Your New Year’s resolution was to expand your small business in 2013. How is that resolution faring? If you’re struggling to improve your small business’ revenues so far this year, it might be time to look to your IT department. Yes it’s true: Your IT department delivers the technical expertise to make your business even more efficient. That, in return, can raise your employees’ productivity and grow your business’ bottom line. Here are some tech projects that Small Business Computing.com suggests for small business owners who want to see their businesses grow in 2013.
Bring Wi-Fi to your business
The bring-your-device movement continues to grow. This makes sense: Employees often work more efficiently when they can work on their own personal tablets, laptops and smartphones on the job. After all, they are more familiar with these devices. Taking their own devices to work can also help when employees need to put the finishing touches on a report or presentation when they’re at home or traveling. But this policy only works when your office provides a strong and reliable Wi-Fi network that employees are able to use to access the Web, send and receive e-mail messages and update your company’s Twitter and Facebook pages. Make investing in a reliable Wi-Fi network a key goal of 2013.
Ultrabooks
Your employees are able to do more when they can tote laptops to meetings with customers. Traditional laptops, though, are too clunky. And small Netbooks are often too slow and limited. Ultrabooks, though, are a different animal. These laptops are both small and light enough to be portable, and powerful enough to enable employees to show multimedia presentations and reports to potential customers. One way to watch your business grow is to provide your employees more options for snagging new customers. Ultrabooks are one of these options.
No more Windows XP
Windows XP is a solid operating system, especially compared with the universally unloved Vista. But Windows XP’s time has come and gone. Microsoft will no longer offer technical support for the 10-year-old operating system come April of 2014. And the company will stop delivering security updates for the system at that time, as well. Which means that it’s time for you to upgrade any machine that is still running this operating system. Upgrade to Windows 7; it’s one of Microsoft’s more popular operating systems.
Take IT Away 