One small business owner shows how she uses technology to run her business -- and her life -- in the real world. What collection of technology tools and services do you use?
As entrepreneurs and business owners in the digital age, all of us are constantly looking to new technologies to help us do more with less. But becoming truly technology-savvy requires learning about the technologies, developing practices around them, and constantly fine-tuning those practices.
My inspiration for this interview came from a lecture by John Seely Brown on Learning in the Digital Age. Brown is a former director of Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) at Xerox, where I had the pleasure of working with him. Today he's a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California (USC) and the independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge.
In his lecture on learning, presented at Indiana University in April 2009, Brown suggests reversing the flow of learning. Traditionally, we spend a lot of time learning about something (e.g., years of college) and then put it into practice (e.g., applying the knowledge to our job). The journey generally progresses from "learning-about" to "learning-to-be."
In the digital age, it may make more sense to reverse the initial flow and create a virtuous cycle of the two types of learning. You could practice something (learning-to-be). When you get stuck, you'd learn more about it (learning-about). With that new learning, you go back to improve the practice. And the cycle repeats.
Without creating technology practices that work for us, we may learn about a technology, think it can help our productivity, maybe even play with it for a while. But we won't be able to deploy it effectively, and we will drop it sooner than later.
Creating new effective technology practices can be done faster and more easily by studying how others are successfully putting them to use. This would be like an apprenticeship. In the digital age, the notion can get expanded online, to what Brown would call a "distributed virtual cognitive apprenticeship."
Entrepreneur Battlefield
To see how this works in the real world, meet Kerrie Paige, Ph.D., president and owner of NovaSim LLC. NovSim is a small technology firm based in Bellingham, Wash. The company develops mathematical models and simulations that help its clients make the most of limited resources. Paige is a business owner, a road warrior, a wife, and a mother of three boys.
Her company, NovaSim, has limited resources that have to be delicately extended to handle international clients. So she's had to deploy various technologies to make herself and her people more productive.
Since Paige travels frequently, she wants to be as functional in London as she is in her office in Bellingham.
In addition, she needs to take care of her three boys and run a family. So technologies have to apply to her personal and professional lives equally well.
Paige's approach to deploying new technologies is based on a few guidelines:
- Stop compartmentalizing. She uses the same productivity tools for personal and work needs.
- Keep it in the cloud. She has moved all of her data into Web-based applications. This allows access to all of her data from a browser anywhere in the world. She also can share the data easily with her colleagues and family members.
- Choose applications that talk to each other well. This can automate some of the routine work of transferring the data.
- Keep it simple. Productivity tools have to be easy to use for her, her colleagues and her family.
- Tools must be able to scale. As the company grows, the tools need to scale up easily.
Next Page: Technology Toolkit and Practices
