The majority of our clients have principals or senior team members who have been working with computers in a business capacity for 10 years or more, and some more than 20 years. Just about all of them have asked me if I think technology has become easier or harder to use recently. Without hesitation I answer, “Definitely more complex, and today’s business systems, hardware and software, are not as reliable as they were six or seven years ago.” Take my opinion with whatever grains of salt you still possess – my view only encompasses a very small slice of the world, but it does span over 30 years of working in the industry, and as anyone close to me will attest, I don’t wear rose-colored glasses often.
What this means for you
The primary thing we didn’t have 10 years ago at the scale we have now is the vast increase in cybercrime and the resulting arms race in cybersecurity. Security rarely makes things easier, and if there was one thing that everyone expected from technology was that it was supposed to make our lives, both business and personal, easier. I don’t think anyone reading this would be able to say this has come to pass for them. We don’t have the ability to bypass today’s security requirements, nor can we affect the lack of quality control that seems to be permeating software and hardware manufacturing lately. Businesses hang by the thread that is technology without realizing (or believing) how tenuous it is. What we do have is the ability to control how resilient our businesses can be by focusing on two key elements that have atrophied from our (forced) reliance on technology: flexibility and redundancy.
Flexibility is what you think it is – wherever you have the latitude to be flexible in your business processes, you should absolutely be prepared to test and use that flexibility, whether that be understanding how to check your email through a web browser, accessing critical client information via your phone, or changing marketing strategies based on recent world events. Lest you forget, technology is only a means to an end – the real resource of any business is its information and people. If your work processes require complex Rube-Goldbergesque technology and processes, you are treading on increasingly thin ice.
In the event that certain elements of your technology infrastructure are in fact inflexible, whether by regulation, requirement or the very nature of the process, plan for redundancy. Data is itself not something you can normally be flexible about – either you have it or you don’t, and redundancy in this regard is better known as “cloud backups.” Need the internet to get things done, and sending folks offsite with hotspots isn’t an option – then get yourself a backup internet circuit. Workers can’t work without a laptop? Engineers can’t work without their high-end workstations? If downtime is not something you can be flexible about, get backup hardware and establish budgets to regularly replace that hardware.
Image by Amit N from Pixabay
