Are you moving or not moving?The pace of technology innovation continues to stun even the most seasoned veterans. Are you prepared for the changes that are taking place? The more prepared you are, the easier time you will have adjusting to the future
Filing vs. Searching. See all those folders on the left-hand side of your email program? We get it. You’re organized. But you’re getting more email than you used to get. Much more. And you’re likely to get more. Searching, not filing. Yahoo used to have a beautiful directory of web sites, managed with extreme detail. Now people search. It’s faster. Same thing with filing your mail versus searching your mail. If you’re filing your mail, you won’t keep up with the change.
Moving parts. Hard drives with moving parts are the next pay phone or VHS tape. Start moving forward with solid state storage in mind, or cloud storage. Think carefully before investing in moving parts for your laptop. Servers are another story, but most moving parts are headed for extinction in the tech world.
Multiple devices. If you are going to be completely screwed by losing one piece of electronics, you’re doing it wrong. If you lose your iPhone, you remotely wipe it and move on. If you drop and break your iPad, you buy another one and iTunes recreates its settings (soon Apple will do this without even needing your computer to help). If your desktop computer is stolen, you buy another one and restore from cloud backup. If you can’t currently do this, you’re doing it wrong. Get away from total reliance on any one device. They just don’t cost enough to warrant that kind of risk.
Password theft. Your password will get compromised, either by a web site losing it or having it hacked, or you might lose it because someone guesses it, or someone might steal your info over an unsecured WiFi connection. Or from an internet cafe. Are you going to use the same password on every site? Then you’re likely to have identity theft of some kind in the future. Want to reduce the risk? Use a different password for each web site. Can’t remember it? Ask us for tools that will do this for you.
Collaboration – software companies have had a rough time getting collaborative documents working smoothly. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and many others have taken steps, but it’s not quite here yet. But it will get here soon enough. The sooner you start trying some cloud-based document sharing (e.g. Google Docs), the sooner you will be prepared for this level of interaction. Professional service firms that include their clients in their document creation will likely win out over firms that hide everything from the customer until the very last version is ready to send. Truly modern client/vendor relationships will be extremely transparent.
Why wait until you’re forced to adapt to these changes? Start now!
Comments