Understanding the Impact of Technology on Business
Technology changes the way we do business. Look at the fact: almost every company today hires custom software development services to create a digital product. Companies similar to MLSDev can help with building custom software adapted to the market needs.
Whether it is a website for a state agency, a tax-deduction tool for an attorney’s office, or an engine to fly Boeing, the number of businesses requiring custom software development grows.
This phenomenon, like any other, has both good and bad sides. One thing is clear: if technology impacts business, we have to drive the most use of it.
In this article, we cast light on how your business can benefit from technology. You’ll discover:
- Top benefits technology may bring to your business
- The bad and ugly sides of tech development
- Ways to make technology help you
Let’s get these and more insights below.
Benefits Technology Brings to Every Business
With tech growth, we become faster, more open, more effective, and spend less time on boring routines. Here are the main benefits tech gives businesses:
1. Competitiveness
Benefit #1 is the ability of small start-ups to compete with corporations.
Although we have a problem with monopolies, we also have unprecedented possibilities for small start-ups and niche firms to launch successful products and attract audiences.
The example of the apps like FitBit, and the growth of delivery services like Deliveroo is an example. A tech start-up requires minimum investment and almost no resources except for talent to get started.
Also, tech cuts bureaucracy. It means bright minds go a shorter way to success compared to predecessors.
2. Improved Management
With numerous management tools like Jira, Trello, and others, any boss can have immediate insight into any operations chain. This caters to business integrability. A company works as a live organism, and any accident gets reported and approached in real time.
3. Boost the Efficiency of Operations
Tech makes business free from routine work in several ways. This includes less bookkeeping, reporting, finance, bills, security, and scheduling. All the management operations can be performed via the majority of tools letting one staff member do the job of a team.
Human-led operations are also performed faster, which opens more space for competition, experimenting, and innovation.
4. Better Communication with Customers
Today, it is okay to have 24/7 customer support with either live agents working from different parts of the world or AI chatbots capable of covering customer requests. The number of platforms for communication with customers also grew.
It is common to implement numerous tools into one conversation thread with a customer. A customer can tweet about an issue, then receive an answer via email, then call a support team for feedback and require a response in a Twitter chat again.
Thus, technology gives businesses unprecedented ease and freedom in communication with a customer.
Customer expectations changed as well. Now a customer demands better attention, higher speeds in issue solving, and more loyalty.
5. Innovation
Technology doesn’t just enable businesses to invent new products and services. By giving any business owner a digest of the most important developments in their niche, technology drives innovation unprecedentedly.
We have free access to almost any information – from the Encyclopedia Britannica to Tesla’s electric-cars patents. This streamlines education and research and leads to even more innovation in the future.
Wrong Ways We Utilize Technology
Besides the majority of positive uses, the tech also has bad and even ugly sites. Although it’s not the tech itself to blame, it’s rather how we use it.
The inappropriate use of technology is a serious issue to be discussed, as the flaws we don’t eliminate today may turn into monsters tomorrow.
Here are the cases when we should rethink our use of tech:
Growth of Monopolies
The development of a free market is not possible in the conditions of monopolies. For decades the internet space was free from monopolizing, and we could benefit from the majority of new products, free in terms of price and spirit.
Today, things change. Monopolies make it harder to promote small and medium business solutions, hinder innovation, and mute competition.
Solution: by supporting products from the small and medium businesses, we contribute to the free market’s evolution.
Lack of Human Contact
Dehumanization is one of the pressing psychological issues of the 21st century. It affects business as well.
Multinational teams lose contact, customers get mad about inefficient chatbots, and bosses don’t know their employees. The story tells one thing: we don’t know how to leverage tech in communications.
Solution: there should be a margin where technology implementation should stop to give way to live communication. In terms of customer relations, it can have a form of live events. In terms of business communication, it can be meet-ups, conferences, and team-building.
Privacy Loss
We have just quit the era where privacy violations didn’t have a recurring character and customers didn’t yet feel spied over. Now, we have more and more complaints about selling personal information, irritating ads popping from everywhere, and concerns about human profiling.
This ruins the feeling of trust between companies and customers.
Solution: any company should understand that privacy matters and ensure their customers have control over how their data are stored and used.
Security Breaches
A company may lose tons of important and valuable data because of a security breach: phishing attacks and the need to respond to incidents waste tons of precious time.
Solution: the security tools and the whole culture of storing sensitive information should develop at pace with other tech developments.
To Sum Things Up
Despite the fact there is a lot of tech in business, we must admit, we are still the newbies in driving the maximum profit from tech. While we streamline operations, we may forget about customer privacy; while facilitating digital communication, we may forget about human contact.
The key takeaway is simple: to recognize that we still have to learn a lot about how to use tech, experiment, make mistakes, and find solutions.