Technology is the enabler for most businesses today, and SMEs rely on IT apps and systems in most departments, from finance to sales. There are a few common challenges with technology, and in this post, we review what they are and how to turn them into strengths for your business.

Top Most Common Tech Challenges

Thankfully there are a lot of sources online to assist with the accuracy of our content. Starting with TechCrunch. They rank IT security as the top challenge.

IT Security

The pandemic did not pause cybercrime, and reports say cyberattacks increased with malware, phishing, and ransomware being the most common cyber threats to businesses. Remote working has added to the stress.

Companies need to ensure devices and apps used to share data and access business systems are secure. Staff at home are less accessible. The need for ongoing knowledge transfer and user training requires planning and resources, which is an added cost SMEs would prefer to do without.

Malware Attacks

Out of all types of data attacks, malware is among the most common. Malware attacks are simple and happen when a piece of malicious software is installed on someone’s computer or a network. The malware will then perform specific actions as desired.

Some malware is there to disrupt. Other malware can do things such as catching admin credentials for financial information, for instance. These can be very serious and put your whole organization at a standstill, so they cannot take them lightly.

Another thing you should know is that malware attacks are rarely made without the cooperation of a human in your organization. And, in most cases, they weren’t even in on it.

Attackers will often use social engineering techniques to pose as someone in authority. The receiver will have no idea as everything will be made to look like it’s coming from that person.

But this isn’t the only case where humans can become a liability. As a matter of fact, humans are the single biggest IT vulnerability.

You may have a remote or hybrid workplace, and one of your employees loses a device that could be found and accessed by a hacker. From the device, your whole network at risk.

It’s in the Cloud

Getting your head around cloud computing and how to adopt it company-wide is challenging. Vendor agreements are different, and the model is user pays, which is a far cry from buying a server and having it in your office.

Lack of In-House Skill

This is one of the biggest challenges for any business. Finding people who have IT skills and the type of skill you need can be complicated. Someone may understand certain things, but if you have an issue that needs a particular set of expertise, you might find your business stuck and hitting a dead end.

This is why many businesses decide to outsource their IT department. This way, they have a team at their disposal that can deal with everything that they need. They can also do things such as maintaining your licenses to make sure that they’re in order and that your patches are all up to date. Or they might be able to help you recover your systems quickly if there’s an unexpected error or breach.

Emerging Tech

Getting to grips with AI, robotics, Natural Language Processing, and matching learning is challenging to most businesses. When do you adopt systems that may replace your staff? There’s no escaping change and technology evolution. Some apps already use AI, and automation is used in many mundane tasks within the business.

Chatbots use AI and machine learning are the norm on many websites that offer services and online purchases, i.e. eCommerce stores. 64% of users say the 24-hour service is the best feature of the chatbot. As a consumer, you rely on instantaneous response, especially when you’re in the midst of an online purchase.

Summing Up

These are just some of the most common IT issues small businesses have to deal with every day. If you are one, make sure that you protect yourself against these risks and consider hiring an expert team for assistance.

Designing a successful digital product is tricky and challenging. In the crowded space of the WWW, your product may not end up in search results, and this is why findability precedes usability in designing for the web. If your product can’t reach your audience, it has failed already.

Therefore the big question here is how do you ensure that your product is easily found and accessible by your target audience?

The answer to your question lies in information architecture. Design a superior user experience (UX) using a tree test.

Top 4 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Tree Testing

Still unsure of what a tree test can do to your design venture?

Let’s take a look into the true capabilities of a tree test.

Primarily, you would be running a tree test because of any one of the following reasons.

• baselining an existing tree
• detecting the problem area and points thereby establish a base score
• experimenting test trees trying to solve existing information architecture problems
• comparing each version against each other to find the best possible solution to the existing problems

However, a tree test also does a lot more for your product. Following are a few primary areas where a tree test can be beneficial.

Why It Pays To Use A Tree Test

1. Evaluate product navigation

A tree test can improve your digital product’s online findability. With the test tree, you can evaluate your product’s existing information navigation system. How? Well, users complete a series of tasks looking for items using the site structure. Using this method to evaluate your site structure, you have a way to measure how easy it is for users to find things.

Treejack is one of the most popular tools used for tree-tests.

2. Time-efficient

With a remote tree test, the users can be located anywhere, and they can take the test in their own time. You benefit from getting quality, quantitative data.

3. Cost-efficient

By using online test conduction, results accumulate from global users. Thus, it reduces the costs of on-premise tests.

4. Agile

The biggest asset of tree testing is that it is designed for experiments. The test sessions are concise, each test of around 15 – 20 minutes, having a maximum of 20 tasks per session.

This improves the success rate of completing the test by users significantly. These tests, like card sorting, are pretty much simple with low complexity that readily helps with the dropout rates.

Combined with remote access to the test, all this makes data collection fast and the data analysis process lean. This means whatever insights you derive from your test analytics, you can apply them in no time.

How To Optimize Your Tree Tests

Ensuring you get the maximum benefits out of your tests is one of the most important yet neglected design tests areas. But if you can make sure to ask the critical questions without fail, your tests will not fail you.

Following are a set of core questions that can ensure you make the most of tree testing.

1. What is the objective of your tests?

This is perhaps the anchor point of your complete questionnaire. This answer is going to help you achieve the hyper-targeted activities for your test. For instance, you may want to analyze the results of your design changes in the navigation structure.

2. Who is your target audience?

Answering this question right in the beginning can save you a lot of pain in the long term. A good practice here is to take some time out and think deeply about your product visitors.

