Is Your Practice Ready for Unified Communications?
July 3, 2008
What if it was possible to reduce costs while growing your business at the same time? Ever wonder how to set your business apart? You could set your organization apart just by how you regard customer service, making you the preference amongst the competition. Not only will your customers benefit, but your business will as well. In this article by Nick Snoply, he’ll help explain several ways in which technology will be part of the solution, especially within the medical field.
Is Your Practice Ready for Unified Communications? (pdf download)
The Fear of Being Too Connected…
May 22, 2008
By Marissa Jacquay
As I’ve begun to meet with more customers and prospects and define Unified Communications, and how it plays into enhanced productivity within their organizations, I keep getting the same response. Well Marissa, I like the idea, but I don’t want to be TOO connected.
Mobility, in regards to communications has changed so much over time. I think back to childhood, and life seemed simple. Maybe it was due to the fact that I was young and had a child’s perspective, but making trips out and about, and running errands with my parents was simple. We put on our shoes and our coats and we left…I never heard them say, “Oh, hang on, I forgot my cell phone,” or “I will call or text you when I get there.” I remember my neighbor had the first cell phone I had ever seen, and it was connected to a bag that you had to carry around, and I thought that was so cool, strange, but cool. Then pagers came into the picture, you were somebody if you had a pager, and knowing the lingo that if someone paged you with a “911″ after it, that meant, it was urgent. Suddenly more convenient analog cell phones came into the marketplace, and yes they were bulky, but they were better than the original phone in a bag and these allowed for more mobility. And today, well, most people have some sort of a mobile device.
Okay, you’re probably asking yourself, why is she rambling? The point I’m trying to make is this, just as we grow up and mature from children to adults, technology does the same thing, and as technology evolves, society adapts to that changing technology and although we have early embracers…we also have those who wait, and wait, and suddenly the technology embraces them. They have to adapt or they’re lost. Look at the World Wide Web. Company web pages were a thing of the future, but today, if you don’t have one, or don’t have some aspect of e-commerce you’re losing a piece of the pie and the competition might just leave you in the dust.
We’ve gone from basically not being connected at all, to developing ‘Blackberry Thumb’ and being connected to our devices 24/7. You have the two extremes, and you’ve got that happy medium. Technology is only going to keep progressing and changing, and it’s up to all of us to “Roll with It,” but remember that we have choices, and it’s up to us to determine the boundaries that we set with our communications. Productivity is what is pushing these changes, but remember that increased productivity may allow you to still stay on top of your work responsibilities, and still manage to have a life outside of work, and the benefit of this is that you know can have the best of both worlds, and one or the other doesn’t have to suffer. In the past, you had to choose to stay late at work to answer e-mails or leave early to attend your child’s baseball game. Now, you can leave on time, answer the e-mails from your smart phone while you’re waiting for the game to start, and still have the life you choose outside of the confines of the brick and mortar office. It’s a balancing act that may take some practice, but with being TOO connected, the positives outweigh the negatives, and at the end of the day, it is all about CHOICES, and it’s okay to turn off those mobile devices and CHOOSE to come back to them when you’re ready.
Marissa Jacquay is a technology specialist with G3 Technology Partners and works with businesses to analyze and assess how technology can solve business problems. She can be reached at 317.876.6535 or by email at marissa.jacquay@g3tp.com.
How to Create Value: Process, Product, or Both?
March 21, 2008
Well, to be honest, we get a lot of questions upfront: Are you going to blow me away with technology terms? Or, try to sell me something that I’ll never understand how to use? Or, sell me more than I need?
Those are good questions. (It sounds like you’ve bought technology before.) Well, we do things differently here, and our philosophy is that we don’t aim to sell any particular product like others do. We actually care about the product only to the extent that its solves your problems.
Here is Our Thinking:
We want to provide the optimum value when you get your new system installed, whatever it might look like. In the past, when we haven’t done our due diligence — to find out exactly what you need — we realized down the road that there were things that were left out. That isn’t good for anyone. Consequently, the G3 Process is a vital part of our value to you.
Explore Your Business
First, we Explore your business. We ask you questions about your direction, your strategy, your technology initiatives and other important items. Then, we tell you a little about how our best customers are using technology to solve business problems.
Deeper Diagnosis
Next, we go into a Deeper Diagnosis of the issues and goals you have. If technology isn’t solving a business problem, then we won’t recommend it. You may meet some other people from G3 at this point. And you might bring in more of your people to make sure we have input in all areas before we recommend anything.
We used to witness the “One Purchaser” phenomena where one person would buy technology then no one would use it because they were never consulted. That’s a mistake we won’t let you make.
Recommendation
Then, we come back with our Recommendation. That way, we are recommending solutions that fit the business goals and objectives that we discovered in the Exploration phase.
You might think this is overkill - too long of a process - but technology has taken on such an important part of a company’s competitive strategy that we would be doing you a disservice if we didn’t pay attention to the long term vision.
And, we don’t want to get that phone call from you in six months where you say, “Hey, why didn’t you tell me you did this? If I’d have known that…” well you know the rest.
If you want to speak with one of our specialists, call us at 317.872.8888 and we’ll be glad to walk you through our process in more detail.