How to Upgrade the IT Equipment in Your Business

 You depend on IT to run every part of your business. You need people to access your website for sales, your workers need to get tasks done. Nowadays, you depend on IT to run meetings for your remote teams.

Some estimates show that 1 minute of downtime can cost a business $5600. That’s $336,000 an hour.

If you and your team are running into productivity issues because of technical problems, it’s time to consider upgrading your IT equipment.

Sure, you don’t want to spend money on IT, but it’s going to cost much more if you do nothing about it. Read on to discover when it’s time to upgrade your IT equipment and the steps you need to take to get it done.

Think Like an Enterprise Architect

An enterprise architect is one of the most valuable positions in an organization. They straddle the line between business strategists and IT experts.

They’re the ones that map out your IT infrastructure to make sure it’s efficient and it supports your business. They see the big picture of the business, rather than focusing on bandages to fix small problems.

That’s because those bandages and hacks will eventually create a dysfunctional IT system.

Your company may not be large enough to need an enterprise architect, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from them.

The technology exists is to support business goals. Never lose sight of that fact. If you do lose sight of that, then your IT strategy will be all over the place. This is what enterprise architects understand so well and it’s the one thing you can learn from them.

The Goals of the Business

The other lesson to learn from enterprise architects is how to align your IT department with the goals of the business. It’s not easy to do.

The starting point to align your technology and business goals is to know what your business goals are. These should be short term and long term goals.

For example, your short term goals are to reduce operations expenses and increase communication between departments.

In the long term, the business goals are to increase online sales by 20% and website traffic by 50%.

Once you have your goals, go back to your company roots, and read the vision and mission of the business. Do the goals align with them? This is a simple top-down approach that ensures you have the right strategy in place.

How Does Technology Support Your Business?

Where does technology fit in with your business goals? That’s the next question to ask yourself.

Using the examples above, the marketing and sales teams would largely be responsible for website traffic and online sales. You’d want to meet with those teams to find out what tools they need to meet those goals.

You’d also want to meet with other departments to find out if they need anything to communicate better. You want to know what’s preventing them from communicating now. It could be cultural issues within the business or they don’t have the right tools to do so.

Audit Current Technologies

There may be IT equipment issues that could prevent those teams from meeting their goals. For instance, a business that wants to increase website traffic and sales needs to have servers that can handle the increase.

Otherwise, the hard work the marketing team does to increase traffic will go to waste. People won’t be able to access the site and make a purchase.

You’ll want to run an IT audit of hardware and software in the business. This is when you go through your entire IT asset inventory and note what you have and the condition of the hardware.

This includes mobile devices, laptops, desktops, and servers. The asset audit is a huge help to your accounting department because it helps them calculate depreciation.

You should list the device, the date of purchase, cost, upgrades, and date of upgrades. You can then determine what devices need to be upgraded and why.

Develop Metrics of Success

You’re going to need to show ROI for your IT equipment upgrades. IT is expensive, and business owners are reluctant to spend money on things that they can’t see the benefits from.

You’ll need to prove the value of the IT purchases by creating success metrics. For example, one server upgrade could speed up

One communication tool can increase communication between departments by 20%. That improves efficiency because employees aren’t waiting for answers over email.

Employees spend roughly 5 hours a day checking business and personal emails.

By proving that your upgrades cut down on this time because the employees get instant answers, the more likely your upgrades will get approved.

Purchasing Upgrades

Are you ready to go shopping for IT equipment? You should already know what your needs are, so it does become easier to purchase upgrades.

Of course, you want to get the most out of your purchases, so you need to know where to shop.

Computer brands like Lenovo are getting ready for the end of year sales such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Check out the models they have on offer and get more info here.

Plan and Implement the Upgrade

Before you install your new equipment, make a plan to do it seamlessly. Create a rollout plan that details what is being replaced and when.

In small organizations, these changes can be done in one shot. In large organizations, rollouts should happen slowly. This allows you to test for issues before proceeding to the rest of the organization.

You don’t want to create new issues for your workers, so make sure that you have backups of the data on the hardware before you proceed.

Training and Education

After you install the IT upgrades, you’ll need to educate employees. They need to know what the changes are and how they are impacted.

You also want to inform them of the benefits of the IT equipment upgrades. This will get buy-in from employees, especially if it makes work easier.

Software upgrades will require more training because that’s how the employees interact with computers.

You can create ongoing IT training to make the upgrades last as long as possible.

Create a Disaster Plan

About half of all small businesses experienced a cyberattack in the last year. Successful attacks do enough damage to put a company out of business.

You could be hit by malware or there could be a power outage that you have no control over. Without a plan to reduce the impact of these disastrous situations, you will lose a lot more than just downtime.

Recycle Old Technology Responsibly        

Once you wrap up your upgrade, you need to figure out what to do with that old technology. The most responsible thing you can do is recycle it.

The worst thing you can do is to dump it without clearing the data from the devices. That data can be recovered, even if it’s been sitting in the trash. That would put you and your customers at risk.

The other issue with throwing away hardware is that it’s toxic. The toxins can leach into groundwater and cause a lot of damage.

