With the world turned upside down, some industries are decentralizing their workforce while others are experiencing an explosion of new hires. You solve the biggest problems first — ensuring skeleton crews can keep the office lights on, at-home workers can access their VPNs and call their customers, and new hires have the basic equipment required to fulfill their increasingly vital roles.

Once the dust settles (a bit), you are hit with a second wave of challenges — things you didn’t even consider before. If the office is still open, who’s ordering toner for the printers and changing it when they run low? For employees that need to produce business-critical documents, is there a printer powerful enough to address those “asks” and small enough to fit in an ad-hoc home office? If you doubled your print demand when you doubled your essential workforce, will your current printers be up to the task?

I’m going to walk you through these critical printer questions and suggest some ready-made solutions that our team has developed.

In my role as product manager at CDW for emerging technologies, I work with vendors that are producing some amazing new solutions. Many of these products are being taken up by emergency response and public safety organizations.

When it comes to emergency response, technologies such as drones and augmented reality (AV) and virtual reality (VR) are capable of assisting frontline workers in safely executing their tasks. Healthcare professionals and first responders can leverage those same technologies to maintain social distance and support early detection of contamination, and can also use mobile devices to stay in contact with non-urgent medical patients. Read about more use cases for emerging technologies.

A common concern among CIOs today is operating their IT departments as a business. In a way, these CIOs are beginning to think like COOs. And as they do, they’re implementing changes that lead to improvements in their operations. They’re managing their workflows more strategically and effectively, and that pays dividends for customers. As IT leaders bolster IT operations, they’re also adding value to their companies.

So how can an IT team intent on internal improvement ensure that its transformation helps the company as whole? I tell my clients to tackle such initiatives in three distinct steps.

New technologies get a lot of attention. In fact, you probably hear a nearly constant stream of discussion about technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, machine learning and the Internet of Things. Sometimes, it even seems impossible to avoid the acronyms for these technologies — AI, VR, ML and IoT.

By comparison, radio frequency identification is largely ignored outside of certain trade journals. Retailers, however, should pay attention to RFID, which has provided the retail industry with a way to identify and track inventory for the past 15 years.

When it comes to IT standards, the ITIL (formerly an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library) framework is different from regulatory standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and HIPAA. While those standards require organizations to demonstrate compliance or risk harsh consequences such as fines, the ITIL framework is a voluntary set of best practices for organizations to follow to ensure that they’re aligning their IT services with the needs of the business. It’s both nonprescriptive and nonproprietary.

ITIL 4, the first major update of the framework since 2007, largely emphasizes the same values and priorities as previous versions. However, ITIL 4 was designed to keep up with recent trends in software development and IT operations. Here are four of the most significant changes to the ITIL framework.

Today’s unmanned aircraft systems — better known as drones — can be programmed to accomplish a slew of important jobs. In fact, drones are poised to radically improve many public safety applications, from fire departments using drones with sensors to locate people trapped by fire, to rescue teams sending drones to locate lost hikers in our vast national parks — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Drones themselves are already highly sophisticated and largely commodity technologies. What makes a drone application special are the sensors, software, flight services and data analytics that users bring to bear.