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By the DynaSis Team

As a company that helps small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) adopt technology as a true enabler of their success, we frequently answer the question, “How, exactly, does technology drive my business forward?” Many business leaders see technology as a requisite support system for conducting their operations, but not as a performance enhancer.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, numerous recent studies and surveys indicate that modern technology not only can enhance business performance; it can fundamentally reconfigure a business for success in the digital era. Implemented intelligently, technology both drives innovation and expands potential.

To help business owners and executives explore this innate value of technology—and align it as effectively as possible with their own business strategies—DynaSis President Dave Moorman is penning a series of targeted, quick-read articles. Ranging from cloud technology to risk mitigation; from security to mobility; he’ll cover every facet of how technology can propel SMB success in an era when ignoring it can mean business failure.

We invite you to read our first article, “Moving Your Business to the Cloud: Three Top Reasons Why the Time Is Now.” It’s filled with insightful commentary and powerful supportive statistics that validate our belief that the Cloud is a key enabler of SMB growth and competitive advantage, moving forward. We think you’ll enjoy it.

We’ll be announcing each article that debuts in our blog, but if you would like us to send you a copy as soon as it’s ready, please email chas.arnold@dynasis.com. We promise you, this is a series you won’t want to miss!

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and mid-sized 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.

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By the DynaSis Team

Unified communications―a service found in many VoIP phone solutions that extends communication by incorporating location, availability and notification―is changing the way companies and their personnel do business. For example, no longer are customers forced to leave a message at 4:55 pm on Friday and wait for a call back on Monday, merely because their representative happened to be down the hall or out of the office.

Now, phone systems can find the representative, notify him or her, transfer the call to another device or location, and perform many other connectivity functions without any operator interaction. These systems are often called Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), because that is exactly what they are―a technology service, usually cloud-based, that works with the underlying VoIP hardware to achieve greater functionality.

UCaaS dovetails perfectly with the “always on” nature of business communications today, where personnel can be available via smartphone, tablet, laptop or other device, in any location. UCaaS is also a key component of customer service, as the technology does more than locate and notify a specific person; it also can connect a caller to any employee that matches a specific profile, for example, to connect a caller with a salesperson.

In 2015, we expect to see even more development in UCaaS, with such innovations as web-based, real-time communications (WebRTC) being used to unify communications even further. Already, workers are using their mobile devices to take and share on-the-fly videos with other staff, vendors and customers. When these solutions are built into a UCaaS platform, it extends business functionality and customer service even further.

According to Nemertes Research, 68% of all companies have implemented at least one cloud-based UCaaS solution. With customers expecting more connectivity and faster response times, and VoIP and UCaaS solutions becoming more affordable than ever, firms that remain fixed on legacy telephone systems risk losing their competitive edge. To learn more about VoIP or UCaaS, we invite you to give us a call.

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By the DynaSis Team

On August 14, Forbes published an interesting article entitled Technology Will Change Your Job: How to Prepare. It’s no secret that technology changes our work lives (and our personal lives). It increases productivity enormously, for example. It also makes it easier to stay “plugged in” to the workplace―a double-edged sword that gives us more mobility but also lets others track us down when we would prefer not to be connected.

However, this article wasn’t about that aspect of technology. Rather, it referenced a book, by attorney Richard Lieberman, entitled Your Job and How Technology Will Change It. In the book, Lieberman postulated that technology won’t simply let us work more efficiently; it will change the intrinsic nature of our jobs. He also suggested that those who do not adapt to this change will find themselves out of work.

“Bemoaning new technology is very much like those people who said passenger airplanes were terrible because they did not provide the comfort, leisure and sociability of a long train trip,” Lieberman stated. A more accurate analogy, we submit, would be to compare the value of a technically astute, well-trained administrative assistant to one who clings to an early version of WordPerfect or Word―or heaven forbid, a typewriter.

