Does anything just not work in your tech stack (the software and services that you use every day)? While there are certainly some technology priorities that can’t really change-like securing your private accounting data-products might be out there that offer a better fit for what you expect in communications, data security, and collaboration. In today’s blog post, we’ll take a look at a more holistic approach to how you use technology every day.
Understand Your Expectations
One of the biggest challenges that modern computing places on us is to keep our own expectations in line with what software can accomplish. Some of the more interesting things that have come out of the AI race of the past two years have been about how much performance to expect out of an algorithm. While AI is good at some tricks, it’s really not all that great at a lot of others.
For example, pretty much all of my attempts to get Copilot for 365 to give me useful help in Excel had been failures until recently. I had expected that the algorithm could get more involved in what I was doing, but what it’s there for is more like a customized search. Asking it to do things that it couldn’t was making me miss the point: if I have data in my sheets and a very specific formula to find, it can help find me one. It won’t necessarily be perfect without testing, but it really has been able to work wonders with table and PivotTable references that get pretty arcane at times.
Learning a little bit about how the software is intended to work, instead of wanting it to work the way you expect it to, can go a long way. A lot has changed in the past 20 years, even if everything on the desktop looks pretty similar. Modern browsers are more like full operating systems from 20 years ago; this is why they can do some amazing things, but also have a lot of complexity with their notifications, extensions, and profiles, and why your browser needs to be secure to keep your network secure.
We rely on companies like Microsoft to make the product we use. When they pivot on a specific technology or make changes to the software we use every day, it’s still our choice to use them (even if it doesn’t always seem like it). They have their own reasons why certain workflows or interfaces need to change; although we may want to fight that urge to change, it puts us into an uphill battle where we are trying to hold on to a way of doing things that is ultimately not up to us (as users).
When Is “Good Enough” Not Good Enough?
Once you understand where your expectations are, you can judge your software for what it is. If certain parts of how it works make you frustrated, it may be because you’re not exactly sure of what it’s intended to do by its makers.
Microsoft Teams is a great example: using Teams chat and calling is pretty straightforward, but if you think that the chat format is too hard to find historical data, it’s because that’s what channels are for! Channels are underused by our clients, and most would be surprised to find that Teams is intended not just to be a direct messaging platform, but a collaboration space for your business’ organizational units-teams in the managerial sense. If you had an HR channel with the correct permissions set, then you could have HR related posts and responses that are more straightforwardly formatted and searchable than just a chat that goes back and forth between a group.
Of course, if you know what your software is intended to do, but it’s hard to figure out how to implement it, then it might just not be the right choice for what you’re working on. SharePoint Online, for example, can be a great way to share folders and documents externally (and securely), but it has two major caveats that come up: 1) if you intend to share with an external party, you should plan a SharePoint site that the external party can access all of, instead of just part of, and 2) SharePoint is intended to be the working copy of your files as you work on them, and there aren’t any slick solutions for syncing these files from a file server or other shares on your business’ network.
This doesn’t mean SharePoint isn’t good enough for this task, just that it’s intended for something besides this use case. It’ll take a different workflow with less automation to achieve, at least, without redesigning how you think about your data, and where it lives (in the cloud or on premises). These are just a couple of examples that are specific to the 365 ecosystem and some of the more complicated parts of it. They’re really only complicated when there isn’t a clear plan for how your business will use the software to speed up collaboration and accelerate your procedures.
Rely on Expert Advice
Having an IT partner that you can trust gives you an advantage when it comes to these issues, giving you access to someone who can identify another platform or piece of software that does do what you’re looking to do with your data. There might be another way of setting things up-where you store your data, how you access and collaborate on it, etc.-to achieve exactly the kind of efficiency and ease that you’re looking for.
Relying on your expert IT team to help craft a plan for your technology that supports your business needs, suggest ways to automate workflows, and advise on the best on-prem and in-the-cloud solutions can really increase your company’s adaptability and competitiveness. A quarterly review of your technology and security postures is called a Quarterly Business Review, and it’s the perfect opportunity to grow your partnership with your IT experts and start planning for a more effective future together.
-Written by Derek Jeppsen on Behalf of Sean Goss and Crown Computers Team