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4. What will the role of technology be in your business?
This is a business strategy question. Is technology going to let you do "more with less?" Will it reduce busy work? Improve quality? Will it add to your services and capabilities? Will the technology provide business intelligence to company leaders or does it make an admin’s job easier? Will it do both? As simple as this seems, it’s quite significant. The answer will (1) determine the scope and penetration that technology will have and (2) will divulge the complexity of the system and (3) will impose many of the requirements for a system. It will also indicate whether the system you are looking for can be pulled off the shelf or would need to be built from scratch.
5. Will the technology accurately reflect how work gets done?
This consideration is about whether you’ve addressed the relationship between efficiency (does something for little time or money) and effectiveness (does something well). A business may have imple-mented technology that effectively accomplishes a task only to learn that it actually reduced the overall efficiency of the work. One case is of a company that added a system into which all orders were entered so they could later be tracked and referenced. But they didn’t eliminate the need for orders to be written on a paper form first. Net result: before technology, one-step process; with technology, two-step process. The system was abandoned tens of thousands of dollars later and in the words of one executive, they haven’t revisited it because they "tried technology before and it didn’t work." Sure it didn’t work! They didn’t look at technology in the context of all the work being done on each order, they only looked to solve a narrow effectiveness need at the expense of efficiency.
6. Are you willing to change how you work in order to implement technology?
Sometimes technology can solve problems only if you wrap your business around how the technology works. This can likely save you money if the alternative is a custom system. If you are not able/ready to alter work practices, the technology solution may be more complex and costly. Sometimes that’s your only choice. A happy medium can also be worked out, but it is tricky and risky. At best, you’ll have incurred a non-recurring cost to pay for it in work hours --- if not development hours --- and at worst, you’ll incur recurring hours in every-day process "work-arounds."
7. Will the technology solution scale with your business?
If technology works well at your current level of activity, then you want it to work well at other levels of activity, whether higher *or* lower. A common mistake when specifying tech-nology is to look at the constraints and limitations of your business as they are today and apply them to what technology will do. This will result in technology that is limited by design. The same mistake is made when only looking to solve business needs as the technology looks today. This would result in a business that is limited by technology. Either scenario stalls a business and causes your technology investment to be sunk.
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