If your answer is: “everyone”, then you are doing it wrong. Remember, if everyone is your audience, then no one is your audience.

3. Define the independent variables

Deciding on the independent factors that are dynamic can produce multiple end-results.

Use factorial experimental designs. This method enables you to examine each variable in isolation.

4. Define the dependent variable.

Dependent variables can also bring a lot of improvements to your overall user experience. To assess its impact, you have to observe its effect on its respective independent factor instead of the end-user interface result. For instance, you can examine the precision of an area locator for completing preset tasks.

5. What do you use while comparing trees, a control group or a treatment group?

Control Group acts as a benchmark. It is not vulnerable to changes. Here, comparing the altered results to the original group is possible. You can assess the degree of difference between the results of both groups.

6. While comparing testing trees, do you use a between-subject design or a within-subject design?

It’s important to decide whether you want the same group of test-takers to participate in all the versions of your test tree or anyone.

Whether you choose both strategies or not, both have their own merits. Therefore, it would be best if you decide based on your test goals. For instance, choosing a between-subject approach can reduce the test taker fatigue, and the learning effect could even prove to be time-efficient.

Parting Advice

The whole point of executing a tree testing activity is to ensure you stay updated about your target audience’s behavioral nodes. This means conducting frequent tree tests can boost the overall information architecture health of your digital product.

The above tips and tricks are definite to help you optimize all your tree testing campaigns, but the heaviest success metric still lies in your hands.

Ensuring you understand your target audience will make sure that your design assumptions walk the closest to reality.

Regardless of the business size or the type of organization run, there will always be a need for creating, storing and sharing information. Knowledge management is a set of processes that can help create and distribute said knowledge to utilize its potential to the fullest.

So the question we will answer in this article is: does your business need knowledge management software?

Importance Of Growing Your Business

It would help if you always were looking at ways in which you can grow your business. It can help you to cultivate a strong company culture as a result. The better informed your staff are, the more successful their work becomes.

Knowledge is valuable for everyone, yet one of the biggest challenges that businesses face is communication. Growing your business is made difficult when there isn’t effective communication within the company. There’s often a lot of down-time that results in fix errors in communication or clarifying issues that could have easily prevented.

How Does Knowledge Management Work?

It’s firstly important to know how knowledge management works. It’s something that varies from business to business. So what your knowledge management entails might not be the same for another company.

The information you have as a business needs to be organized, and that’s where knowledge management comes in. This system will likely have various tools that you can choose from to help with the customization of your knowledge database.

You want to make your knowledge more accessible ultimately, and with these management systems, you’re able to do precisely that.

A knowledge management system will consist of an internal process that helps capture company knowledge. The information is reviewed, and then technology in the form of software helps support all this. You may already have somewhat of a knowledge management system in place.

For example, if you use cloud storage or a shared drive to save documents instead of saving them on your desktops, then this is knowledge management in action. There is some excellent internal knowledge base software worth learning more about before deciding which one is for you.

The Benefits Of Knowledge Management Software

With knowledge management software, the process of setting it all up is something that will take time. However, the benefits of having a system in place can make it all worthwhile.

As your organization matures, it’s essential to have this knowledge management to support and enhance your daily operations. One of the significant benefits is that it can help gather the power from your company to grow the business.

You can give your employees more knowledge sharing structures that can help them do their job more efficiently. There’s quicker problem-solving and faster decision making that comes with having this system in place.

It can help make your employee’s work more exciting and engaging, which is ultimately what you want to better yourself from the competition. With more knowledgeable and productive employees, it makes for improved work processes in general.

To continue innovating your business and supporting employee growth, having this knowledge management software will be more beneficial to have in place than not have it at all.

Implementation

What are the steps to implement knowledge management software into business?

If you’re implementing knowledge management software for the first time, it’s essential to know the steps in which to do so effectively.

Identify Problems

Firstly, you want to consider the problems you have and to define them in more detail.

Brainstorming

At this point, you’ll then focus on the part of your organization that can help brainstorm these problems to create solutions. It might be those interested in such a project, or you feel you are capable of doing so.

When you’ve gathered these individuals together, you then have your initial network. You’ll then want to actively involve everyone else, perhaps giving this initiative its own name so that it gets people interested.

Ideas

Capturing ideas is an essential part of the process, and this might involve suggestion boxes or providing a simple Google Form questionnaire for people to fill in and give feedback.

Implement solutions

Implement these and be sure to reward those who contributed to changing those problems into solutions. It’s then time to share that knowledge and ensure that every employee knows what’s available and how to access it.

Sharing The Knowledge With Your Customers

It could also be something that you make available to your customers if you feel it’s relevant.

There are times when you have potential leads come onto your site and perhaps have questions stopping them from making a purchase or moving down the sales funnel.

Your customer service agents will likely have those common questions asked to them multiple times per day. If that’s the case, then offering this knowledge base to your customers will reduce the number of queries being directed at the agent.

It means your agent can prioritize more complex queries, and those potential customers can navigate further down the sales funnel, hopefully, to make a sale.

Summary

Your business can undoubtedly benefit from knowledge management software, especially when communication seems to be a problem for many companies nowadays.

Things become more challenging to manage as your organization grows in size, and when it comes to training employees, sometimes, there can be information that gets missed.

Having this one centralized database of information can help to educate both existing employees and any new ones that come into the organization. It can save time, cut down costs, and aid that your business will benefit from when it comes to growing it over time.

Again, a knowledge base takes time to build, and there may always be something that you’re adding to it.

However, it’s better than leaving it unorganized and having your organization as a whole feeling unprepared and lacking the knowledge they need to improve your company.