Solutions & Stories
We’ve been promised since the 1980’s that businesses would eliminate paper-based sources of recording and sharing information. While massive progress has been made on this front, a failure mode we still see in nearly every company we encounter is: A paper form or document was replaced by a digital version, but that’s as far as it went. The data and the insights are still siloed and not leveraged to benefit customers or the business.
Read MoreCertain kinds of projects don’t do well under intensively planned and strictly monitored project management regimes. Most often, these are projects being run in dynamic environments without a lot of clarity and needing the ability to change LOTS. To succeed, these projects need frameworks that provide support for the project goals, embrace change, and adapt to the evolving environment. These frameworks fall under the banner of iterative, incremental delivery and are one of our favorite ways to deliver value to customers.
Read MoreBusinesses use lots of different software to take care of important tasks, such as accounting, file sharing and storage, Customer Relationship Management, or specialized operational apps. Most of the time, the team uses these different software packages independently because each is great at what it does or it is the only way to handle a specialized task.
More and more, software packages are offering varying degrees of features that enable integration. When we say “integration”, keep in mind it is a pretty broad term that can vary from the ability to export data from one package manually to sophisticated capabilities such as accessing the underlying database, getting notifications when something important has occurred, and even programmatically controlling the software like a user themselves might do. Even software without an API can be accessed automatically and made to share data.
It wasn’t all that long ago that we didn’t have a choice. Different software operated in disconnected silos and if you were lucky you could export a bit of data into Excel to manipulate, copy, and maybe re-import it into a different package. Now, particularly with cloud-based apps that do much of their work over the internet, we have a wide range of capabilities that make possible some pretty amazing ways of handling data.
Read MoreMany companies start their digital transformation thinking it is all about increasing efficiency and therefore saving money. The companies that achieve the most success with transformational efforts have learned, the more you make it about delivering better value to your customers, the bigger the benefits you’ll see.
Read MoreNews stories are filled with the promise and the fears of AI technology, but for those in smaller businesses, it is sparking conversations about what it is and what it may do for their work. We’ll start by reviewing some of what AI is (and isn’t) and then share some practical examples that companies of all sizes can access right now to help with their projects. We’ll review some of the drawbacks too
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