The world is in an ever-changing development loop regarding business technology solutions. It seems that every year an innovation evolves the business tech landscape for the better. This is, of course, wonderful for the evolution of business as a whole, but what tech can you implement into your own SME to see results?
In this article, we will look at some technology innovations that your enterprise can incorporate to improve efficiency workload capacity and keep the door open for future expansions when a growth phase hits. But first;
How Do Businesses Use Technology?
To give you insights into worthwhile tech investments, we need to analyze how technology is changing the business landscape and operations.
Primarily, most businesses and enterprises will use technology in a functional capacity to accomplish their workloads. This can take different forms depending on your SME’s area of business.
If you run a digital marketing agency, your employees must have efficient workstations to complete their work. However, if you run a data center, you may be more inclined to invest in server technology.
To make the most of the latest innovations, you need to analyze what technology you currently use, where your business needs resources, and how technology can fill that gap; if it can, that is.
But even if you aren’t in a digital field of work, you will still use technology every day. Retail workers will use an inventory picking system, bars will use state-of-the-art order management systems, and hotels will use sophisticated booking and admin technology.
Tech permeates our world in more ways than we may realize. So, what can you focus on?
Mobile Employee Workstations
We will focus on the digital-based SMEs for a moment and address the need for employees to have dedicated workstations. This is important for multiple reasons but has changed dramatically over the past few years due to COVID-19.
COVID-19 has brought about a working revolution in which hybrid work from home models are now the norm. This is, of course, replacing the old way of working in which attending an office from 9 am to 5 pm every day was mandatory.
And employers are beginning to see the benefit of using hybrid working models. It can create a friendlier environment for employees to work the way that suits them. While in-depth studies have yet to analyze the impact on the working world that hybrid work from home models have had, early signs show it has been positive.
Be it employees saving money and time commuting to having more time to focus on their work. Everyone seems to enjoy this new employment model.
Following this, ensuring employees have dedicated mobile workstations is crucial to supporting hybrid work models. While desktop PCs have always been more powerful, laptops quickly catch up. Unless you have very specific, high-performance applications your employees need, laptops are the way forward.
Investing in a laptop for every employee is a must to facilitate hybrid working models.
Begin Implementing Blockchain Technologies
Since we are talking about the way forward, blockchain has been making waves over the past decade or so, and this is for a good reason. If you are an SME that needs a permanent, un-editable record of data units, then you should absolutely be looking into the blockchain.
The blockchain can represent a new way of storing data units that will revolutionize the world for accountancy, bookkeeping, and finance firms. But what exactly is the blockchain, and how can it be useful?
In essence, the blockchain is a ‘chain’ of ‘blocks’ that consist of data units. These data units can consist of everything from transaction information to images, videos, and even audio files. The thing to note about blockchain is that it is a decentralized public ledger that evolves perpetually forwards in this ‘chain’ of blocks.
A block can only contain so many data units, and after that quota has been reached, the block is ‘sealed,’ and the next block begins. After a block is sealed, it cannot be edited or modified in any way.
This is exactly why things like NFTs and cryptocurrency have inflated in price. Cryptocurrency, for example, only has a limited amount of currency units available to the market, and with each block that evolves, fewer units become available. This drives the value of each currency unit upwards.
While cryptocurrency may not be useful to an SME, the innovative method for record-keeping that blockchain has introduced is ground-breaking and very much will be!
In Summary
There are so many new technologies being developed year-in, year-out that it can be hard to keep up. However, emerging tech is always something that SME and SMB owners should be keeping an eye on.
You never know when the next innovation may evolve your business model to its next phase.
Featured Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash
