Blog Series: Your Technology is your Competitive Advantage

A common trend we find with our customers is their need to cut costs to remain competitive. Technology can and is a catalyst for cutting costs, but it is time to stop looking at technology as merely an operational expense and rather see it as a competitive advantage.

With the advances in technology and the evolution of IT, many large corporations are fundamentally shifting their view of IT as a way to gain market share, launch competitive products and enhance their services.  For small businesses, these advancements are great news as they can often realize the same benefits of IT as their large business counterparts.

At the center of this fundamental shift in IT are mobile technologies and cloud based technologies. Mobile devices already play a significant role in our everyday lives, but they should be playing a stronger role in your business. Our customers are looking to have a mobile strategy that could give their employees secure access to their business data, apps, and productivity suites regardless where they are located. The ability of an employee to respond to an email from a lead or access a file and deliver a proposal in a timely fashion can be the difference between winning the business or not.  Thus, the business with the mobile strategy is at a significant advantage for landing that new account or retaining an existing one. This advantage is fueled by the emergence of Cloud Technologies. More and more customers are beginning to see the value of cloud services and how they can not only support an effective mobile/digital strategy but they can modernize your operational technology.

Some of the biggest, recent success stories of where mobile and cloud-based technologies are a significant competitive advantage and creating a new market place are car services like Uber and Lift. These companies levered technology to enhance and revolutionized the outdated concept of taxi services and modernized it for the 21st century rider.  The result is an efficient business model that meets the need of today’s mobile and connected consumer all the while creating entrepreneurial jobs for thousands. Rather than adapting their business model to meet the needs of the market, taxi companies are focused on fighting the rapid growth of these car services. If you can’t beat them, join them.  And to join them requires looking at technology as a competitive advantage, and not as an operational expense.

According to Michael Porter from the Harvard Business Review, “new technology changes the nature of competition and how astute companies have exploited this.” He goes on to detail ways to set yourself apart with technology:

“It changes industry structure and, in so doing, alters the rules of competition,”

“It creates competitive advantage by giving companies new ways to outperform their rivals,”

“It spawns whole new businesses, often from within a company’s existing operations.”

These are only a hand full of reasons why any business owner – especially a small business owner – must begin to view technology as their advantage. If you feel like you might one of these business owners who is looking for that competitive advantage we have a few tips to help you get started:

• Identify areas of your business that could potentially benefit from these strategies
• Hire and IT expert who also understands business and can help you leverage technology as a competitive advantage
• Insist on having a mobile & cloud strategy for your business if you don’t already have one, make sure to have your expert design one based on the needs of your business & the future goals you’ve set forth for your business.
• Position & encourage your workforce to embrace these strategies & apply them to their day to day workflow.

Perez Technology Group is a Technology Firm delivering IT Infrastructure and Cloud based Projects. Specializing in the development of Technology solutions for small and medium sized businesses. With the experience of having deployed, managed Infrastructure & Cloud based solutions across many different enterprises including several Fortune 100 companies. Perez Technology Group is a part of the Microsoft Partner Network & a Dell Certified Partner.