Technology can help grow your business in a number of ways.  Here are direct ways that technology can increase the amount of money a business makes:

Electronic Marketing

This includes having a high-quality, informative, truly useful website, where your customers can come to find out about you and what differentiates you from the competition.  In some cases, eCommerce – the ability to sell from the website – is appropriate.  Electronic Marketing also includes new things such as social networking and viral marketing.  The Next Big Thing, although the idea has been around for some time, is location based marketing – marketing via text and email to a customer’s cell phone as they walk past a store, utilizing the GPS information included with every new phone.

Productivity Enhancements

This category includes those tools that extend both your workplace and your time – mobile computing, which allows you to retrieve information from anywhere as though you were in the office, and remote workforce, which allows your employees the ability to work from home, the beach, anywhere there is Internet access – improving their quality of life and stretching their availability.  Making use of mobile devices – Blackberry, iPhone, other smartphones, to achieve greater connection to your workforce – is also in this category.

Improved Customer Service

By making information easier to get to, and by pulling together all of the data about a customer, you have the ability to serve the customer better – with greater consistency, with greater speed, and with lower likelihood of missing opportunities.  Included in this category is a well-conceived, and well-utilized, customer relationship management system.  Also, a solid document management system is indicated here – and the two need to be tied together.