Gershwin is wrong about this particular summer. The livin' ain't easy. Besides the normal slowdown many companies feel during the summer months, when you consider the widening recession and skyrocketing gasoline prices, this summer promises more pain than pleasure. It's like we have a sunburn before we even get to the beach.

Let's look at three steps and one attitude adjustment you can make this summer to turn slow time into growth time.

First of all, realize technology is no longer “that stuff” that replaced the typewriter and helps you read your e-mail. Technology is now the tent pole for your business: everything hangs off your technology in some way or another.

White collar knowledge worker jobs require hands on technology for almost every function, from e-mail to spreadsheets to collaboration tools to project management software to desktop Web conferencing. Those jobs scream for technology, and it is often used to link people across the Internet the way the water cooler drew them together pre-PC.

Blue collar jobs rely almost as much on technology, but much of it remains hidden to many workers. Yet every small company benefits from computerized accounting, online bill payments, e-mail, fax to e-mail, and some type of collaboration tools to coordinate the increasingly geographically dispersed back office. Field techs use smart phones linked to shared calendars or forwarded from VoIP phone systems. Remote office dwellers connect to the same files as those in the main office, thanks to online collaboration tools or VPNs links between inexpensive home office routers and main office routers. Can you do your job without anything that has an on/off switch and an LCD screen today? Almost certainly not.

As Aberdeen analyst Michael Dortch says, “technology is now too important to be left to IT people.” Technology that doesn't support your business has no reason to be in your business.

So how do you make technology work for you rather than against you? One way is to make it cheaper. Review "Money saving tips" from last December. You're welcome to spend between $250 and $400 for Microsoft Office 2007, depending on retailer and the version of Office you buy, but you can get the same features using the free OpenOffice.org productivity suite. Your money, your choice, but I choose OpenOffice for at least four of five computers in companies I help.