The Right Tech Habits

A theme of this month’s cover story (“Honing the Advisor’s Tech Edge”) is the necessity of keeping up with the latest technology. The implicit message of this and many such articles is that you need to get hip with the times if you want to avoid a slow decline.

It’s almost funny, in a nervous laughter kind of way, that people who chose their careers because they were attracted to finance and liked dealing with people, now ostensibly have to become tech geeks, programmers, video producers and a lot more to remain viable as advisors.

Well, that’s not exactly the case. We have experts—and the top experts in advisor technology are quoted in Jane Wollman Rusoff’s article—who read the various products’ “prospectuses,” test them and advise advisors on their use.

Advisors who successfully harness new technology—whether it is online content marketing that makes their expertise searchable on the Web or social collaboration tools that disperse their blog posts—can gain a much broader potential reach than in the past.

While some advisors will select technology that magnifies their strengths and others find programs that compensate for their deficiencies, perhaps there is a broader lesson that technology can teach to all advisors.