Technology is the foundation to ease, accuracy, and efficiency. While Bongi had an enormous amount of work to create and then correlate, she found that technology increasingly assisted her in this regard. Spending time analysing and being taught various IT systems, she learnt the value of investing in something that would help her daily: Technology.
How Technology Makes your Life Easier
Bongi’s initial resistance arose from both fear and the change required to implement a new system. However, the benefits reaped, outweighed the costs involved.
Bongi identified the following advantages:
- Time
When Bongi started to keep a record of the time she was spending manually communicating and keeping records of her data, she was astounded that almost 1/4 of her working day revolved around her manual processes. Automating this not only saved her time, but also freed up mental space to allow her to concentrate on more important responsibilities. - D.I.I.I.A.
Bongi worked with a lot of information. An effective system assists in recording and sorting her data, transforming this into usable information, interpreting this information, building a bank of intelligence, and allowing her to act with the confidence that she had followed a process. - Reliability
As someone who liked to get things right, Bongi continually checked and double-checked her work. The knowledge that the information generated by the system provided her with a huge sense of relief and comfort, knowing that she was confident to take accountability for the outcomes she produced through technology.
Making her life easier was more than an expression, it was a time, energy, and mental space saver, which enabled her to function more effectively and with greater creativity.
What to Insist on
Part of her initial anxiety was feeling overwhelmed at the number of options and different offerings of each system. Knowing that she needed guidance, Bongi approached a Business Coach who had worked to develop an IT system that satisfied all his Business Coaching requirements. He called the system Coach in the Corner. This provided her with an in-depth insight into what she needed in your own system. These were the areas that Bongi insisted on when looking at which form of technology to use:
- Reliability
Since she would be using the system daily and inserting her data, Bongi could not afford for the system to lose any information or crash on her. Understanding that all IT systems may have downtime, she needed to be guaranteed the robustness of the system that she would be using. - User-Friendly
Although computer literate, Bongi had no illusions about her capabilities to navigate technology with which she did not have experience. She, therefore, needed a user-friendly interface, ideally designed around a Windows framework so that she did not require extensive training, and so the technology would be intuitive and familiar to her. - Support
Bongi needed to be able to give and receive feedback on the system’s offerings. She could not be left to work this by herself. She needed a lifeline in case she did not know how to do something, or in the eventuality that the system failed her. Support in terms of both a system-familiar technician, as well as someone with whom she would be able to communicate, was pivotal to her decision.
Technology can be the greatest gift, or the greatest curse, depending on how it is designed, and then explicated. Bongi committed to learn and use the system so that she could gain the best she could from it. Within a few weeks, she was astounded that she ever worked without it. Technology increased her effectiveness, her efficiency, and her state of mind.
“Technology itself doesn’t make leaders. Technology only amplifies leadership.”
Steve Jobs
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