Why you should treat your technology like a colleague

The team behind the FuseWorks product suite have always intended for Fuse to become a part of accounting firm’s teams, helping reduce the administrative workload so that accounting practices can focus on more “human” tasks – interacting with clients, gaining new skills (to expand service offering), identifying ways to grow and expand and putting those ways into action.

Part of the reason why we have an implementation team who works with a nominated ‘Champion’ to implement our products, is that we want to make sure that there are a few things being taken care of including:

1. We know our software is being set up to provide maximum value (customised to unique needs of every client)
2. There’s someone on the team who really knows the product and how it can deliver value and can help the rest of the team learn about it
3. There’s time for optimisation – ironing out the small quirks that can hold back the potential results if not dealt with. This feedback from the team on how to make our products work best for a client’s needs is managed by the champion and passed on to the FuseWorks implementation consultant who works with you from discovery, implementation to optimisation.

This is all to help clients make Fuse part of their team and make sure it has goals and measurements in place to make sure it’s doing its job and providing value.

This is actually an important concept, no matter what the technology you use – to treat your technology as a colleague.

If you hired a new employee who had a long list of skills and abilities to help your team, you wouldn’t just park it in the corner without being given anything to do. Yet so many businesses will pay for and implement software and technology but not actually utilise it effectively. This is for a variety of reasons. Some of these include:

• There’s a lack of understanding and training in the team
• It’s not set up quite right for specific needs
• No-one is ultimately ‘responsible’ for the technologies results and contribution to the business
• There’s an older technology that’s being replaced, but the older one still needs to be phased out properly.

There’s a great TED talk that explores this too (and where we got that statistic from above), and we love to share it when we chat to clients about best practice when implementing a new process that utilises technology.

So, what do you think? Will you be having a performance review with your technology anytime soon?

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!