As we move forward in 2023, we decided to look back on 2022 and share our insights in this edition of the DatCom Business Briefing. We’ll discuss some of our internal accomplishments and what we think the takeaway is for your business.
And then we’ll work our way outward to the wider world of business and technology. We’ll be sure to give our take on those developments as well. Enjoy!
In this edition:
1. Increasing Your Visibility with LinkedIn Newsletters
2. Don’t Gamble Your Revenue Away
3. Tech Trends for Business Leaders (Not Tech People)
Increasing Your Visibility with LinkedIn Newsletters
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. The latest data shows that 57.2 million companies use LinkedIn for connecting their teams to other professionals. But they also use LinkedIn for improving the company’s online presence and visibility.
One way to do that is to provide thought leadership via LinkedIn Newsletter. As soon as we discovered the feature, we couldn’t wait to use it to stay in front of an engaged audience.
We had just one problem. The feature wasn’t available to DatCom.
Seeking answers, we discovered the key to unlocking this feature is consistently posting LinkedIn articles. After posting 2 articles a week for some time, LinkedIn gave us the ability to turn our articles into the DatCom Business Briefing! The difference between ordinary articles and LinkedIn Newsletters is company followers can become subscribers. And LinkedIn notifies subscribers every time we release a new edition.
It worked for us; it could work for you.
If you want your audience to see your professional thoughts, turn on creator mode and write consistent, high-quality articles.
Here are a few editions of the DatCom Business Briefing you might have missed:
Next-Level Business Automation
Why Staff Enhancement is Essential
A Sparkling Vision for Change Management
Don’t Gamble Your Revenue Away
Businesses play a dangerous game when they gamble their revenue on old equipment. And in 2022 we enhanced our ability to proactively prevent clients from experiencing major losses due to unexpected downtime.
We did this by developing automated reporting sequences for critical business infrastructure.
It’s simple math. If your company generates thousands of dollars per day, you must protect business uptime. If a $1000 piece of equipment fails without a handy replacement, you could lose 10x that amount waiting around for a fix. Meanwhile, you’re still paying hourly wages and other business costs.
And yet we see countless businesses flirt with lost revenue when they fail to keep their technology up to date.
It’s a ghastly gamble, so our team prioritizes full-service remote monitoring with true professionals paying close attention to client needs. We know that customer experience is critical, and we don’t want our clients going round and round with low-level technicians. Fast response times and resolutions make for warm business relationships.
DatCom sustains itself on loyalty, not churning through customers for gain.
From employee workstations to network servers, we often fix failures before our clients notice them.
Through our Remote Maintenance and Monitoring (RMM) tools, we see every machine, every piece of hardware, and every performance indicator.
When a computer goes offline, we know. When they become overloaded, we know. When a virus attempts to infect a network or software fails, we know.
With many tech support companies, you must tell them when your computers aren’t working. And if you’re trusting a large-scale IT provider to have your back, you’ll have to wait in line.
Our 2022 enhancements grant peace of mind to us and our clients.
But that’s not all. Our automated reporting system allows us to deliver insightful data to clients in a monthly executive summary. Our reports enable them to budget accurately for their technology. As a result of our knowledge, tools, and responsiveness, our clients aren’t gambling thousands of dollars on a $1k piece of equipment.
Gambling Revenue on Human Error
Another risk that businesses take is losing revenue because of human error. An extra zero here or a misread line there, and you’ve wasted several hours. We use accounting as an example because it’s an easy issue to fix. What we call, “low-hanging fruit.”
Wouldn’t it be great to do all your accounting in mere hours with minimal, if any, time-consuming rework? We achieved that again this year with data automation. Rather than experiencing days of crunch time and hair-pulling frustration, we enjoy accurate and fast bookkeeping.
Now, you might be thinking: “well, I know how valuable time is. So, we outsource our accounting and payroll and similar tasks to people who do it better and faster.”
True, but do you want to be dependent on outside work every year? Or would you rather find a loophole that no one else has?
Automation works wonders and it’s a fist-pumping eureka moment when you see it in motion.
And for those who appreciate solid numbers, we estimate a savings of 81% or 16 hours reduced to just 3 hours of focused work.
Accounting tasks are what we call a “low-hanging fruit” for data automation because it saves us so much time. It’s the perfect place for small businesses to start their own automation journey.
