Looking Into The Crystal Ball – 2023
Hi everybody Jeremy here managing director of the Human IT Company, Vancouver’s most responsive IT company and your number one choice for a small business computer support.
As I record this, it’s the middle of December 2022. And surprising to absolutely no one is that all the media outlets are putting out articles with predictions for technology in 2023. The problem though is that many of these articles are geared towards companies that have hundreds or even thousands of employees… According to the Canadian government, in December of 2020 there was approximately 1.2 million businesses in Canada. Of that number, just under 98% of them were small businesses with between 1 and 99 employees. That makes it difficult for these articles to have meaning and context for your average Canadian small business or charity. To that end, I’d like to give you our suggestions for technology in 2023, focused on small businesses
Number one on the list is efficiency. When we have conversations with our customers they’re wanting to make sure that they’re getting the greatest bang for their buck. They want to get the greatest use out of what they already have instead of just throwing money at problems. Of course, with everything going on in the economy and with rising interest rates it’s not surprising that businesses are wanting to make sure that, if they have to spend money, it’s being done wisely.
Item number 2 on the list is scalability. Traditionally when you think of scalability you only think of getting bigger. But our customers are asking us about solutions that can scale quickly and easily both upwards and downwards, based on economic factors market conditions or other factors. A lot of these discussions are around cloud-enabled tools
The third item we get a lot of questions about is flexibility. When the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, a lot of businesses had to do a hard pivot just to survive. The question that we often see from our customers now when we propose a solution is “how flexible is this solution? Can this solution be adapted to work in other ways, or are we going to be locked into this one path?”.
The 4th the point we often get asked about is connectivity. Business owners are wanting to make sure that their staff have the ability to work from anywhere… Not just work from home, but work from anywhere, whether that be a conference, a customer location, home, or the office. We’re seeing that business owners are wanting to make sure that their team has access to all their data regardless of the location. We’re also seeing questions being asked about connection speeds at the office. Whether it’s new faster types of Wi-Fi, or taking advantage of faster Internet connection speeds offered by the ISPs, being able to connect to the data, the Internet, or each other is generating a lot of interest.
The final item we get asked about a lot is sustainability. A number of business owners have expressed concern to us about making sure that parts are properly recycled, as well as finding ways to reduce their overall carbon footprint. Some of those questions are around refurbished equipment, or remanufactured consumables like printer cartridges. Even when businesses talk to us about hybrid work models for their teams, sustainability and environmental factors are often part of the driving force behind these questions.
So there you have it, our list of small business technology priorities for 2023. Of course this is just coming from our conversations with our existing customer base… No one has a crystal ball, no matter how much they might think they do. But if you’d like to have more discussions about any of the above points, feel free to leave us a message in the comments, or send us a message at www.HumanITCompany.ca, or give us a call at 604-336-8133 and we’ll be happy to look into the crystal ball with you. Thanks for watching and have a great day.