The Power of Perception

What Others See Matters

Over the last several weeks, I've been talking about the strategic application of technology: how the timing of tech spending relates to material benefits, what you should expect as a return from your tech spend, and the improvements you should feel from improved speed, accuracy, and reliability.

In sum, what we've been talking about is managing technology spending to yield strategic and competitive advantages.  If you're not proactively managing the technology problem, you're reacting to it - and probably hastily and poorly - and that doesn't inspire confidence in anybody.

Perceptions Matter

Confidence is 360-degrees, baby.

If you're not controlling your IT spending or your spending doesn't line up with strategic outcomes, it's a problem that's visible to you, your employees, your suppliers, and your customers.

What does it say to these stakeholders when your company:

• Makes significantly more mistakes than your competitors?
   
• Is chronically late on assignments, appointments, and deliverables?
   
• Doesn't have the capability and convenience offered by your competitors?
   
• Isn't listening nor responding to consumer complaints, needs, and concerns?
   
• Is significantly more difficult to work with than other business partners because you don't have the automation to make their business processes more streamlined?
   
• You're using email, contact, calendar, and business productivity solutions that knowingly - based on their own terms and conditions - expose your customer's personal private information to spammers and advertisers?
   
• You don't respond when someone in your organization loses a cell phone, a laptop, or is hacked, nor attempt to understand your degree of exposure, risk, or legal obligation when these events occur?
   
• Never thinks twice about installing wireless electronic devices on a business network shared by point of sale stations or credit card swipes?
   
• You're down for a day, two, or three, after a catastrophic systems failure?

The point is that perceptions really do matter. They can say a lot about a company, its products and services, its management team ... It's a signal.

What do you think that message should be saying about your company? 

Managing technology risk is part and parcel of modern business management today. Small business owners wear many hats and can't be expected to know everything about every subject, but that's why they hire CPA's, HR professionals, marketing companies, and web designers. They should also think very carefully and proactively about who they bring on as a trusted IT advisor.

Is it going to be your cousin? An intern? Another 'Geek-Guy' from down the road? Or somebody serious, with real business experience? Well, as they say ... the choice is yours.

Next: What is an Information System.

R

Reduce Your Stress: Tell Your Phone Who's Text is Important

Your cell phone is a relentless master. And it has you trained better than Pavlov's Dog.

When it vibrates, you look at it; it twerps, you look at it; dings, you look at it; even when you're not supposed to be, you're looking at it. We do this with our phones because we've unwittingly created an unhealthy addictive response cycle in our brain, yet none of that constant anxiety really helps us to become more productive or more efficient. In fact, it just fuels a mounting sense of anxiety.

If you're ready to take control of things, and put more investment in the current moment, here's a couple of good suggestions on how to manage text messaging more effectively. These instructions are for an iPhone, but a similar process can likely be followed on any mobile phone system. Okay, ready?

1. Turn off Vibration for Text Messages. On an iPhone, you can do this by accessing Settings > Sounds, and de-selecting both of the vibrate options.

2. Turn off Sound for Text Messages. In the same space, you'll want to put the text tone to None.

3. Enable a Text Tone for Important Contacts. In your Contacts, find a Contact from whom you always need to be alerted when they text you. Think of somebody important in your life - not clients, not just anyone - who you really want to be notified when they text you. 

4. Edit a Contact. Change the Text Tone to a tone of your choice. Leave the Vibration selection off. Save your changes.

Final Thoughts

Okay, you might ask me, why turn off vibration entirely?

• Well, first off, you and others around you can still hear it, even when it vibrates, and it disturbs the moment of Now. That's not useful.
   
• Second, by not disabling it, you train your body to listen by feeling for the vibration, even to a point of creating imaginary false positives where you think you're feeling the vibration of your phone but you really aren't.  That's actually kind of creepy.
   
• Third, vibration drains the cell phone battery faster than playing a tone. So, yeah, it serves a practical purpose. Use less energy. Save the planet. Yadda-yadda.

If your goal is to disassociate the habitual response of checking your cell phone with each and every incoming text message, by telling your cell phone specifically who is important, you can filter out the noise of irrelevant and meaningless messages that pull your mind away from Now. You can check text messages as if they were email messages - on your own time and schedule that works for you - and with substantially less drooling.

R

Shouldn't Technology Make Things Faster?

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Returns

Over the last two weeks, I've described ways to earn quantitative, monetary returns from technology investments - through reducing expenses, containing expenses, and generating revenue. And hey, money's great (I'm not going to argue with money), but you know, sometimes, it's not all about the money.

In my classes, I like to tell my students that technology should also do three other important things - three things that aren't money and are more qualitative in nature - and, if your technology investments aren't doing these things, then listen: there's a whole heck of a problem. Something is really, really wrong, and needs to be corrected.

Speed, Accuracy, and Reliability

Shouldn't technology ... make things faster? I mean, really. If you spend a bunch of money on a new computer and if it slows your business process down, how is that helping?

While we're on the subject, shouldn't technology ... make things more accurate? That's what computers are for, right? Reduce error rates? If a ton of money is spent on system upgrades and the computer system spits out bad information (and leading to bad decision-making), how is that helping?

Finally, shouldn't technology ... be more reliable? System's up. System's down. Wibbly-wobbly, undependable, reset this, restart that, pound it until it's working, how does that help anyone?

These are qualitative metrics in the sense that, off-hand, they generally are more felt than measured. Now, you can break this stuff down and attempt to measure time, accuracy, and reliability to give yourself more concrete metrics, absolutely, but intuitively, we can sense if something is faster or slower, more or less accurate, or, generally unstable; our feelings and gut reactions are pretty useful when understanding technology return as well.

In fact, it's the intuitive reaction from staff that gives management's first impression of its return on technology spending.

The Problem of Confidence

If the solution isn't faster, more accurate, and more reliable, there'll be no confidence in the system; users may even develop work-arounds or "shadowsystems" to do something the first solution was supposed to do!

That stuff eventually leads to even more complexity, more processes out of control, more time, more cost, more inefficiency and more waste.

Technology investments should improve confidence in the information system and the business processes it supports, not weaken it, no?

If This Ain't Happening ...

... something is seriously wrong. The implementation went south. The design was bad. The configuration isn't quite right. When implementing technology solutions, management's expectations of their vendor or solutions provider should be clear - the technical solution should do at least one of the following quantitative things:

• Reduce Expenses
• Contain Expenses
• Generate Revenue

And at least one of the following qualitative things (hopefully all three):

• Improve Speed
• Improve Accuracy
• Improve Reliability

Think about it. If you're a small business owner, why would you invest in technology if it was more expensive, cost more than adding additional labor, or generate money? Why would you invest in technology if it slowed stuff down, made data useless, or was inherently unreliable? How could you have confidence in the solution if your provider couldn't demonstrate these aspects of your return to you?

Next time: the power of perception.

R