One management consultant for a boutique professional services firm said he sometimes compared competition between his company and larger competitors to a mouse scrambling between the legs of a herd of elephants. Children’s cartoons to the contrary, elephants aren’t really scared of mice. Still, boutique professional services firms can capitalize on some important advantages to compete with larger players.

Shadow IT is when employees use unapproved software, apps, and devices to do their jobs. Typically, employees have good intentions and may turn to various ad-hoc services to get their work done because they don’t believe their employer provides them with a good solution. Since the 2020 Coronavirus outbreak, surveys of IT professionals have revealed that the rise in employees working from home has generated a surge in this practice.

When the world changed in 2020 and workers were sent home to do business just as they would have at the office, professional services firms — like accounting firms — became virtual overnight. It’s safe to say that this situation is decidedly more “unique” than most. Offices were empty, lights off, and businesses started to operate exclusively via the power of the internet for collaboration, communication, and business operations.

At its core, the term data governance refers to a system of decision rights and accountability for all information-related processes that exist within an organization. In other words, it’s a way to not only maintain visibility over the information your business is creating every day. It’s also a way to track the formal management of those assets as accurately as possible.

In an era where more people are working remotely than at literally any point up until now, it’s safe to say that business leaders all over are suddenly forcing themselves to learn a lot about how to manage these new remote workforces that they find themselves in charge of.