Tech Trends for Business Owners (Not Tech People)
Artificial Intelligence and Business
2022 was an interesting year for artificial intelligence (AI). If you’re active on social media, you may have seen images that were cooked up by an AI. Using powerful virtual computers, people are creating impressive images with textual prompts.
We saw the release of ChatGPT in late December. Users can create a blog post, press release, or online article from a simple list of bullet points.
How effective, ethical, and impactful will these AI tools be?
Marketers want to know if these tools will be useful in creating content. A possible economic recession will lead to an increase in marketing as businesses look for new customers. Small business leaders who have never tried marketing before will want to try using ChatGPT to produce marketing collateral, emails, and social posts.
We highly encourage business leaders to test the waters before diving in all the way.
While using AI to write material is less expensive than contracting a copywriter or content writer, you still must be careful because AI lacks nuanced knowledge and creative writing ability.
Canva is a popular and inexpensive online graphic design tool with a new document writer onboard. You can use ChatGPT within it to generate written content.
Our marketing team has used Canva and we tested Magic Write. The writing is quite readable, but sometimes contains slight errors or silly constructions. It’s no replacement for the human touch and an editor’s eye.
But if you’re a bullet-point person tasked with writing something more substantial, AI writing could be really useful.
Hybrid Work Trends: What they Mean for your Business
After 3 years of Covid, fully remote jobs are decreasing, but hybrid work is here to stay.
Onsite workers wish they had it and remote workers want to keep the flexibility. To remain competitive, leaders should remember that location flexibility is a powerful draw for top talent.
And yet we can’t forget the power of onsite collaboration in spaces designed for teamwork.
For the last 2 decades, HR leaders have been seeking a cure for the depressing cubicle farms of the late 20th century. It was grim, with movies and sitcoms accurately parodying the lifelessness of it all. Low-level workers grinding out their repetitive, boring tasks. With the experience capped off by a soul-crushing commute to and from the cube farm.
Open office design was supposed to increase collaboration, but rigorous experiments conducted before 2019 showed that open floorplans fostered less face-to-face collaboration. No single floor plan is most productive for every business. The key is to determine which worker behaviors are most important and then seek those outcomes.
Researchers found it best to use office space for a wide variety of intentional activities. Not only meetings, but brainstorming sessions, workshops, or even social events. Hybrid work supported by unified communication platforms moves the need for devoted focus work out of the office. Leaving real estate for more intentional, communal, and collaborative activities. And most people prefer not to spend 5-10 hours of their workweek commuting.
2023 will show us that a cure for work-life balance is available with a powerful synergy of technology and methodology.
As businesses adopt unified communication and automation, they’ll be able to provide their workers with a healthy balance to enhance productivity.
Think about it:
- Focus time at home.
- Teamwork and culture onsite.
- Robotic mouse and keyboard tasks are minimized with automation.
- The modern office becomes a beautiful and inviting communal hub for collaboration and inspiration.
- Less time commuting.
- Epic productivity!
Get the picture?
At DatCom we often discuss a vision of “a perfect day at work.” When everything comes together for the good of the worker and the business. The DatCom team excels at making businesses better for owners, leaders, and workers.
And smaller businesses can experience the dream with strong tech leadership. For the business that can’t invest in a full-time Chief Information Officer, DatCom is like having a CIO at a fraction of the cost.
And that brings us to an important fact about our circumstances over the last few years.
Technology Renewal in 2023
2023 will be a year for technology renewal for most companies.
How do we know that?
Business technology has a predictable life cycle. Most organizations had to sit still on certain pieces of equipment from 2020-2023 because of the pandemic. It’s not as if businesses had much choice in the matter with supply shortages and logistics in disarray.
If a company’s equipment was aging out 3 years ago, it’s festering now. It’s a scary thought that should make executive blood run cold.
You can rest on grace through a global pandemic and people will understand if you get clapped with a technology catastrophe. But 2023 is a critical year for technology renewal.
Out with the creaky; in with the crisp. Technology Renewal is about the reliability and security of your business infrastructure.
At DatCom, we will empower businesses to super-exceed the tired and uninformed way of using business IT.
Play it smart in 2023 – Schedule a Business Technology meeting with DatCom
