Evaluating Your Business Activities—Are All of Them Helping Your Business?

By the DynaSis Team

Every day, business leaders—or their employees or vendors—engage in a variety of activities to keep the business running. Does that mean every single one is beneficial? Before you answer, consider this.

There are plenty of activities, such as firing a problematic worker who wasn’t properly vetted or repairing a PC that was inadequately maintained, that keep a business running only because they fix problems that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place. In addition, vendors, employees and even business leaders all engage in activities that don’t really do anything but waste time or money.

So, how does a business evaluate whether activities are beneficial or not? We believe there are four key criteria that can determine whether or not an activity has merit within the organization:

• Lowering costs
• Increasing productivity
• Minimizing risk
• Driving growth

These are the “lowest common denominators” of business success. Any activity that is not doing one of these things may be keeping your business running, but it isn’t improving your operation or making it more competitive. At the end of the day, improvement, and not status quo, is what leads to long-term success.

The question then becomes, how can you evaluate your business activities and eliminate the ones that don’t provide one of these four benefits? Cutting away the dead wood and the fat is a process that takes time and reflection. It isn’t immediate, but it can really strengthen your business.

Ask key employees and stakeholders to look for activities or actions that aren’t providing one of these four benefits and then explore how they developed. If it’s a wasteful activity that slipped in unnoticed, stop it. If the activity became necessary due to another problem (like a PC repair caused by inadequate maintenance, in our example), making resolution of that issue a priority. Then, start looking again.

You’ll find areas to improve throughout the business, and we have a few to suggest for technology.

1. Implement virtualization (discussed in our last blog). You will reduce your server and desktop count, save money and energy, and reduce IT management and maintenance.
2. Put a secure, properly managed mobile device in the hands of every worker. It’s a proven fact that mobility increases productivity. There are other ways, as well, but that’s one of the fastest approaches.
3. Take a hard look at your business continuity/disaster recovery plans. It amazes us how many businesses discover they really need “flip the switch” data recovery only after they experience a major outage and lose business as a result. Don’t let your company be one of them.
4. Reduce IT complexity. One of the leading drivers of business growth is innovation, and one of the number one barriers to innovation is IT complexity. If your company is operating with a mashup of hardware, software, storage and other solutions, perhaps cobbled together into a pseudo-custom platform, you are likely engaged in an endless cycle of integration, configuration, tuning and testing. Resolve to untangle the web, now.

Last, don’t let your busy schedule prevent you from starting this initiative. In the time it took you to read this article, you could have identified the personnel that will help you in this task and gotten them started finding areas for improvement.

About DynaSis
DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.