Leveraging Technology in Your Business – Part II Eamonn Percy

By Eamonn Percy

What the BIV Panel Said”

September 24, 2015 – Last night, I moderated the Business in Vancouver – Excellence Series: Leveraging Technology panel made up of Craig Brennan, CEO of Quick Mobile; Lindsay Smith, of Massive Media and GetConnectedTV; Greg Malpass, CEO of Traction on Demand: and Elizabeth Vannan, IT Leader of MNP.

It was a great event, well attended by an enthusiastic audience, and the panel were dropping meaningful pearls of wisdom, left, right and centre!

For those that were not able to be in attendance, I have summarized the best advice I heard from the panel on how to leverage technology in your business.

Use this in conjunction with the key points from my newsletter earlier this week, and you have a winning combination of tactics to be successful.

Here it goes:

1. Get the business right first – Technology is a great accelerator and will accelerate a bad business to failure just as fast at it will accelerate a good business to success.
2. KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid! – Don’t over complicate the implementation, just focus on what needs to be done to simplify value creation and delivery to your customer.
3. Understand and use Data – All the panelists mentioned the importance of analytics and metrics to understand the reality of your business, then using technology to improve it.
4. Hire Digitally Savvy People – As you hire for skills, attitude and character, having digitally savvy people on your team will make a huge difference.
5. Designate a technology transformation team – For larger companies, designate a cross functional team responsible for transforming the company based on technology, don’t just leave it to the IT department.
6. Have a plan – Sounds simple, but as I have mentioned numerous times, the importance of a plan cannot be overstated.  As Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up somewhere else.”

Eamonn Percy, Founder and Principal, Percy Group Capital + Business Advisors, writes, speaks and advises on the topics of accelerating business growth and leadership, based on 25 years of real-life experiences of leading, managing and growing companies. Subscribe to his weekly newsletter, Growth By Design, and receive free content on leadership and business growth. This article first appeared in the Percy Group Blog and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.