Mark Needham, winner of the British Chamber of Commerce Entrepreneur of the Year Award, shares some of his experience of the world of business – and why keeping on top of the latest technology is crucial.

If you run a small business, it’s easy to stick with the technology you know. While corporations tend to have regular training and updating of skills for managers, it is tempting to keep flogging the computer and telephony kit you bought years ago, until suddenly you realise how old-fashioned you must look.

I’m always interested in new technologies, not just shiny new gadgets, but also things that simplify the way we previously did something. The buzzword of the moment is ‘cloud computing’ or ‘software as a service’.  This is easiest to explain with an example from computer games. A few years ago you bought a CD and played it at home.  Today, if your kids want to play, you have to pay online. This is software as a service.

Online business services are often free or significantly cheaper than buying a whole software package. Google Documents, a group of free programs, which anybody with a Googlemail or Gmail identity can use, is one such service.

It includes simplified equivalents of Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which you use online. You either upload your existing documents, or create new documents on it. The documents are stored on Google's servers, and you can log on and update them from anywhere. Crucially, you can allow other people to log in and use the same document too.

In my spare time I act as one of two administrators of a group called the Cambridge Bail Circle. We try to arrange bail for refugees, and to do so we maintain two lists - one of members who might be prepared to offer bail, and one of refugees who need it.

Sometimes we get in a muddle if I update one of the lists, while my colleague thought he had the master list, or vice versa.

So now, I have uploaded these documents to Google Documents. Whenever I need to update them, I log on to them. Rather than send my colleague the documents as an email attachment, next time I need to send them to him, I will just send him a link. He can then update the same original.

Not only is this a more efficient way of working together, it also stops my inbox filling up.

And Google Docs will go some way to ensuring that I do not single handedly fill up our new server. It’s more efficient - and Google is paying the storage costs.

One of the benefits of running a small business is that you can decide to do something on a Monday morning, and have made the change by lunchtime. Using Google Documents, at least instead of emailing documents to and fro, is one of these changes. Next time you are asked to upgrade your backup system to larger storage, try comparing the cost of this to an online backup service, which copies your data over your broadband connection to somewhere distant and cheap, rather than taking up the time of your staff in your office.