hours printing brochures, sorting pages, stapling them together and preparing packs by hand.
The first thought might be:
“We need a new printer.”
Maybe you do.
But the better question is:
“How can we stop spending so much time doing this?”
The answer might be a printer with better finishing options. It might be a different way of producing the document. It could be a change to the workflow.
The important part is telling us what is taking the time, rather than trying to work out the technical answer yourself.
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The same applies outside the office
Technology problems aren’t always sitting on a desk.
Maybe you need to keep an eye on a remote property.
Maybe staff are driving vehicles around town and you need a simple way to know where they are.
Maybe you have a temporary work site that needs a business internet connection.
Maybe you have cameras, tools, laptops or other equipment moving between people and you need a better way to keep track of it.
These might feel more like operational problems than IT problems.
That’s fine.
Tell us about them anyway.
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You don’t need to know what category it fits into
One of the easiest ways for businesses to miss opportunities is to assume something “isn’t really an IT thing.”
You shouldn’t need to work that out.
If something is wasting time, creating frustration or making the business harder to run, it is worth having a conversation about it.
We might be able to help.
We might know a product that already solves it.
We might be able to suggest a simpler way of doing it.
Or we might tell you that technology probably isn’t going to improve it enough to be worthwhile.
That is useful to know as well.
Tell us what’s annoying your team
Good IT should do more than fix things when they break.
It should help your business work better.
So if there is something your team keeps complaining about, a job that takes far longer than it should, or something you’ve always thought could be done better, tell us about it.
Not sure if it’s an IT problem? Tell us anyway.
Tell us what you’re trying to achieve. Get in touch with Q10 and we’ll help work out the simplest way forward.