Running a small business with employees spread across multiple geographical locations? With tech advances in Cloud Computing and Cellular and Mobile Communications, it is possible today for you to collaborate with your employees – anytime, anywhere.
SMBs’ future looks great with the cloud and mobile tech
Cloud computing and mobile technologies hack our life – literally. Both have changed the way we interact with others individually and professionally. Business-wise, cloud and mobile apps play their role as an enabler, allowing you and your staffs to work whenever, wherever they are. Time zones are becoming less and less meaningless; your physical location is also becoming less important.
If you are a budding entrepreneur, starting a small business is never been easier. Adopting the lean startup principles, you can launch your innovative product to the market faster.
This also holds true when it comes to employee training. It was a major challenge running a business which team members located in different cities in different countries. Not anymore. You can now deliver training videos and materials on-demand – right from the cloud – using specialized cloud-based training solutions or a general collaboration tools.
Business communication-wise, mobile communication has rapidly taken over any other form of business communication technologies. Making phone calls from your mobile device has never been easier – and cheaper, as well – today. Using Skype? You can talk with your clients and colleagues with Skype – it’s becoming a norm today.
Running your entire business in the cloud – yes, it’s possible today!
Today, you can sign up with a reputable cloud-based collaboration tool, such as Huddle, AceProject, Celoxis, and many more, and start managing projects completion and communication in no time. As those tools are accommodating users who want mobile access, you can now collaborate with your team from your smartphone and tablet PC.
Let’s just say that today, telecommuting is made accessible for everyone – companies need to think and rethink their policies with regard to remote working.
Want to time-track your staffs in the cloud? Many of those collaboration and project management tools facilitate you with such function.
What about customer relation management (CRM)? Salesforce and many others enable you to manage and analyze your customers from a web-based software running in the cloud.
Working with Gantt charts, flow charts, graphs for managing your project? Sure – Smartsheet and Zoho can offer you just that.
Want to have a chat? Yes, you definitely can. Most online collaboration tools offer you the ability to communicate with everyone in your company – without having any software installed on your PC or laptop.
Want to deliver video training? Just embed it into the system and it will be delivered to your staffs, on demand.
Want to wish your colleague a happy birthday or share your holiday photos? Certainly – just use the internal social networking feature available for a combo collaboration tools like MangoApps, an all-in-one suite for enterprise social networking, collaboration tool and social intranet.
Still running PABX the conventional way? Well, you can now manage your PABX using a mobile app – from answering calls to setting up call routing.
The bottom line is, you can practically do most business operations and activities from the cloud-based software.
Takeaway
If you haven’t use mobile and cloud technologies for your business operations and communication, you are losing out! There are more and more small business owners who are integrating the cloud with their existing system. They have the competitive advantage and move ahead of the competition.
If you decide to have it a go, be sure that there are always risks associated with tech adoption. Be sure you understand the risks and developed some measures to deal with them.
Ivan Widjaya
In the cloud