Services

Take a look under the hood of many companies’ collaboration environments today, and you’ll find what I call “organized chaos.” Employees are using collaboration tools to get things done, but they’re frequently toggling between different applications to message colleagues, manage calendars, share documents and initiate video meetings.

Many organizations support different collaboration tools across departments. This might make sense if, say, an engineering team benefits from a different collaboration workflow than what other business units use. However, collaboration environments are often not the result of strategic decisions, but rather an ad hoc approach when deploying technology tools.

In many cases, business units adopt a given collaboration solution simply because it’s one that employees are already familiar with. As a result, companies miss out on the benefits that come from adopting the tools that are best suited to helping them meet their business goals.

For many business and educational leaders, the resumption of work and learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be a challenge. Enforcing health and safety policies and detecting noncompliance can be difficult to accomplish, especially in high-traffic areas, but it’s crucial. Enhanced video surveillance can help. In recent months, many organizations have repurposed existing EVS systems, typically deployed for physical security, to support screening measures related to COVID-19, such as thermal imaging scans, occupancy management and contact tracing.

Layering face mask detection into video analytics, and potentially integrating it with access control systems, provides an additional layer of protection. As with occupancy management and contact tracing, many companies find that automated solutions are far more effective at mask monitoring than humans are.

When college students and their parents sign their tuition checks, they’re not just paying for the education they receive in the classroom or the degrees they earn at the end of four years of instruction. They’re paying, in large part, for the college experience.

But many higher learning institutions are currently operating with a remote learning model. Students at these schools can’t mingle on the quad, hang out in their dorm rooms or even study together in the library. To deliver the value these students are paying for, colleges and universities must find ways to create an online experience that comes as close as possible to replicating the energy and engagement of the on-campus environment.

Increasingly, colleges and universities are turning to student devices to help deliver that experience. Here are some lessons from institutions that are taking a successful approach.

Given the unprecedented business context of this year, things are even more challenging. Many organizations are still operating largely with a remote work model, and employees often join firms without ever even coming into the office to meet with their managers and colleagues — let alone HR personnel. Under these conditions, it is impossible to conduct traditional orientation programs, or even to simply sit down with new employees to lead them through the various payroll forms and other documents they need to complete.

Many companies are finding value in HR Service Delivery from ServiceNow. While the Now platform is primarily known for its IT service management capabilities, it can also deliver consumer-like HR experiences to employees, helping companies to get their workers up and running as quickly as possible.

Welcome back to the third part of this blog series, where I’ve been exploring the options available in the cloud contact center space. A quick recap of who we have talked about in this series: The first post was on the power of RingCentral, the second was showing off the red-hot Five9.

In this third blog, I will explore where Cisco Systems is at in this cloudy landscape. In a business landscape influenced by the pandemic and remote work, cloud computing has been a valued resource for many companies, especially those relying on cloud contact center technology. Let’s dig into where Cisco, one of the on-premises leaders of contact center, is with cloud.

A large organization I work with recently experienced a serious cybersecurity incident. Ransomware had struck the business, crippling its technology systems and causing an outage that lasted more than 300 hours. This type of outage would have a devastating impact for any organization, but this company felt the pain acutely because it is a Software as a Service provider. The ransomware took down its SaaS offerings which, in turn, affected the critical business operations of hundreds of its customers.

After the dust settled, the company’s CISO contacted CDW to ask how we could help him better mitigate and respond to disasters in the future. He knew that deficiencies existed in the company’s technology architecture. He also understood that correcting the deficient technologies would not be enough. They needed assistance identifying gaps in their program in addition to understanding the impact of losing their SaaS offerings. The firm was determined to avoid the financial and reputational damage of another serious outage.