What’s holding your company back – YOU or your team?
By AdviceBridge
In the aftermath of the pandemic, even the most non-techy financial advisers have become familiar with technology that they may previously have resisted. And early adopters will have ended up engaging with it even more. But are you getting the most out of what is available?
Many small businesses are apprehensive about technology because of a lack of awareness or understanding. Whether you are or aren’t technologically savvy, it’s easy to miss opportunities to grow and develop your business.
Data literacy and engagement are key for business owners and C-suite executives
According to research, business leaders are struggling to understand and work with data. This can lead to widespread company deficiency in data confidence.
A Censuswide survey, involving more than 7,300 business decision makers, found that just 24% of those surveyed considered themselves to be data literate.
And, despite 92% of business decision makers believing that data literacy is important for their employees, only 17% report that their business significantly encourages employees to become more confident with data.
Data literacy levels are low across the entire business structure
Data literacy is a skill that empowers you and your team to ask the right questions of data and machines, build knowledge, make decisions, and communicate meaning to others.
Thinking critically about the data you’re collecting and how you’re using it should play a role in everyone’s job.
This requires data literacy — the ability to analyse and organise complex data, interpret and summarise information, and develop predictions. Yet levels of data literacy across many businesses is worryingly low, as the illustration below shows.
Source: TechTarget
By investing in data literacy and educating your entire team, you can bring more diverse and creative thinking to problem solving, identifying inefficiencies and potential opportunities that data can reveal.
Don’t let you or your team struggle and hold your business back
Although 90% of business leaders cite data literacy as key to company success, only 25% of workers feel confident in their data skills.
If your business is struggling to capitalise on data, consider implementing one or more of these three ideas:
- Make data literacy a priority across your entire organisation by raising its profile
- Empower employees to speak up and apply their data literacy, encouraging them to use it to make improvements and generate new business ideas
- Teach data literacy in a way that engages your employees.
Even your tech team could be holding you back
Don’t overlook the fact that your tech team could be holding your company back.
Do they have a broad enough skill set to cover the main programming languages? Is your technology reliant on just one of C Sharp, Java, or Python?
It’s possible that your team may need a shake to help them see the advantages of letting go of what they are familiar with and embracing other programs.
If it’s necessary to get your tech team out of their comfort zone, re-skilling them with low-code or no-code could be the key to helping your business flourish.
Low-code/no-code platforms can empower your wider team
Low-code or no-code platforms give employees the ability to develop powerful applications with little previous experience.
Visual software development platforms allow developers to create mobile or web apps by dragging and dropping application components and connecting them together.
This modular approach removes the need to write code line by line, giving professional developers the opportunity to build applications quicker.
Because you don’t need prior knowledge of traditional programming languages to get started, low-code/no-code environments enable business analysts, office administrators, small business owners, and other non-IT professionals to build and test applications.
You can rearrange and repeatedly test modules until the app works the way you need and want.
Low-code/no-code capabilities
Low-code development requires some level of coding. Professional developers can use low-code to deliver applications quicker and divert their time to more complex and unique work that has a greater impact and adds more value to your company.
Meanwhile, no-code development directly targets non-technical users. Team members who understand business needs and rules but have little or no coding experience can use no-code to build, test, and deploy business apps.
Typically, no-code is used to create tactical apps to handle simple functions. While low-code can be used for simple functions, it can also be used to create apps that run processes that are critical to the core systems of a business, such as integrations and digital transformation initiatives.
Get in touch
If you’re concerned that you, your technology, or your team is hampering your potential, AdviceBridge could be the ideal solution. AdviceBridge can consult on a wide range of operational matters in running advisory practices through to implementing and integrating the AdviceBridge automated solution seamlessly with your existing technology. To find out more, please get in touch. Email hello@advicebridge.com or call us on 020 3925 3850.
