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Online Tools Creating more Flexible 21st Century Businesses

Canterbury is consistently being recognised as one of the top 25 cities outside of London for new business creation. As we enter the second half of the second decade of the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly easy to found a services-based business in the UK, and around the world as a whole. This is largely down to the creation of global business and service platforms on the Internet, which can be used and accessed the world over.

The Era of Big Data

In times past, businesses needed to survey customers and potential customers to discern how their products and services were being received. They would rely upon sales statistics phoned or emailed through. Furthermore, teams and departments would often battle to effectively share and use information from others while business organisations were highly hierarchical.

Today, things work a little differently. Big data is streamed almost instantaneously into central storage and processing locations online. This has revolutionised stock orders, shopping, warehousing and logistics. Teams are able to store almost unlimited data online and when well organised with the right permissions, the data can be accessed by any employee, anywhere. This means there is better access to information across diverse teams, departments, and levels on a need to know basis.

Scalable Business Services Transforming B2B

The aim of the B2B market has always been to provide goods and services to other businesses which they cannot do profitably themselves. Outsourcing and subcontracting has traditionally been something of a fine balance between doing it better in house at a larger cost or outsourcing it and hoping it will be ok. The biggest downside of doing everything in house is the prospect of layoffs and legacy payments should the business start to contract or change focus.

In the 21st century, businesses across Kent have become more dynamic. It is now possible for the entrepreneur to concentrate on the areas of their business they are most comfortable with while outsourcing almost all of the other services. With 1 in 7 people in Kent working from home, many of them are providing these B2B services including writers, website designers, graphic artists, virtual assistants, editors, accountants and administrators. They allow a business to scale up and down as needed because freelancers are paid on a per job or per hour basis with no guarantee of work.

Handy Platforms for Diverse Workgroups

This outsourcing and data comes hand-in-hand with a proliferation of business-friendly platforms and tools online. These range from business planning and scheduling tools such as Trello, which can run free or paid, to in-team communication workspaces such as Slack and Skype. Growing businesses can also engage developers to build back-end work systems to process work as a team. All of these make it possible to hire or outsource work to people all over the world who can access the same information to drive the business forward. In doing so, businesses can be more selective over hires while cutting business location costs to practically zero.

Blog By Sally Keys