The message was, essentially, “Adapt or die,” and we believe that this message applies not only to workers but also to the businesses for whom they work. Emerging technologies from robotics to cloud computing are being adopted much faster than most people had predicted. Young people are embracing these new technologies far more rapidly than their older counterparts, and they want their employers to adopt and provide cutting-edge solutions, as well.

Conversely, many older workers and managers (the Baby Boomers) are not staying abreast of technology. However, they retain the majority of cultural and institutional knowledge that makes a company “tick,” and they often make the rules regarding who can do what, and when.

Frustrated by the pace of technological change, younger workers are bringing their more advanced, personal technology to work, much to the consternation of the older, inflexible executives and managers. In doing so, these younger workers can put businesses at risk.

So, the challenge for business owners is to adopt a more aggressive technology stance that will attract the younger stars without endangering the business. They also need to identify and retain older corporate leaders that do appreciate technology―those who can bridge the generation gap within the firm. In doing so, companies can develop a tech-forward, integrated workplace where all players can embrace secure corporate solutions to foster a collaborative, productive work environment.

The alternative is an unspoken “war” at work, where older, hide-bound executives and IT pros attempt to “control” the activities of younger workers, and the workers either become frustrated and leave or they simply find workarounds and do what they want. Neither is a satisfactory, long-term solution for anyone.

Now, here’s the good news. Companies do not have to make major IT purchases and plan exhaustive implementations every year or two in order to have an up-to-speed IT infrastructure. Solutions exist, such as DynaSis Ascend platform, that let firms pay a flat monthly fee for deployment and use of modern, secure IT solutions upgraded on a regular basis.

Such an approach keeps everyone happy. To learn more, please fill out our inquiry form or give us a call at (770) 569-4600.

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By the DynaSis Team

If you studied psychology in high school or college, you probably encountered Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs―those elements that take humans from basic survival to self-actualization. Did you know there is a customer hierarchy of needs, as well? The terms for these needs change from one model to the next, but they all say basically the same thing.

At the most basic level, customers want accuracy and availability. They want things to work and they want to be able to obtain them. Above that, they want companies to meet their desires―provide ease of use; wide color selection; extended operating hours―whatever they desire in the product or service that isn’t absolutely necessary for them to use it. At this level, customers become loyal, and most companies are content if they achieve this “pinnacle.”

The cold reality, however, is that meeting customer desires and gaining loyalty do not place you at the pinnacle. That spot is reserved for meeting customers’ unexpressed needs―actually advising them of things they might want and making them available for them. It involves having a two-way dialog and showing that you are looking out for them.

At this level, companies gain evangelism―customers that tell everyone how wonderful a company is. Most firms never come close to achieving this level, because they are caught up in trying to reach or stay at the loyalty level. They waste the opportunity to become truly great and extraordinarily successful.

So, how do you get your customers to the level of evangelism? You must already have great products or services, of course. Your employees should love your company and what it represents, and they should be dedicated to providing passionate, caring service. To make that leap from this foundation isn’t effortless, but today’s technology is making it a lot easier than one might think.

What do you do with the data available to you? This includes, not only what your customers order, but what they ask about when they call; what they say about you to their friends on social media; even what they say about your competitors. All of this data is available to you, either through your own internal records or through social media analysis. You just have to harvest and analyze it to get a pretty good idea of what your customer might like you to offer them, next. (It’s also a good idea to participate in their conversations and let them know you are listening.)

Best of all, there are ready-made data gathering and analysis solutions that can do a lot of the work for you, even going as far as monitoring conversations about you and your customers across the entire spectrum of social media, so you can jump in and participate. They can even tell you who your key influencers are―the folks that persuade others to either like or dislike your products or services. (If you are old-school and this sounds like an invasion of privacy, consider this: it’s perfectly legal and your competitors are probably already doing it.

These solutions aren’t DynaSis’ specialty, although we can point you in the direction of someone who offers them. Because we care about your success, we just wanted you to know they are there. We also wanted to remind you that, before you decide to implement any solution that gathers and stores customer data and preferences, you should order a security analysis and ensure you have robust defensive mechanisms in place.

