The asterisk has long been used to highlight exceptions or to call attention to a footnote or annotation. For example, a home run record that was influenced by an extended baseball season was noted with an asterisk. This mark is also used to call out legal terms or extended information on a topic.

I think we should be using an asterisk in our conversations about Industry 4.0. This blog explains why I chose an asterisk instead of some other mark in my description of Industry 4.0*.

As businesses restructure and begin to reopen to a changed business environment, many are realizing the importance of disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) planning ― and how integral collaboration technology is to these plans.

For the last several months, CDW has been busy working with our customers to address these DR and BC needs. Managed services often play a role in these engagements. In this blog, I will cover how CDW helps customers prepare for disaster events, how we help organizations operate during them and, finally, how we can assist in managing the user experience during the reopening stages as well as the new normal that will follow.

Almost no company would roll out a new flagship product to its customers without engaging in extensive market research, aggressive advertising, robust public relations and careful analysis of the product’s performance. It’s puzzling, then, that many organizations roll out new IT solutions to their internal users with little more than a handful of training sessions — if that.

When a business replaces familiar tools and workflows with new technologies, the change requires a culture shift. I’m always surprised when an organization spends millions of dollars on a new tool for their employees but then skips out on adoption services. Sure, an organization may still get basic functionality from its IT with this approach, but it won’t attain the actual goal of rolling out a new solution: to build value for the business.

Here are five steps that every organization should take during a significant IT deployment.

The promises of the CMDB have been around a long time. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) popularized the concept back in the 1980s and 1990s as a foundational element of IT service management.

The benefits are clear: having a trusted data source with a rich set of relational information provides organizations with decision-making capabilities to support more efficient operations, better user experiences and proactive mitigation of risk. The marketplace has no shortage of services, technologies and service management platforms that support and rely on the CMDB. A CMDB, and by extension, the capabilities it enables, continues to be an important goal for organizations, even more so now considering the impact of digital transformation.

Before joining CDW, I served as the director of curriculum and innovation for a large school district in Texas. In that role, I witnessed the creativity and dedication of teachers firsthand. I often traveled with those educators to conferences where we learned together about exciting new technologies that could transform the classroom experience. When we arrived back at work on Monday, we were often disappointed to learn that the networking or security teams wouldn’t allow us to use our new favorite tool in the classroom due to privacy issues.

Back then, I had a hard time understanding the rationale behind those decisions. I felt like the “Department of No” was simply getting in the way of the real work of the district. Today, that experience helps me understand both sides of the equation as I work with CDW clients to develop their security programs.

I know that teachers are only trying to do what is best for their students, but they often don’t understand that they might be putting children in jeopardy if they’re not using safe, vetted applications in the classroom. That’s why I helped develop the K-12 Blueprint for Security toolkit, to better educate administrators, teachers, students and parents about privacy and security risks.

Recent events turned our working lives upside down. With very little notice, millions of people around the world were sent home from their offices to suddenly adopt a remote work lifestyle. Four months into this adventure, most knowledge workers have adapted to working styles that replace conference rooms with video meetings and coffee chats with virtual happy hours.

I believe that we’ve arrived at a new normal where remote work will become a standard arrangement for knowledge workers. Both companies and employees will benefit from this approach. While employees can better balance their lives, companies will be able to reduce overhead expenses by consolidating and eliminating expensive physical offices. This work style comes with new cybersecurity considerations, and I urge organizations to adopt six key practices to adapt to our new working patterns.