We hear it often from IT staff:  "There’s no time to implement small technology projects because we’re snowed under by huge, enterprise-level rollouts and upgrades.  Right now, we’re in the process of upgrading our accounting system.  Then we have to upgrade to Windows Vista.  And we’re under pressure to overhaul our disaster recovery plan.  There is no staff time available for ‘little stuff.’  None."

As a matter of solid business practice, the big enterprise projects obviously warrant top priority by IT departments.  That old document management system (DMS) isn’t going to be supported much longer.  A better financial reporting program can help the firm immensely.  In case of a disaster, and to ensure the safety of our growing volumes of data, we certainly need to have adequate redundant systems in place.

Still, we can provide more day-to-day value for our staff without formidable effort or additional overhead.  Think about it:  At the end of a day, what benefit has the end user and the consumer seen from the "big" technology that’s demanded all of the IT department’s attention?  They may not even notice any difference in the firm’s disaster preparedness, which, one hopes, comes to light very infrequently.  And while important, the new DMS may not really change the way our people work.  In fact, staff may perceive that it has so many new features and has such a steep learning curve, they’ll have trouble figuring out how to get any work done with it.

The Big Benefits of Small Projects
Smaller products and services, on the other hand, can make work easier for staff.  IT can implement these in very little time with little or no outside instruction.  We might look at these small technologies as "incremental" steps toward better efficiency that can actually have an important impact on the firm’s bottom line.  They might even deliver a decent return on investment, something that is often much harder to calculate for many capital projects.  In many professional services firms, though, it is difficult to interest the powers that be.  "Small tech" admittedly lacks the sizzle of high-profile enterprise initiatives.

What’s In It for Them
After all is spent and done, it may not be so simple for staff to comprehend "what’s in it for me?" especially if a new enterprise system means they must ditch ingrained processes and find time in their schedules to learn a new program.  At the same time we’re hustling to get employees to buy into our major new system implementation, we might consider equipping them also with lesser tools they can use to immediate advantage. 

Streamlining the management and troubleshooting of BlackBerry devices, for example, is a serious need in many professional firms, and it’s a benefit your people on the ground will recognize.  So is the integration of office and cell phones, and simplified shipping management.  Your low-tech initiatives can be as simple as installing a template-based drawing program so that nonartists can quickly create graphs and diagrams, or replacing antiquated printers with newer, multifeature units, greatly improving the efficiency of secretaries.

Watch Out for Boondoggles
A pitfall you need to avoid with "simple tech" is overkill.  Many computer programs are impossibly overloaded.  Alan Cooper, in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, suggests that technology, if left to technologists, often runs amok because the technologists have a tendency to go overboard.  The fact that a particular feature can be added to an application doesn’t mean it should.  Features can become so far-flung that the user loses sight of why the product seemed useful to begin with.  A microchip in a clock radio can give you, say, 14 different alarm modes, and the result is that you can’t figure out how to turn on the alarm to wake you up in the morning.  I’ve been in hotel rooms where there is a full-page instruction sheet on how to set the alarm clock.

When evaluating small technology, your main concern should be simplicity.  As IT professionals, we have to keep in mind that a product should be easy to deploy, easy to maintain and easy to learn.  It should also deliver simple, incremental value to end users, which drives overall efficiencies for the organization.  When the staff feel better served, they, in turn, serve clients better.

I believe that a very small percentage of IT staff time dedicated to implementing small-tech solutions would net big results.  By taking time to equip our personnel with small technology, we can accomplish several things:  We facilitate our staffs’ routine tasks; we demonstrate our interest in facilitating their routine tasks; and, in the long run, we help our organizations realize notable savings.

About our author :: :: ::

Peter Marks is the President of PS|Ship, a Lynch Marks LLC company.  PS|Ship offers professional service firms a comprehensive product for easily generating parcel shipping labels, tracking shipments and processing electronic invoices directly into accounting systems.  Peter can be reached at pmarks@lynchmarks.com.