The emergency room is the last place anyone wants to be. It means that something unplanned and usually painful has occurred. To make matters worse, going to the emergency room is EXPENSIVE! This holds true not just in your personal life but also in business. Proactive technology health checks can make your business ER visits few and far between.
Is your business making frequent trips to the emergency room?
This could be anything that is unplanned and painful for your business. A missed deadline due to poor communications, a lost Client due to inability to provide services in a timely manner, or financial issues due to inadequate reporting capability.
Three signs your business made a trip to the emergency room:
- Normal business process was suspended to deal with the issue, workarounds were put in place
- There was a financial or productivity impact that shows up in the weeks or months that follow.
- Your people don’t want to talk about “what happened” and are glad “it’s over”
Technology is a leading cause of business ER visits. Without proactive care and review, the same issue will occur over and over, likely at random times. Think about a network outage, server failures, or ransomware. Each of those will send you to the ER in a hurry. The key is to start making proactive “technology health checks” part of your ongoing business operations.
Many groups will tell you they are proactive, but in reality they are gathering vitals but not taking proactive ACTION to correct the issue. This is why every time you go to a doctors office they check your blood pressure, temp, and weight. If they find that something isn’t right they will inspect further. Many more serious health issues have been avoided with good proactive care.
Proactive technology health checks need to be just like your annual health checkup (which you do go on right?). There should be a set of standards that your business is reviewed against, and anything out of the ordinary should be inspected further. This will also develop a baseline over time to compare progress against. This will drastically reduce those inconvenient ER trips!