Ask a group of successful entrepreneurs to talk about their businesses and you could be in for a very long conversation. Ask the same CEOs how they manage technology, and you could be in for the opposite: a very long silence.

To varying degrees, every business — from high-tech manufacturers to low-tech retailers — needs some combination of software and hardware to operate. Those who maximize their return on technological investments by making smart, strategic purchases are often the most profitable. But how do you make those key decisions if, like most entrepreneurs, your technological expertise stops at opening e-mail attachments?

Sorting through the barrage of emerging tech tools is one of the greatest barriers to making the right decisions about applying technology within your business. And with pressure mounting in this slowing economy to deliver the same services at lower prices, every dollar wasted on the wrong hardware or software could have a lasting impact.

It's the reason why managing technology is far more complex than merely handing off duties to key personnel. Business owners need to educate themselves by researching the latest and greatest high-tech toys in their industry. They have to know which key staff to include in the decision-making process, make a sound business case for each purchase and implement those new tools without interrupting business.

Impossible? Far from it. As Canada's Top Women Entrepreneurs prove, you can harness technology to great effect by approaching the problem — or, rather, the opportunity — strategically.

Here are five of the best technology-management practices of companies from the 2008 PROFIT W100.

Follow the pack

Over the course of 22 years in the business of staging events from corporate dinners to lavish weddings, Debra Lykkemark has proudly catered to her customers' every need. But despite the steady growth of her Vancouver-based catering firm Culinary Capers Catering Inc. (No. 63 on this year's PROFIT W100 ranking), the entrepreneur saw a storm brewing on the horizon: in an industry destined to embrace automation, her firm was a painfully low-tech player.

Culinary Capers fell behind the technology curve early in this decade. Supply, labour and general budget management were becoming increasingly complex as the company grew, and neither Lykkemark, now 51, nor her senior staffers had the background to design an efficient technological solution to the problem. To make matters worse, she lacked the knowledge to ask the questions that could lead to the development of a sound technology strategy. If the company's practices and infrastructure weren't modernized, Lykkemark feared, Culinary Capers would lose some of its hard-won market share to competitors that were ready and able to adopt the best new technology tools.

To overcome the challenge, Lykkemark and two key staffers began by researching catering software packages used by other catering firms across North America. To know how to query slick vendors pitching their wares, Lykkemark picked the brains of her peers (none of whom were direct competitors) and did some comparison shopping. "We did a survey of people to find out how big their company was, what part of the software they were using — whether it was the whole program or just portions of it — and challenges they had with the software," she explains. Lykkemark used that information to create a set of questions to help choose the package that would best suit her company's needs.

She eventually found an all-in-one catering software produced by Gaithersburg, Md.-based hospitality software developer Synergy International. The program streamlined her business from event booking down to recipe management. Culinary Capers, originally run by five employees, grew to 35 full-time and 100 part-time staffers around the time Synergy was implemented — and it has since doubled in size, with no signs of slowing down.

Know what you want — and how to ask for it

While many CEOs rely on staff to help make their tech decisions, understanding exactly what to look for when hiring an IT manager or an outside IT firm — and, more specifically, what questions to ask of them — are crucial challenges.