Have you ever wondered how another company can stay so organized or do twice the work with half as many employees as your company? They most likely have some technological aspects that give them that competitive advantage.

As technology continues to expand and help us in ways we only imagined years ago, companies should strive to keep up with the advancements and technological strategies or risk getting left in the dust by their competitors.

Here are some great examples of ways to stay a step ahead:

• Make a business plan. Define your goals and then look at the technological options that can best help you reach them. If you don’t know where you are headed, then you won’t know what type of equipment to buy to get you there.
• When buying equipment, look to the future. Instead of thinking, “what can we get immediately that can get us by for a few years,” think more about what will be best for your business overall. A two year solution, such as purchasing a few more hard drives or a server instead of an EqualLogic SAN, only benefits you short term and really hurts your wallet in the long run. Save on the little things, not the big, important things, such as the technology that backs up your entire business.
• Keep things organized. Just like any paper process, technological processes require a sense of organization to run efficiently and effectively. This can be done several different ways. Some people use a file share with public share, and some people like to use an intranet. Either way, you need to create clear policies to keep it clean and easy to navigate, because it’s not likely you’ll ever create the time to clean it up.
• Find ways to get rid of outdated equipment. If you haven’t realized it yet, keeping outdated equipment running properly by servicing it constantly ends up costing companies more than if they had just purchased newer, more advanced equipment. Also, outdated technology can cause security holes, which is a hacker’s dream. Don’t be a technology pack rat. Get rid of the old stuff.
• Find ways to visualize your information. Your company has tons of information and data history that can help your business run more smoothly if you only take the time to make it understandable and easy to analyze. It’s amazing what you can find when you turn a bunch of numbers into graphs. We recommend Tableau, a product that works with your data to create visualizations that can show all kinds of trends. This type of visualization can help you discover opportunities that can set you apart from the rest.

Having competitive advantages through technology will help decrease costs and increase profits. The real goal here is to find some way to make these advantages sustainable, and technology can help you find ways to do that. I recommend Equallogic, VMware, and Tableau. They are easily upgradable and employ technology that is future proof.