Responza has been around long enough to have catalogued a collection of worrying trends that crop up in small businesses, regardless of the industry they represent. You may have created the greatest product in your field, but if you’re making any one of these five mistakes then your business is at risk.
We also created a few directed questions that you can ask your IT service provider so that you don’t fall victim.
So without further ado, here are the five most common mistakes that a small business can make with regard to its IT:
1) Using consumer-grade equipment to run business-grade operations
You want your organization up and running at all times, but you bought a home edition? Business products are more expensive for a reason: they work. Don’t cut corners to keep your budget down. It’ll come back to bite you sooner rather than later.
2) Using hardware longer than it should be used
Each piece of technology has a lifespan. Servers and PC hardware usually last between three and five years before they show signs of bloatware or failure, and yet we continue to see 8, 10, and even 12 year old machines in production environments. People seem to not understand that these things can and will die, and that they will be left in the cold if they don’t plan for this.

Three things you can count on: death, taxes, and hardware failure.
Note: There is a way to use the predictability of a technology’s lifecycle to your advantage. For example, in a technical architecture that employs thin clients and Terminal Services, all work is carried out on the server. This means that you can use the thin client until the day it drops dead and then go out and get a new one without losing any of your data. The cost difference is pretty big—about $330 for a decent thin client versus approximately $1,150 for a PC in the box—and thin clients have a working life of about two to three times that of PCs.
This technical architecture strategy highlights the strength of an investment in a server. Servers are more reliable than desktops systems, they are faster and more efficient in processing data, and they allow your employees to easily and quickly access that data. The fact of the matter is if you are going to invest in a piece of hardware—and believe me, this is a good investment—you should recognize that it has a limited lifespan, and you should plan to replace it.
3) Lax security
Whether it’s an easy password or an open environment, small business networks are almost always exposed somehow. Hacker culture has changed, and it’s time to stop pretending that you’re immune to attacks. Gone are the days when teenagers in their basements clumsily hacked networks just to get a little bit of attention. Today’s hackers want to silently slip into your systems, and the name of the game is financial gain. Every business ought to have a proper firewall to protect their assets.
4) Not taking advantage of backup software
Some operating systems come with basic backup software already built in, but small businesses seem to either not see it or ignore it. We recommend a more sophisticated backup solution to our customers, but every small business should be creating backups of their data and regularly testing them.
5) Working without a roadmap
Your business should be planned, and for the most part it probably already is. You have project plan; you have a sales process; you even have procedures in place for who goes out to buy coffee when the office supply runs low. But when it comes to IT, small organizations all too often are working with the blinders on. At the very minimum, you should be planning out your IT initiatives and upgrades at least once a year, if only to take account of your ongoing hardware and software needs. But you really shouldn’t stop there. You also need to plan ahead and budget for any additional manpower or tech support that inevitably jumps out to bite you when you least expect it. Establishing a baseline plan for your IT needs will allow you to get that much more out of those systems.

Every organization needs a technology roadmap.
In order for IT to help drive your business, you need to know at least something about your systems. Now, I’m not asking you to sign up for computer science courses in your free time, because—let’s face it—you don’t have any free time.
Luckily, you don’t have to review and evaluate everything that goes into creating your IT infrastructure. Here are a few questions you can arm yourself with to see through the hype, the buzzwords, and the fog, and get to where IT is truly delivering value in your business.
1) Is IT giving me the freedom to transform and grow my business, or is it holding me back (or, even worse, is it endangering my business)?
Before you can ask anything of your IT service provider, you need to ask this of yourself. The purpose of this question is not to get you thinking about the strategic use of this or that piece of technology. The point is to find the ideal means of interacting with and serving your customers, because at the end of the day IT is a tool to drive business.
2) Are we ignoring key business differences as we standardize across the company?
This question follows very logically with the previous one. As soon as business owners light on something that works, they often tend to mandate and standardize. While standardization can be a boon to your business, it can also choke some departments. Take the thin client-Terminal Services approach mentioned above in mistake #2. Just because thin clients are cheaper doesn’t mean they are necessarily better. Some employees will be perfectly fine with a thin client, whereas others may need to harness the awesome power of a personal computer. The crucial idea here is not to use blanket standardization with your IT because even though it may be simpler to manage, it might end up strangling your business. Instead, standardize selectively.
3) Who is in charge of implementing my technology strategy and enforcing my technology policies?
When you bring together your decision makers and your managers, the people who know what the company needs in order to succeed, don’t forget to include your top IT guy so that together they can start coming up with the methods of using technology to your advantage. However, this senior management group should not be in charge of implementing company-wide processes. This is the job of a designated process owner. This person takes the input from the senior team, designs the system, trains the users, and then after implementation, monitors the performance of both the people and the machines in order to establish metrics and ensure continuous improvement, which they then report to the senior team. What’s important here is that you realize that while you are in charge of creating the ideas, you should not be in charge of implementation. Now you just need to find the right manager who can.
It is for precisely this reason that when we at Responza are taking on a new client, we always start off with what we call an “IT Gap Analysis,” which allows us to evaluate current systems, processes, and strategies so that we can identify any problems or issues with their Information Technology systems and procedures. Following this, we regularly hold strategic planning sessions to ensure that business goals and IT plans are aligned.
To learn more about how Responza can help you circumvent these mistakes (and many others!), call 206-762-5100 or email solutions@responza.com today.