Learn Something

Sometimes, the tried and true gets tired, outdated, and inefficient.

Recently, we have come to this conclusion with our account management monthly client reporting model, and decided to leverage the power of dashboards to shave countless hours off our reporting model, provide increased transparency, and allow us to give more value to our clients during our monthly meetings.... And least we forget, reduce our environmental footprint!

Curious to get an inside glimpse as to how we’re moving to a paperless reporting system? Here’s the inside scoop!

When you imagine our business 10 years from now, what do you see?

Do you have holographic, virtual meetings? Do you even have a physical office? 

What makes business exciting, is that there's always a way to evolve, perform better and create more. Whether it's conceptualising a better process, or discovering a new technology.  

We are living in the age of constant digital transformation. Evolving is crucial to remain current and competitive - stagnation is effectively a modern death sentence. 

But implementing a technology change is hard.

Many businesses inadvertently get their technology change process wrong, calling the project unsuccessful.
We want to stop that! 

Being an evolving business ourselves, we have worked out the 4 steps we typically go through when rolling an internal change: Assess, Design, Implement & Manage.

We elaborate further on our proven process below.

You may have noticed that the traditional methods of gaining your customers attention (and business!) are failing to pull in the results they used to. To combat this, HubSpot developed the Inbound Methodology, focused on delivering value to your customers to attract them, and pull them through the buyers journey. This pairs nicely with our own belief in providing value up-front, so naturally we have whole-heartedly adopted this ideology into our online presence!

Many NZ SME's face the same growth barriers: they have reached a stage where customer demands drive are driving their growth, but don't have the right tools or processes in place to manage this growth, anticipate buying behaviors or build loyalty.

The reality is 1 in 3 New Zealand SME owners wish they knew more about technology, and how it can help drive their businesses forward.

The solution? Start understanding your options by looking at how latest technology can assist your business.

The good news? This post explores a handful of the benefits the right IT can bring to organisations (and provides a path for those wanting to take action now!).

We live in an unprecedented age for businesses, the barriers to change have never been so low. Your customers can read reviews, compare and contrast your business with your competitors, without you ever knowing. Not only that, but your competitors can easily keep tabs on you. They work their hardest to target your customers and demonstrate how they can do the job better, as well as how changing to them is pain-free. Gaining competitive advantage is getting harder... but the battle isn't lost! There are still ways to wow your customers and ensure they stick around. 

One of the answers implies reviewing the experiences you are providing to your customers.

If you are reading this post and work for an SME (like most of us in New Zealand),  you sure would be challenging the idea at this point and probably thinking "where is the time to do all that?". So, we thought we would show you, the simple, yet effective tactics that we are applying in our IT business. 

Think back to a time where you thought you had lost your mobile phone. How it feels when your heart drops into your stomach at the thought of losing, not the phone itself, but all the information stored on it.  

With this thought primed, it would be fair to say mobile phones have become the center of our worlds. However, what if having your mobile phone hacked was a million times worse than losing your phone. How would you feel if your life was hacked?

You would be right if you thought investing in an app would be a wise decision this year. You can probably name half a dozen apps off the top of your head that have helped to simplify your life, yet you probably have a few tasks in mind of what you wish you had an app for!

The rise of digital transformation has meant that, apps are now a “thing” for businesses too. Companies who realise this opportunity are able to come up with app ideas that help keep them in their consumers’ pockets, streamline business processes, or automate routine processes to save time (and money).

However, coming up with winning business app ideas can be tricky! So, we have compiled a list of six things you should consider before hitting the go button on a new business app:

Generating reports from data that actually provide you with the information you need to make high level business decisions is not easy.

In most cases, not only is their creation process heavily manual with the sourcing, collating and calculating data from numerous outputs, but the process lends itself to being time consuming and highly prone to errors.  

It's easy to see how only 29% of the companies who strive to be data driven are able to achieve this reality.  

So, how is their data different to yours?  They are able to transform their numbers from data to insights. 

What's the difference between your data and their insights? Well, quite a lot. To break it down, there are 6 key attributes that differentiate actionable insights from data. 

We have seen how ransomware attacks can spread globally in a matter of hours, the social aspect of the internet is leaving us vulnerable. These events are a dime a dozen, and although not all of them make it to headline news they are a daily occurrence!  

We have narrowed all key information down into three core aspects of how you can keep your personal information safe online, which we will deliver in three part series of blog posts covering social media, mobile phone and passwords. 

In 2017, businesses of all sizes and sectors are leveraging cloud computing to run and develop their operations. The benefits seen from shifting to this ‘IT on demand’ model go beyond financial gains, as highlighted by some of our previous blog posts.

If your organisation is only just getting started with cloud computing, or even if you have gone past the point of accepting that cloud should be your “go to” model, sometimes understanding which areas to tap into first starts with a simple exercise: observing what your competitors are doing.

We have done the work so you don’t have to! In this post, we have summarised the top 4 ways businesses are leveraging cloud computing, and how you can take advantage of these initiatives to outsmart your rivals.