All the customer engagement and gratification in the world won’t build your business if a criminal steals those lovely pools of data that you collect, analyze and store. If you suffer a data breach like those of PF Chang’s or Target, your customers will become evangelists, but they’ll be telling everyone to run the other direction. If you’d like to request a technology assessment to see where you are, now―or discuss any aspect of technology and how it impacts your business―we invite you to fill out our inquiry form or give us a call at (770) 569-4600.

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 By the DynaSis Team

 If you follow our blogs, you know that we talk frequently about the value of technology for driving better business results. For many business owners, the question, then, becomes: “How can I ensure it makes a difference at my company? How can I quantify its benefit?”

To be honest, a lot of technology is notoriously hard to quantify, in terms of overall financial benefit. Small improvements and upgrades are easy to quantify. If, for example, your order processing clerk’s PC crashes and you replace it, you can fairly easily quantify the value of the orders that might have been lost had they not gotten processed on a timely basis.

Even on a larger scale, you can quantify the hard dollars of specific improvements. For example, if you implement a new inventory management solution, it might reduce inventory costs in a way that you can actually see, on paper. A new teleconferencing system could reduce hard travel costs. So far so good.

The crux of the problem, for the ROI equation, is that technology benefit is not a simple dollar for dollar equation. For example, if you upgrade your infrastructure to a faster, more stable platform and give your employees better access to information, it will likely improve your customer service. Your customers will likely think more highly of you, because they will perceive you as being “on top of your game.” Try to put a price tag on that.

On the flip side, if you make a dramatic change without having the proper framework in place, it won’t deliver the results you expect and you could negatively impact customer service or employee productivity. That’s what makes the “intangible” benefits of technology so elusive.

Business owners hear horror stories of companies that spent millions of dollars and reaped very little benefit―tangible or intangible. That makes them hesitant to engage in technology upgrades unless they can see a bottom line number that indicates the improvement will pay for itself in hard dollars.

We encourage you not to think that way. In reality, when a firm spends a fortune on technology with very little benefit, generally either the solution was the wrong one or they implemented it prematurely or unwisely.

Technology is like a house. If you don’t have a good foundation, no amount of bells and whistles are going to result in a quality product. In the example of the inventory solution we mentioned above, if a company deployed a major platform like that without having the appropriate infrastructure in place to integrate it with the rest of company operations, they likely wouldn’t achieve the benefits they sought. The new system might actually reduce the efficiency of their inventory management and delivery mechanisms.

To resolve this conundrum, firms should evaluate their existing technology thoroughly and then plan improvements and upgrades from the bottom up―the foundation. Above all else, you must achieve stability, performance, availability and security in your corporate technology platforms. That alone will result in a huge improvement in productivity, and can foster better customer service and faster delivery. Then you can add the rest of the layers to build something that’s really stellar.

Such an approach requires a roadmap that looks one, three or even five years into the future. If you don’t have a strategic technology roadmap that steers every decision, you may luck into the right combinations of solutions, but you won’t be able to quantify their benefits. You won’t know where you were or how far you have come.

Don’t get us wrong―solutions that promote mobility, better data management and other important functions are vital to the success of most businesses today, but they pieces of a puzzle, not the answer on their own.

We invite you to fill out our inquiry form or give us a call at (770) 569-4600 to discuss what you want to accomplish and how you will need to prepare for it. Optionally, if you want faster results, we can show you ready-made, cloud-based solutions where someone else has already laid the proper foundation.

By the DynaSis Team

[featured_image]Last week, we talked about your options and considerations for purchasing and installing Office 2013. This week, we’ll discuss Office 365 and give you some financial comparisons.

Office 365
For a fee ranging from $12.50 - $22 per user, per month (billed annually), you can license the full version of Office for each of your employees. Best of all, the installation is good for five devices. So, if you have workers that need Office on a desktop at work, a desktop at home, a laptop, a tablet and a smartphone, one monthly fee will cover them all. That can make Office 365 a bargain. If your employees don’t need Office in multiple locations, it’s not such a deal.

