Is Your Technology Plan Ready For 2011?

Happy New Year! The start of a new year usually brings a new set of plans, ideas, goals and objectives to achieve in both your business and personal life. For advisors, it is important that your overall 2011 business planning also includes how you use technology at your firm. Perhaps you are currently very happy with your technology. Or maybe 2011 is a year when you plan to make big technology changes. Or perhaps you are somewhere in the middle. In any of these cases, do your firm a big favor and map out your technology strategy for the upcoming year. This month’s column will help give you some ideas of how to approach this task and start the year off well.

Over the many years that I have visited advisors’ offices, it has always been clear to me when a firm has included technology as part of its overall business planning. These firms often had a specific list of technology goals and objectives that were well-thought out and correlated with the other business objectives of the firm. For example, if one of the business goals was to expand and open a second office location in the third quarter of the year, then there was a defined list of technology tasks associated with this objective. Or another firm might have had a less complicated business goal, where the founder just wanted to be able to work from her second home on Fridays during the summer. Here again technology clearly played a critical role in achieving this goal, allowing the advisor to use a virtual private network and cloud-based software resources to access the firm’s systems and databases. Whatever your own business goals may be, the important and best practice is to ensure that your technology needs are included as you develop your overall plans. A full technology assessment may take a bit of time and research, but if it is not included in the planning, well, this is when I would hear advisors say that they would have never purchased this or that technology product if they knew it operated as slow as molasses while sitting in the deck chair at the beach house. Or they had no idea how costly their IT support needs were going to be when they opened a second office. Ensuring that there is clear alignment between your business goals and your technology resources is therefore a perfect place to start your new year’s strategizing.

Now, before you get a wish list from your staff with their 2011 technology needs, it is very important to start with an itemization of what you already own. I know it may seem easy to simply purchase something new to meet a business goal or objective. However, the reality is most advisors (and their staff) don’t leverage the technology that already exists at their fingertips. As an example, if a common complaint is that a certain technology product runs too slow, your first step should be to evaluate the computer being utilized. Upgrading the memory on the machine or in a worst case purchasing a new computer might better address the problem versus trying to identify a replacement technology product. If you do find that your 2011 technology plan will include purchasing a new product, then it is critical that you understand how it will complement and integrate with the current systems used by your firm. Make sure that you do not introduce any “Lone Rangers” in your technology solutions in 2011 (and in later years for that matter). The availability and advancements of technology products designed for advisors should offer you the ability to find a solution that you can build upon and integrate with your existing technology processes and products. Therefore, your plan should not only include the details of how the new product will be utilized, but also how it will specifically integrate with your existing technology—essentially increasing the potential return of the new technology investment.

Including your current technology vendors and your staff is also very important as you develop your technology plan. Your current technology vendors might have a significant release scheduled in the near future and you want to be sure that your firm is prepared to incorporate any new features that are available. Installing new releases might appear as a non-event, but take a close look at any new features and enhancements that you can use. Be sure to allocate sufficient time to training for your staff if you plan to introduce a new technology solution. Overall adoption is always critical and it starts with a well defined training program that instructs your staff on how to best use the new product. And with any goal or objective, make sure that you define and measure your progress to completion. For example, if you plan on introducing a new imaging system in 2011, set a goal of scanning all new client documents starting on a specific date. Then perhaps a second goal would relate to scanning all legacy (old) documents by another date later in the year. Success with each check-in point builds momentum and ultimately increases your odds of achieving your overall goals. These check-in points also remind your staff that the goal is still important and is worthy of their continued time and attention.