How Can Choosing the Right Technology Help in Business Growth?

All businesses, be it small-sized or mid-sized, need to implement solutions related to the latest technologies to thrive in today's ever-competitive environment. Technology can help these businesses develop and strengthen their core products and service offerings, helping them keep a steady pace with the technology revolution. It also allows them to reshape their marketing strategies and other aspects of their operations.

Adopting and integrating new technologies into core processes can help small businesses overcome the competition and capture a significant market portion. It allows them to grow to new heights and become profitable in a shorter span.

But due to lack of awareness, most organisations face the challenge of choosing the best solutions to help them achieve their desired goals. One size doesn’t fit all, and this statement is true even for businesses and technologies. However, that shouldn't be hard to overcome if you follow a step-by-step process that entails knowing your business needs first. This article will help you streamline your search according to what your business needs. You can then choose and implement the solutions to solve the problems.

Analysing Business Requirements

When it comes to assessing your business needs, the question is not 'How to Grow Your Business?', but rather, 'What Solutions You Must Implement?'

You can do this by performing a business requirements analysis. A business requirements analysis consists of five steps that go from gathering information about stakeholders to documentation.

1. Identifying Your Stakeholders

To get the best and latest technologies for your business, you must first know who the project will affect as part of its outcome. It includes the teams working on such technologies, or it can even be others who are part of your organisation and the project.

So, the first step towards procuring new technology for your business is to list the stakeholders.

2. Gathering and Categorising Stakeholder Requirements

As a part of implementing new solutions across the organisation, you should make sure you know your stakeholder's needs. Once you do that, you can separate them into different categories.
To gather information about the needs of your stakeholders, you can follow these four steps:

1. Interview stakeholders
2. Conduct group workshops
3. Create a prototype and make it available for end-users
4. Develop test cases for end-users

Doing so will allow you to know what your stakeholders are looking for from your project.

So, now that you have gathered all the information you need, it is time that you separated it into four distinct categories.

• Functional
• Technical
• Operational
• Change Management

Note here that each category is different. For instance, functional requirements may involve how the product should cater to the end-user. Similarly, technical requirements focus on issues in the technology itself and the solutions needed to overcome them.

Likewise, when it comes to operational requirements, the technology must solve problems related to business operations. Finally, the solution adopted should act as a catalyst for changes in the organisation or its management.

3. Analysing Stakeholder Requirements

The next step in the business requirements analysis process is getting to know the stakeholder requirements. For this, you must start with defining the requirements. Once you have defined stakeholder requirements, you must:

• Prioritise and identify those feasible and achievable requirements.
• Understand and solve any issues or conflicts between them.
• Make clear and measurable connections between stakeholder requirements and business objectives.

4. Documentation

Once you finish analysing and prioritising stakeholder requirements, identifying those feasible and achievable requirements, and resolving all conflicts between them, you can put together a detailed report that includes both the stakeholder requirements and your business objectives.

You can then show that report to your stakeholders and, after getting their approval, move forward with the procurement process.

Choosing the Right Technology for Your Business

Now that you have got the approval of your stakeholders, it is time to start with the procurement process. However, before you can begin, you should ask yourself, 'How to grow my business with the help of this technology?' Four factors come into play when implementing new technology across your organisation. They are:

1. Productivity

Any technology is useless if it doesn't help an organisation in improving productivity. Increased productivity is highly beneficial for businesses and can come in many forms, including reduced workflows. However, note that many such solutions can only do so temporarily. If you want to increase productivity on a large scale, you may need to do some calculations before jumping to conclusions about the solutions you need.

2. Customisability and Scalability

Agile may be the way to go, especially for those fast-moving businesses. Will the software get regular updates and implement the latest solutions? Can it seamlessly integrate with existing business processes and other such systems in your organisation? Is it adaptable to the ever-changing business needs of the organisation?

If you ask an expert the question, 'How to Expand Business using the latest technology?', they will get straight to asking these questions before suggesting one to you.

3. Credibility

Most businesses think that implementing the latest technologies early on can do them good. However, that's not always the case. When choosing a technology for your business, you should also consider other companies' adoption of the exact solutions. Another thing that you should consider is what people have to say about the product. That is, whether the company offering the software or technology solutions has good reviews.

Such factors weigh in for things like the stability of the software or technology and help you decide for how long you can use them. It can also help you better understand whether such technology or software will compete with your rivals.

4. Cost

If you have the question, 'How to Grow Business?' in mind, and think that investing in new technology could hold the key, then you are not wrong. However, when buying and implementing a unique solution for your business, you should also consider the cost. Cost does not just include the subscription charges. It also entails the costs incurred for training your employees to implement that technology for the organisation’s benefit.

So, when you decide to buy a new software solution for your business, carefully consider both the subscription charges or the buying costs and those you incur for training your employees to implement the solution and help boost business.

5. Features

The features that technology or software offers are things that you must consider before buying and implementing it. It will help if you are looking for such solutions that offer features that benefit your business or organisation. For instance, you may want to implement a robust ERP system across your organisation. To do this, you must first look at the different ERP systems available in the markets and their features and decide on one that fulfils your requirements.

6. Backup and Support

When buying new technology, check to see whether you have the vendor's support during the transition, right from installation to implementation. You will need help with different stages of the change in a typical situation, including installation, up-gradation, troubleshooting, and security. So, make sure you have both the vendor and your IT department's support. In that way, you can rest assured that you implement the new technology across different departments of your organisation.

So, these are the factors that you should consider when implementing new technology for your business. In case you are not sure about what new and emerging technologies can help your business to grow. In that case, you can always get those small business tips from an expert or from someone else who already owns and operates a start-up organisation.

Conclusion

Don't rush things when implementing new technology for your business. Though several emerging technologies can be beneficial, many others can also break your organisation, primarily when implemented in the wrong way.

Also, don't hesitate to ask an expert for business growth tips, especially those about implementing new technologies on a large scale.

Also read:

1) How small business promotes industrialisation?
2) Impact of Lockdown on Indian Economy
3) GST: Is this a benefit to the Economy?
4) How funding boosts Startups to redefine Indian Economy?
5) OkCredit: Simple, Paperless & Secure solution for businesses

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FAQs

Q. How Can I Store Data Related to My Business?

Ans. You can store information related to your business in many ways, but keeping it on the cloud can be the most effective.

Q. Are there any Risks Involved in Implementing New Technologies for My Business?

Ans. You have various risks of implementing new technologies for your business, most of which are related to widespread software failure resulting from cybersecurity attacks.

Q. Will, I Go Out of Business if the Technology that I Implemented Fails?

Ans. No. You won't go out of business even if your systems fail as long as you have a robust backup system and have taken a backup of all your data.