Wipe off the data of your devices and then make a visit to a local electronic recycling center.

Repeat the Cycle

Technology doesn’t sit still. It always evolves and your business has to evolve with it. Doing one upgrade now doesn’t mean that you’re off the hook.

It’s good practice to run an IT audit every 6 months or so. That ensures that you keep your IT infrastructure up to date. You also know that your staff isn’t losing precious minutes on slow technology.

If you do discover that you need to upgrade IT equipment, then run through these steps again.

Set an IT budget for the year that’s large enough to cover these upgrades. How much should you set aside? It depends on your business needs and industry.

The average company spends about 3% - 5% of revenue on IT. This varies by company size and industry, but it’s a good guideline to start with.

IT Equipment That Won’t Let You Down

If you have any hope of having a thriving business, you need to make sure that your IT equipment is fast and efficient. A slow computer or an outdated program could cause a lot of headaches and security risks for your company.

When you look at IT upgrades, you need to start with the goals of the business and make sure that your IT infrastructure supports your IT goals. You can then start the long process to assess your needs, purchase equipment, and install it.

Your IT department has to be vigilant in detecting changing business needs and be ready to adapt at a moment's notice.

To stay up to date on the latest technology news, visit the Tech News section of this site.  

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Four Ways to Find Out If You Have Too Much Technology or Not

In the world of today, being interconnected is not an option –and neither is the use of office technology. However, a certain question arises from this statement: what is too much technology use, and how do you know if you are using too little or too much?

The more you seek to answer these questions, the more likely you are to succeed. In fact, they are highly important because of the increasing rates of sophistication in technology (even the ones used in your workplace), and along with that comes the rise of employee expectations. In addition, you also need to consider all major issues in office systems, regardless of whether they are small or large. These include privacy and security issues (leading to the increase in lists of the10 best VPN services), as well as frequency in upgrades of operating systems and networks.

In case you are not certain of the amounts of tech you use, here are some criteria you can examine and ensure your workplace satisfies your requirements now and in the future.

Creating a plan and mapping important milestones

Numerous small and medium businesses as well as startups will tend to celebrate the business plan details, but will forget to include the plan for technology inclusion and monitoring within it. However, all successful businesses will always have a good plan for their technology use and inclusion.

If unsure of the periods to best evaluate your tech plan, consider doing it when you hit various milestones in your business. For instance, you cannot expect to operate using the same methods when you increase your employees from two to ten, or even to 50. You cannot also expect to use the same methods when your business revenues increase to thousands of dollars every month – you will need to incorporate new tech and upgrade the ones that are already in existence.

Tech normally utilizes tracks very closely with the revenue generation and headcounts. Therefore, both of these criteria are a natural starting point for projecting any technological needs you might want to consider in the future.

Seeing all the strategic values of something

In general circumstances, a startup and a small or medium sized business will maintain its focus on the cash flows, customer growth and investors. This unfortunately comes at the expense of increasing office tech, understandably so because the business is still in the stage of trying to survive against the competition. They will therefore treat technology incorporation as an expense or an afterthought.

However, in the hiring environment of today with the stiff levels of competition, that thinking will not cut it at all. For instance, a recent PwC study revealed more than 50 percent of millennials state that one of the most important factors in helping them decide where they want to work is whether the business has adequate technology. In their own personal lives, they are already accustomed to spending money on tech gadgets such as tablets, laptops, smartphones, and so on – so they do not expect their potential employers to be slacking off on the same.

If you want to attract the best employees today for your company, investment in the best technology for the business is an investment you cannot ignore. It is not just functional, it is used as a measure of how serious your brand is, and whether it is looking towards the future.

Consider benchmarking against your physical space

The greatest expense any business will have is not necessarily the electricity costs or anything else associated with daily expenses – it is usually the real estate, or rent. Therefore, one of the defining factors of technology use in your enterprise, both for now and the future, is the space you occupy, and how various people use or interact with it.

Today, real estate also happens to be more fluid than before because it is changing frequently. For instance, starting off with an open office floor plan, then changes to hoteling, to telecommuting, and so on.

Therefore, it is very important to make an accurate and thorough inventory of all the needs of your real estate. For instance, consider if your floor plan includes a close plan, where each office your employees operate in have doors. On the other hand, do you have unassigned stations, thanks to an open office plan? Do you have any telecommuting employees, and how many of them are they?

These and other questions will help you to know your footprint better, and deliver the right technological tools they need. It is a tough call trying to balance real estate with IT, but when you crack this code, it will pay you dividends in the future.

Set rules and stick to them

You will be hard pressed to find any individual who is not a tech expert these days, especially when it comes to subjects they enjoy. You will also find an employee in all companies who cannot live without access to their smart gadgets and laptops, and they always expect the network of the company to configure around their devices. There is a distinction between dysfunction and flexibility though.

Every big company always has IT standards, and without them it becomes impossible to manage. If you have a small company and are delaying your implementation process of standards, then you run the risk of getting to the ‘Franken-tech’ state, where your business cannot function adequately.

