Is your company’s business operations technologically agnostic? Are your business operations too reliant on a single vendor’s service or product offering that it would be impossible to ever change to another vendor? What would happen to your business operations if your technological solution were to vanish? This article will focus on the pros and cons of integrating technology into your business operations and highlight the necessity of designing your business operational model in an agnostic way.
From the point of sale through delivering a service or product, all companies in every vertical have business operations. Most business operations are designed iteratively, developing from an early entrepreneurial vision to serve a need in the market to a continuously evolving and expanding set of steps defined by years of experience and adaptation. We operate in a world where information and access to services are nearly instantaneous. The expectations of customer needs and wants continue to accelerate consistently. Customer expectations cause businesses to look for ways to enhance and augment their business operations to meet these customer needs.
At its most basic level, business operations are comprised of: processes, people, and technology. Technology’s role in business operations should be to enhance efficiency, create standardization, and reduce the interval to execution. The pros of implementing technology are that it can be transformational; processes and subsequent tasks that took days or weeks can often be reduced to hours or minutes with a higher level of accuracy. The cons of implementing technology are that business operations become dependent on a specific vendor or service offering, often with critical layers of business operations built upon one service. Vendors are keen on this fact, often adding additional service fees and annual cost increases because they know that you will never leave them or cancel their service.
While technology can transform your business operations and support exceptional service delivery, keep these tips in mind when sourcing a solution to enhance your business operations.
- Take the time to internally evaluate your business operations and identify the core problem or issue you are solving. Too often, a technology solution is implemented to solve a specific business problem without business owners taking the time to review the interdependencies of the entire business operations model holistically. Non holistic analysis of your operational need leads to over-buying at increased cost and likely the subscription to various disparate licenses from multiple vendors with overlapping service offerings.
- Design your business processes to be vendor and technology agnostic. The technology solution identified to meet the needs of your business process(es) should support the execution of your business process(es), not be the business process(es). Being both vendor and technology agnostic enables leverage within the business to make a vendor or technology change either due to service level inadequacies or non-market rates imposed by the vendor.
- Look for technology solutions from multiple vendors to identify options in the market. There are numerous vendors offering business solutions, each with their strengths and weaknesses. Identify at least (3) vendors who could meet your business needs.
For the best opportunity to purchase technological solutions at the right price, contact AIQ. We can quickly and efficiently assist you in reverse auctioning your purchase, identifying multiple vendors and options, and obtain the very best competitive price the market has to offer.