With the Office 365 Small Business Premium Edition, up to 25 employees can have desktop (PC or Mac) versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher and Link, plus online access to most applications from any computer, mobile access to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus cloud perks such as a hosted website, a team intranet site, online conferencing and cloud file storage.

If you don’t need Android or iPhone access or desktop installations, you can opt for Office 365 Small Business, which for $5 per month, per user (billed annually), gives you web-based and mobile (Windows Phone only) versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint (plus the cloud perks). If you have more than 25 users, you’ll have to bump up to Office 365 Midsize Business (starts at $15 a month for up to 300 users), but it also includes Active Directory integration and self-service business intelligence.

Which Is the Best Choice?

Renting Office adds up, but you’ll automatically get upgrades, fixes and new versions. As we mentioned above, if your employees do not need access to Office on multiple devices, then Office 2013 is less expensive over a three-year period for those that want desktop installations ($399.99 per user for Office 2013 Professional versus $450.00 for Office 365 Small Business Premium or $540 for Office 365 Midsize Business).

If your employees are content using office only via a web browser, Office 365 is less expensive ($180.00) over a three-year period than all but Office 2013 Home and Student ($139.99). And, if upfront outlay is your prime consideration, then jumping to Office 365 is certainly the way to go. You can always opt later to switch to Office 2013 or its successor.

The virtual CIOs at DynaSis can help you evaluate exactly what you need as part of your Windows XP upgrade. (If you haven’t planned for that yet, time is running out. We really hope you’ll read this article and call us, today.) Either way, we’ll be happy to help you make the move to cloud productivity with Office 365.

By Dave Moorman, DynaSis

For decades, the technology world has described its industry as “Information Technology,” or simply, “IT.” There were IT workers, IT consultants, IT systems and IT companies―all of which were part of an ecosystem that stood alone and apart from “business.” IT systems enabled the preparation, storage and dissemination of business information, but few companies gave much thought to IT’s role in the business effort.

Over the past decade, however, companies and industry experts have begun talking about “business technology,” or BT, rather than IT. So, what is business technology? There is no official definition for the term and, in fact, it continues to evolve. However, the BTM Institute, a research think tank devoted to cross-disciplinary thought leadership, defines business technology as:

“The application of IT to deliver a business capability or automate a business operation―the result of configuring, implementing, applying and using IT to produce a business result.”

In other words, business technology is exactly as it sounds―the convergence of business directives and technological capabilities. Whereas the world might previously have thought of IT workers as ivory-towered geeks, working in the elite inner sanctums of their cubicles, business technology workers―also called business technologists―are deeply engaged with the company’s plans and objectives.

Have You Adopted Business Technology as an Approach?

BT-oriented companies understand that technology is a powerful mechanism for propelling business achievement; a tool to enable the attainment of corporate goals and results. They believe in measuring the performance of technology, not in terms of network availability or server uptime, but through key performance indicators (KPIs) tied to specific business strategies and goals.

This doesn’t mean that uptime and network reliability are not important. The ability of technology to carry out its missions is still paramount. However, BT-oriented firms incorporate technology strategy into their business planning and execution. They view their technology systems, workers and consultants, not as necessary adjuncts, but as value-add contributors to and partners in the company’s success.

Technology has always helped achieve business objectives, from reengineering processes and reducing costs to streamlining worker collaboration and communication. However, its value to the balance sheet has largely gone unrecognized, with management perceiving technology primarily as a cost center to be kept in check.

In a company that endorses business technology over information technology, that will no longer be the case. Technology will be a fundamental component of the business equation―technology and corporate blueprints and roadmaps will support each other and be inextricably linked. Furthermore, companies will be able to calculate the value technology should deliver and then benchmark the outcome against those projections. Such an approach may raise the expectations for technology, but it will also increase the rewards. If you’d like to discuss transitioning your firm from IT to BT (hint: it’s easier than you may think), give me a call.