Is technology the key to your business success?

There is an interesting discussion going on, over on one of the blogs I read. Lena West has been mulling over the relationship between women business owners & technology – and why many women don’t seem to leverage the tools of technology as much as their male counterparts.

I would take this one step further and speculate that it’s not necessarily just a gender thing – but an industry thing. Take the industry that many of my clients work in – the health & wellness industry. From my experience, technology is simply not a vital part of their small business strategy.

In wondering why it isn’t, I’ve come up with the following reasons (which are very similar to Lena’s – great minds and all that!):

• Small business owners don’t fully understand how closely their use of technology is/can be related to their business success.
• They may not know where to turn for help when it comes to leveraging technology and are either afraid of being or have already been burned by their attempts.
• Related to their concern for being burned is the belief that technology is something you ‘do’ to your business – and it’s very often not integrated into the business very well (if at all) meaning that it is often set up to fail in the first place.

Take the poll above and tell me how wrong I am!

In my old role as a management consultant, one of the things I remember very clearly were the ‘People, Process, Technology” relationships. They were deemed as 3 of the most crucial elements of a successful, ‘high performing’ business. A company’s ability to integrate all three was part of what determined their level of success.

It is the same for small businesses. Those who understand these relationships are at a critical advantage over their colleagues who don’t.

I’ve been harping on about processes for a while now – but now I think it’s the turn of technology…