Directive Blogs

What does your IT budget look like for the remainder of this year? According to Gartner, your IT costs might be increasing. So, we ask you this: are you being intentional with your IT spending, and are you spending your business’ hard-earned revenue on technology which advances your organization’s ability to succeed? Let’s take a look at Gartner’s study to see what we can learn from patterns in IT expenses.

With Amazon’s annual Prime Day having come and gone, we can’t help but wonder how many of you bought consumer electronics while they were on sale through the web retailer. If you did, that’s amazing, and we’re glad you got what you’re looking for. However, we do want to strongly urge you to consider disposing of your old electronics in an environmentally conscious way.

Have you ever wondered why it sometimes takes longer than you might expect for certain tasks to be accomplished with your business’ network? It turns out that technology is far from a simple thing, and small issues can seriously derail productivity and efficiency of complex information systems, one of which is the notorious network bottleneck. How can you identify and rectify this issue for your network?

Innovation is something that you want the people working with your technology to have a highly-developed sense of. Creativity isn’t often associated with business IT, but it is something that should be considered a true benefit if it can be brought into your operations.

Let’s explore exactly why creativity is an asset (even with your in-house IT team) and how you can nurture it in your employees.

We’re always talking about boosting productivity and the role your technology has in that quest. What we don’t always talk about is how boosting innovation can help free up your employees to produce better results. It’s the same technology, and it can have multiple benefits. In this week’s blog, we’ll discuss how focusing on how these two thoughts can be one and the same.

We always hear about how innovation drives business. This has been typically true for the whole of human existence. As businesses have tried to stay profitable among the problems they’ve faced throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we are beginning to see a troubling trend where new products are released with a laundry list of new features, but aren’t really enhancing the customer experience. Today, we look at how businesses have enhanced their marketing efforts to make products that don’t provide the types of innovations that are useful to customers. 

If you want to minimize costs, being proactive can go a long way toward this goal. Your business’ technology is one such area where proactive maintenance can allow your company to save countless dollars and hours of downtime. If you haven’t implemented a proactive maintenance platform yet, then you might be putting your company at risk.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most interesting technology markets emerging for small and mid-sized businesses for some time. It can cut down on a lot of time and effort in several different functions of your business. We’d like to spend some time this month taking a look at some of the ways small and mid-sized businesses are utilizing the IoT.

Every business wants to make smart technology decisions. For the small business looking to get their workforce the affordable workstations one option that you have today is utilizing the budget Chromebooks that are available. Today we will discuss what the Chromebook can bring to your business and how it can help you reduce your hardware costs and get your staff the resources they need to be productive. 

Technology enables some amazing things for businesses, but it can influence the way you both look at operations and the way your business functions. Not all businesses have the capital to make these large technology investments. You are far from optionless, though; today we want to discuss some of the better investments you can make in your technology infrastructure, in particular ones that won’t drain your budget.

If you aren’t versed in business technology, finding the right solutions can be challenging to say the least. Technology should make your life easier, not more difficult. With so many options at your fingertips, we thought it would be helpful to share a couple of tips to help you get started with deploying the right technology solutions for your organization. Here are three tips to help you make the best, most educated decisions about the technology for your business.

Cloud computing has been touted as one of the most innovative and important technologies for smaller businesses as they look to compete with larger organizations. How it makes this possible is by offering the dynamic computing environments that can help bring these smaller businesses into the information age without saddling them with massive infrastructure costs while doing so. That’s not to say that the cloud is cheap by any means, and this month we will discuss how cloud computing is a great option and how if it isn’t managed properly, it can be problematic for the businesses that rely on it. 

A good business owner envisions the future and what it could bring about. You may have already devoted a considerable amount of time to the good things that could happen, but how often do you picture the bad? If you don’t imagine the worst-case scenario, you could be putting your business’ life on the line. Are you prepared to deal with a data loss incident?

How often do you find yourself stressing out about who has access to which data or internal resources on your company network? What about who has access to open the front door of your office or who has access to important physical resources within your building? Ensuring the security of your business’ assets is critical, and access control tools can help your company ensure that only authorized individuals have access to specific parts of your organization’s infrastructure, be it physical or digital.

For better or worse, the way information technology is being used has come to define the way that businesses run. The most noteworthy companies are the ones using their data to their advantage and utilizing cutting-edge tools to facilitate efficient processes and productivity while managing their costs. One technology is giving more and more organizations the freedom to accomplish their goals and automate more of their mundane processes: Artificial Intelligence

A lot of people like to venture predictions about what the future will bring for business, and many of those predictions are based on anecdotes and hopes. When it comes to information system management and the future of IT for business, there are a lot of claims made by companies looking to take advantage of the reliance on IT and present business owners’ and decision makers’ options on how to leverage this technology for their own good. Today, we thought we would take a look at three emerging technologies that we will all come to use in the future and whether they are right for your business now.

How often over the past year or two have you gone to replace a device on your infrastructure, only to find that the price has increased or the device simply isn’t available? This is an issue with the current hardware shortage, particularly for business electronics. Since businesses depend on technology, it becomes critical that you understand how this shortage impacts your day-to-day operations.

It's always important to maintain and manage the tools you use for work. Nowadays, this includes the software your business uses each day. Let's go over some tips for doing so properly.

Problems with your technology can often be spotted long before they become major time-consuming difficulties, but the catch with this statement is that you have to actively be looking for them in order to do so. If you want your business to remain profitable, you have to make sure that your technology is not wasting your business time or resources, and one way to do this is by actively monitoring your network for these issues.

Risk management is part of any effective business strategy, and it’s one aspect of running an organization that must be addressed if you want to secure long-term success. Today we want to discuss what goes into an effective risk management strategy and how you can take advantage of it.