To remain competitive as a professional services provider for rapidly growing and evolving companies, consultants have to deal with an ever-more-complex business environment. Very often, today’s projects have a broad and large scope, involving global locations, multiple stakeholders, and of course, high client expectations. These days, meeting those expectations often requires beating the odds.
So, it’s official. We are in a recession. But some experts say investment in digital transformation during a recession should remain steady. The National Bureau of Economic Research declared on June 8 that the recession began in February. It’s an unusual recession, by all standards — one not caused by macroeconomic financial mechanisms as in 2008 with the housing market collapse or in 1981 on the heels of tight monetary policy and an energy crisis.
When lockdown hit, it immobilized the entire industry; staff had to transition to working from home, tenants and clients could only be supported online or over the phone and all repairs and maintenance work was brought to a sharp halt. Fast forward to now, after months of moving operations online and trying to digitize processes, several industry challenges have been put under the magnifying glass.
M-Files bested all competitors in this year’s edition of the Nucleus Research Content Management (CM) Technology Value Matrix. Similar to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, the matrix places vendors in four regions — assessing them on two key factors: functionality and usability. M-Files earned the top spot for both criteria, placed in the Leader quadrant for the seventh consecutive year.
Information, in all its formats, is the lifeblood of business. Yet, it is an asset that’s often poorly managed, and therefore, provides less value than its potential. Let’s face it. Information only has value when it is refined and used for decision-making. So why do we not treat information with the respect it deserves? There can be many reasons for this, but I believe that fundamentally, it is about ease of access and use.
As one observer noted, even large disasters like Chernobyl didn’t completely stem from a lack of documentation. This crisis caused so much damage because people failed to follow the planned and documented processes in time. While it’s important to document processes, no flowcharts or instructions will help businesses run more efficiently or overcome unexpected unusual obstacles if nobody follows them.
Along with so many dramatic changes the coronavirus pandemic has abruptly introduced into our daily lives, a lot more business has moved to the internet. Because of social distancing, millions of employees have exchanged their commutes for a home office. At the same time, all sorts of companies have seen an explosion of traffic to their eCommerce and online service sites. During this time, businesses have been forced to rapidly shift both their marketing and servicing channels.
