Technological resources can help any business or organization become more effective. There are some overarching resources that most any business can use to increase productivity and decrease waste, including:
A content management system (CMS): Gone are the days when you need to pay a Web developer an hour’s wage to swap out a sentence on your company website or bold some text.
Most websites now integrate a CMS to some degree, which allows users with no HTML or programming experience to edit written content on the website just as they would in a word processor. Popular CMS platforms include WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.
A customer relationship manager (CRM): Originally little more than fancy address books, today’s CRMs are powerhouses of efficiency. You can use them to send and track e-mail marketing campaigns, print mailing labels, track customer support cases, send product warranty reminders, sync with your order fulfillment department, and much more.
Even psychiatrists can customize their CRMs to track patient medication schedules, getting alerts when high-risk patients didn’t refill by a particular date.
Top CRM platforms include Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and BatchBook.
A central file server: E-mailing multiple versions of a document around to employees gets complicate and inefficient really fast. Instead, use a central file storage repository to make it easy for anyone to find the document they’re looking for and to handle version control for often-revised files.
Aside from running your own server in the office, which usually requires on-site IT resources, check out Google Drive or Dropbox.
