Starting a business is rarely simple and it’s not uncommon, after a few years (or even days!), to step back and be surprised by the tangled web of tech you’ve built to support your operations.
With web design and hosting, telephony, email, tools for collaboration, project management, accounting, creative development, sales, marketing, managing social media and customer service, document generation, and likely countless more department or user-specific needs, it’s easy to find yourself with more of a technology jungle than a controlled ecosystem. And when you add in 2020’s sudden shift to remote work and organizations’ scrambled efforts to keep their day-to-day operations as normal as possible, companies are rapidly adding even more to the product pile.
Couple all of that with the fact that most services now run on cloud-based subscription models, and you’ve got a recipe for a payables leak that’s steadily impacting your bottom line. Gone are the days of buying Microsoft Word 2013 or Photoshop 5.0 and running them until your computers stopped being compatible.
One of the upsides to subscription models though is that you’re always running the latest and greatest version, and updates and new releases usually deliver new features and functionality alongside other fixes. And oftentimes, those new features will be organizational “must-haves” that you’ve previously had to rely on a separate system for (it’s like Facebook copying features from other successful apps, only effective and an actual boost to productivity). But keeping track of release notes and changelogs can be tough, especially across multiple platforms — which is why it’s important to do the occasional tech audit to identify overlaps, excesses, and under-utilizations you may have missed while focusing on day-to-day operations.
That’s why we decided to build an organizational tech audit/analysis tool! As cloud computing experts, we’re already reading the release notes and tracking changes in the tools we use (and their competitors), and might as well have a tool to make our checkups easier. Then we figured we ought to expand the practice for our clients — and now the public.
The front end is still being fine tuned, but you can follow this link to kick off your tech audit right now!
And, as always, if you need help getting a new product or platform rolled out org-wide, drop us a line! We’re happy to help. Until next time, keep working hard, smart, and happy.
We’ll see you in the cloud.
