What is the Technology Triad?

Let’s go over what we call the TechnologyTriad. And with this, it is a representation of how technology touches the people and also the security aspect of your business. There are three separate yet correlating components.

When we look at the people component, we have to understand that satisfaction of people as it relates to technology is essential because emotion drives performance, and unhappy employees create bad cultures that drive down performance. Also, we have to understand that the people are accountable for really over 90% of security breaches. So there’s a big risk with our people, and they’re also prone to shadow IT practices, which means that they are out to make things work for them. And if the employer does not provide products and services that make their job easy, they go out and find it themselves. One great example that I see often today with the work-from-home situation is Dropbox. Employees go out and get a personal free Dropbox account and put office documents into their personal Dropbox account so that they can work from home using the corporate data, which is really very dangerous for the business because now they have their data well outside of their reach.

Another thing about people is they’re very hard to acquire and retain. The average US employee stays at a job for about 36 months, and we’re seeing that people just don’t stay around and it takes time to ramp them up, which is very difficult. And then boom, they’re leaving. So you’re in this constant state of churn. Studies have shown that technology and the emotions that are exhibited from poor technology are very critical to the retention of staff.

The next component is the technology itself. It’s got to give you a competitive advantage whenever I talk to clients and they tell me that, oh, gosh, my technology is just horrible and it’s really driving my business down. I know they’re not using technology correctly. In order to be successful, you’re going to have to manage your computers, your software, the decisions that you make in picking a solution has to integrate with the overall business process model that you’re running. And in today’s world, it has to be near 100% availability.

The average user cannot tolerate a system that is down and not functioning correctly. It will just absolutely kill the business environment, and it’s got to be really easy to use and deploy. I give examples where you’ve got Company A and they’ve got a good technology stack that they can roll out and have a person fully trained in 60
days and Company B, it takes six months. And if you’re looking at an employee that’s going to stay around 36 months, you’re really going to see a huge competitive advantage for Company A and the ability to get more done in the allotted time.

And then finally, we’re going to look at the security component of this. This requires the highest skillset for management and most business owners and even It staff typical IT staff are just not skilled for this ever-changing threat landscape. A term that we use is security never sleeps. The bad actors are working around the clock trying to hack our systems. In fact, in the year 2021 and we’re just now entering Q4  of 2021, there have been more security breaches in this year three quarters of this year than there have been in the previous five years. And there’s no end in sight.

The world and just America is short some 500,000 security professionals. So the bad actors have a leg up on us. And if your business goes without its data for ten days, 60% chance that you’re going to fail after a significant breach. So there’s a lot at stake here. If you’d like to find out more about how your business stacks up in accordance with other businesses in these three areas, I have an assessment form that we can pass out to your people. We can look at your technology and your overall security and see where the gaps are so that we can spend your IT budget in the most effective way. Let me know, and I’d be happy to give you guys a hand.