Pain free technology

Technology can be painful, whether it’s a minor pain like a PC power supply dying, or a major pain like a wandering customer credit card list that makes news headlines. Get a jump on spring cleaning and prioritize your technical pain points, then deal with them.

What hurts you and your business? True to the old saying, most business pain revolves around time or money. Rarely does anyone feel they have enough of either, and less money often means taking more time to perform important job functions.

Let’s talk money first. Where are the bumps in your budget? Do a few things leap out and pick your pocket each month? Many people worry they’re overspending on telephones, including office phone systems, local phone service, long-distance calls, and mobile communications. Let me put your mind at ease: if you haven’t updated one or all of these areas in the past 18 months, you’re paying more than you should.

Brian Padden of HxP and Associates in Plano, Texas, says customers with three or more business phone lines from a traditional phone company can upgrade their hardware with the savings they realize by shifting to nontraditional phone companies (see my October piece “A free phone consultant”). If you fall into that category, price savings should repay the cost of new equipment in less than three years. After that, the savings goes to your bottom line.

How long has it been since you renegotiated your cell phone contract? Most suppliers will rework your deal three months before the contract expiration date. You should adjust your minute plans so you don’t ever pay thirty cents per minute when you go over. You should get new phones that support text messaging and possibly e-mail, if that will help your mobile workers. Apple’s new iPhone release will churn the market a bit, forcing companies to upgrade their phone’s features. As they do, the current phones with slightly less luster will be marked down. Grab those.

Look for similar deals on computers. Computers that can’t support Microsoft Vista are being replaced by systems with more RAM, DVD-ROM drives, and bigger hard disks. Ninety percent of small business users will be perfectly fine with a CD-ROM drive and the Vista-deficient built-in video chips on their motherboards. Grab those.

Does your backup system, or lack of one, hurt you at times? The older the hard disk, the higher the chance of random, or total, failure. If you can’t protect everything (shame on you), then at least find all the computers more than four years old and verify they have a good backup system. I’m on the lookout for interesting new backup options and will report back soon.

Now that you have all the money you need, let’s talk about time. What takes time? Finding files? Getting information from mobile or remote workers? Preparing presentations, proposals, or graphics? Organizing your customer list?

I laughed when I first heard about putting printers in the car trunk, but the HP case studies in “Pockets full of technology” can really save time for mobile workers. When outside sales people are in the office, the company loses money and the sales people waste time. Does printing color brochures on battery-powered printers in the car trunk cost more per copy than Kinkos? Yes, but the extra cost may be a good value when considering the time saved. The more things your mobile workers can do outside the office, the more efficient they will be. This trend keeps large company IT departments hopping, and small companies should follow their lead.

You may not be able to afford the back-end inventory control software to feed real time product inventory levels to a salesperson’s BlackBerry, but you can post a daily inventory report on your Web site, with password protection if you prefer, for easy salesperson access. Day old results for some products may be worth as much to your company as real time inventory levels are to the well heeled companies.

I believe in tools that keep people out of the office during personal time. Do you ever go to the office during personal time just to use your computer? There are some interesting options that give you remote access to your computers and your data files from remote locations. My review of nine remote control software applications in the Network World print edition on Jan. 22 should give you several options to let your fingers do the walking to a remote computer rather than making your body drive back to the office.

Pick two pain points, maybe one from the time group and one from the money group, and put them on your To-Do list. Wouldn’t it be nice if your technical tools caused you less trouble than aggravating customers or annoying co-workers? We’ll address those people problems some other time.