For example, you buy second hand monitors at Best Buy or some machines that are on a local sale, but you are not sure of the quality – and it can easily compromise the quality of your performance. Instead of buying yet you lack the capital to get high tech equipment for your office, leasing is a better option and gives you great performance without straining your resources.

Final thoughts

The inclusion of high end technology in your business operations is a must in the working environment to guarantee great performance. However, you need to consider the impact it has on your business as well, and these factors will help you evaluate different technological options to help you make the best choice.

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2 Easy Ways To Extract Images From MS Word

At times, some Microsoft word documents are sent to us via email with so some images attached to them but most people find it a little bit difficult to extract the images especially when it will be used in another platform. Bloggers, freelancers should be aware of this. It's easy to copy the MS Word documents but not as easy trying to extract the images and upload somewhere else.

Therefore, in this post, you will learn how to easily extract images from an MS Word document. There are two ways of achieving this, one is for extracting a single image, and the other for extracting multiple images. So follow me along.

1. HOW TO EXTRACT A SINGLE IMAGE FROM MS WORD DOCUMENT

Here is the procedure for extracting a single image.

✔ Open the Word document you want to extract the image from.
✔️ Right click on the image and select Copy.
✔️ Open Paint, PhotoShop or any other image editor on your PC and paste the image in a new blank page.
✔️ Save the image with an appropriate name.

It's simple and easy. You can now use the saved image to do anything including editing it and using it in a blog post.

2. HOW TO EXTRACT MULTIPLE IMAGES FROM MS WORD

Although to extract multiple images, you can use the above guidelines repeatedly for each image till all are saved. However, it's time consuming so am sure you will welcome an idea of quicker ways to achieve that. So follow below steps to extract more than one image from MS Word.

✔ Open the Word document from which you would like to extract images
✔ Click File on the main menu at the top left corner.
✔️ Click Save As.
✔ Select Other Formats
✔ Specify the location you want to save it to.
✔️ Select Web Page from the drop-down menu
✔️ Click Save

All the images in the MS Word document will be saved on the folder you chose and they can now be copied, edited and usable on other platforms.

SEE ALSO... Download Latest Microsoft Office Mobile For Android

I hope this article is useful to you. Please kindly share with your friends by hitting the share buttons below. In case you have questions or you are still confused, endeavor to ask questions via the comments section.

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3 Ways To Check If Your Phone Supports Virtual Reality (VR) Headsets

A virtual reality (or VR) headset is a device that you wear over your eyes like a pair of goggles. It blocks out all external light and shows you an image on high-definition screens in front of your eyes. The goal of the VR headset is to immerse you in a game or make you feel the virtual world around you.

Recently, Smartphone producers started producing phones that supports VR headsets (goggle-like display device) while most other phones doesn't support the gadget. Assuming you want to buy a new phone, you need to check if it have a virtual reality compatibility. Therefore let's see how to if your phone supports Virtual Reality headsets.

But before we continue, let me reveal that this is the future of technology but as it stands now, some people are still scared of using or having the VR experience. I was watching a documentary on BBC about VR and a lady was so scared when she saw herself flying around the city of London via a Virtual Reality headset. Back here in Nigeria, a Nairaland member (MizMyCol) reveals how scared she was when she experienced it. In her words;

I first experienced VR tech on a device called VSUN.
It was a scary thing for me.
Honestly, I hate virtual realities.
So when I saw that VR is also enabled on my Camon CX via google services, I didn't bother setting up.
Those that like it can do it if it's enabled on their device, but for yours truly?
It's a No No!

REQUIREMENTS

Before you check VR compatible smartphone, you should know the basic requirements for a phone to support virtual reality headset. A source indicates that the phone should have Gyroscope sensor for any VR apps to work in it. The Gyroscope is a sensor that provides orientation information with greater precision. Other important things are Magnetic Field Sensor and Internal Compass. The Magnetic field sensor is capable of sensing the magnetic field of the earth ( by using Halls effect) and helps in determining the Direction. Using the navigation app with magnetic Compass turned on, the navigation will be more precise.

COMPONENTS OF PHONES THAT SUPPORTS VR HEADSET

✔ Gyroscope
✔️ Magnetic Field Sensor
✔️ Internal Compass (recommended)
✔️ NFC (optional)

HOW TO CHECK IF YOUR PHONE SUPPORTS VIRTUAL REALITY HEADSET

These are few ways to check if your phone supports virtual reality.

1. Freely VR: Freefly VR is a website which has compiled the list of smartphones which are compatible with VR headsets. You can check this website to see if your smartphone is listed there. In case, your smartphone is not listed, you can still have a chance. So, try the next way.

2. Google Cardboard or other apps to check: Download Google Cardboard from playstore. This app comes with a demo of VR. If your phone is compatible this app, your phone will support virtual reality headset.
You can also test with other third-party apps like SensorBox, EZE VR and VR Checker.

3. Ability To Play 360-degree Videos: Another great way to check it is if the phone has the ability to play 360-degree videos. If your phone supports 360-degree videos on YouTube and Facebook, your phone will most likely support virtual reality headsets.

SEE ALSO... Google's New Way of VR Typing

These are the ways you can check if your phone supports VR headsets.

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