Summary: As we approach a new year, let’s explore the topic of new year’s resolutions from a new angle. What new year’s resolutions can your business make for 2016? What common challenges can you address with technology in the coming year? In this article, we explore 5 ways you can improve your business next year.

With every new year, people around the globe make new year’s resolutions. Lose weight. Eat better. Read more. The list could go on.

Each resolution shares a common goal: Self-improvement. They are single changes that (if kept) deliver great rewards.

That got me thinking: If people can set new resolutions, why can’t your business have resolutions? What changes can you make in the coming year that will deliver great rewards for your business?

Now, seeing as how this blog focuses on technology, let’s explore the question from that angle: In what ways can your business save money, improve productivity, or boost the bottom line with technology in 2016?

How can your business use technology in the coming year to put itself in a better position at the end of 2016?

Today, let’s answer that question. Here are 5 resolutions your business can make that will create big rewards in the coming year:

Resolution #1: Integrate your systems

It’s a challenge facing many businesses. Over time, they adopt new software packages and systems. While each one may solve a business need, they create a problem: They don’t always communicate with each other.

The result: Manual processes eat up your employee’s time. Moving data from one system to another requires exports to Excel. The reporting process suffers, as data isn’t available when needed. As such, leaders can’t get a clear view of the business.

“The challenge in 2016 is to reduce data noise and Enterprise systems complexity,” says Roman Gurinovich, Director, XPANSA Group. “Businesses lose time moving data from one app to another and switching between interfaces. We observe these struggles with most of our customers who have dozens of un-integrated applications. Some have an accounting system on Sage and a separate project management system on Atlassian. But, how can they transfer hours for salary calculations to Sage? We advise them to build an Enterprise software ecosystem around a single core. It could be software for key business operations like warehouse management or a single environment like ERP.”

Resolution #2: Deliver self-service BI

The Business Intelligence (BI) and reporting processes were traditionally owned by the IT department. Users requested reports from IT…and waited. Meanwhile, the IT department got overwhelmed with end user reporting requests and customizations.

Over the the past few years, we’ve seen a shift in the BI process. As Gartner explains in this press release, the balance of power in the BI world is shifting from IT to the business.

The data explosion combined with its growing importance is fueling the need for self-service BI. More and more, the ability to put real-time data in the hands of end users becomes a competitive advantage.

“Self-service BI/big data needs to take the front seat for enterprises in 2016 in order to boost productivity,” says Ulrik Pederson, CTO, TARGIT. “Enterprises need to resolve to shake the sentiment that the type of data science needed to provide powerful analysis for big data has to be slow, complex, and difficult to implement. Enterprises should look for tools that allow all users to perform comprehensive self-service exploration with big data when they need it, without major hand holding from IT.”

Resolution #3: Create a security culture

Does it feel like data breaches are becoming more frequent? It’s true. A recent IBM report finds a 12% year-to-year increase in security incidents. What’s worse: These breaches lead to reputation damage, lost productivity, and lost revenue.

The problem is, there’s no silver bullet for security. While security software helps, there isn’t one option that will protect you from every risk.

How can you protect your business in the coming year? As explained below, it all starts with a culture of security.

“Create a culture of security across the organization by making everyone a security stakeholder, and ensure training to this point is targeted, repeatable and measurable,” says Mike Davis, CTO, CounterTack. “Second, its critical to understand the delineations between nation states targeting your organization vs. commodity malware processes running. From there, understanding an organization’s threat landscape more intimately allows you to make the right decisions around detection, prevention, analysis and remediation of threats.”

Resolution #4: Adapt to the multi-screen world

As a business, you’re probably tired of hearing about mobile apps. Over the last few years, we’ve been inundated with the mobile message that businesses need mobile apps.

Does your business need native mobile apps? That’s for you to decide. No one knows your business needs better than you.

But, do you need to adapt to the mobile world? Consider the facts: Mobile usage has exploded. The web now gets more traffic from mobile devices than from PCs. Google recently changed their algorithm to penalize sites that aren’t mobile-friendly.

The fact is, we no longer know how prospects or customers will access our site/applications. Those businesses who don’t provide a mobile-friendly view of their site/applications will lose web traffic, and customers as a result.

“The Internet is arguably already a mobile technology,” says David Mercer, Founder of SME Pals. “More and more people are accessing it via smartphones and tablets every day. Any business that doesn’t update their site’s design to be responsive is going to start losing important organic search traffic, and provide an inferior user experience to the majority of their visitors.”

Resolution #5: Position your business for big data

While big data has certainly generated buzz in the last few years, very few companies actually generate terabytes of data. They don’t have need for Hadoop or ‘big data’ processing.

Or do they?

As it turns out, businesses generate (or have access to) more data than they realize. They’re sitting on a gold mine of information that they never use.

The fact is, businesses of all sizes can capitalize on Big Data. The first step: Begin capturing this data.

“Anyone can benefit from big data if they know where to find it,” explains Tyler Wassell, Software Development Manager at mrc. “The first step is setting up the framework to store this data. Once you begin capturing this data, the possibilities are endless. You can compare publicly available data against your business data and uncover new insights. Or, you can pull new ideas out of “unusable” data. For instance, when we put our server log files in Hadoop and created analytical applications over that data, we gained a lot of valuable information. It now helps me understand where my development efforts are best spent.”

Summary

Now, these are just a few resolutions that can benefit your business in the coming year, but the list could go on. If you would like to add anything to this list, I’d love to hear it. Feel free to share in the comments.