If you’re focusing on efficiency, technology is your friend. It frees you from mundane tasks and helps you store and analyze information and manage projects effectively.
However, there is a point of diminishing returns. While it’s probably not possible to be too efficient, it’s certainly possible to have too much technology. That’s because more isn’t necessarily better, and sometimes too many solutions can actually undermine your business goals.
Here’s a highly ironic example: Research found that IT teams using multiple tools for monitoring and troubleshooting spend a significant amount of time on issues related to those tools. For today’s office workers, switching between multiple apps is common, with people sometimes using 10 or even 20 or more different solutions daily. The result is four or more wasted hours weekly.
The cause isn’t the people, it’s the technology. In many organizations, there’s just too much of it, and it doesn’t work together, so employees have to switch constantly from solution to solution. Researchers studying this “toggling tax” describe disparate systems that don’t connect, causing people to spend significant time “fetching and transforming data from multiple applications and then submitting data into other systems.”
Not only does this lack of data sharing translate into lost time and frustration, it means you can end up with multiple sets of disparate data that’s difficult to reconcile and offers less insight.
Having an IT plan is the first step when you’re considering what solutions to leverage. In a recent interview with SHRM, Rebecca Wettemann, a technology analyst for Valoir, offered these suggestions for companies evaluating human capital management (HCM) solutions specifically, but they apply across the technology spectrum:
Partner with vendors that specialize in your industry. According to Wettemann, “Vendors with pre-built capabilities that reflect your industry will provide faster time to value, will be quicker to deploy and usually will be less expensive to support on an ongoing basis.”
Consider how well the solution integrates with other solutions you’re using. Technology that doesn’t share data can result in wasted time and effort, actually driving down efficiency.
Pick intuitive, easy-to-use solutions. Simple technology pervades our lives, so employees aren’t very accepting of workplace solutions that are complex.
The key to right-sizing your technology is to focus on powerful but simple construction-centric solutions that connect effectively with other construction tech. One additional consideration is scalability. Choose solutions that can grow with you without you having to buy additional technology.
