What Is A Technical Business Review?

For today’s Tech Tip Tuesday, we’re going to be talking about a Technical Business Review. What it consists of and why you should be doing it on a systematic basis in your business, to keep you working most effectively.

 What is a Technical Business Review why should your company even be concerned with those things?  Well, a technical business review is a time where you sit down with your IT department, and that’s whether it’s an internal staff or whether that is an outsourced staff. And what you’re doing is looking at how things are running. You’re looking at the age of your assets. You’re looking at common security concerns that have arisen since the previous quarter when you met. These need to be systematic. They need to be done quarterly or biannually for sure. And you’re also looking at the assets. How old are your computers? When is it time to change so you can budget so you can set yourself up for success?

You need to be reviewing things like your disaster recovery plan, and that’s tech words, right? Most people go, “oh, God, disaster recovery plan,” they freak out. Well, let’s just sit down and get a napkin out and let’s write on that napkin. What happens if tonight the big storm comes through and it rips the roof off and all of our technology gets wet and we can’t run in the morning? What are we going to do? You need to think through those things and they say that people that do that literally on a napkin, nothing that formal, are about 75%. They recover 75% faster than those who don’t.

These are disciplines the business owners need to be taken to ensure the success of the clients that they serve. Whatever problem you’re solving, you’re solving for somebody and you owe that to them. It’s also protecting whatever data you might have of somebody else’s that is under your possession. Also for your employees and ultimately, of course, for yourself.

These are things that are easy. I’ll even share with you a basic framework of things that you need to talk about so you’re not surprised whenever it’s time to replace that software or that server. It doesn’t sneak up on you and all of a sudden have to, what I call, jacking up the network and driving a new one under it.  We hate that as an IT professionals. I hate doing that because not only does it stress people out, but it costs a lot of money and is a disruption to normal business.

Another thing that I hate is whenever businesses get themselves into compromised positions because of security. They have a crypto locker hit their network, their email gets compromised, or they didn’t have a good backup, and now all of a sudden they can’t restore the data that they need. These are things that caused me a lot of stress. I always say I lose ten years off of my life every time something like that happens to one of my clients. We take these things personally and we internalize them. However, they can so easily be solved with a systematic and periodic Technical Business Review.

If you want to find out more, hit me up. I’d be happy to help and give you a framework even to working so that you can be successful.