Contributed by Brian Manning, Co-Founder, President and Chief Digital Officer at Centric Digital
If you were to enter my office at Centric Digital, you may wonder if I’ve either left the company or if I do any work. It’s a totally paperless office.
Not a single piece of paper crowds my desk. Ever. But don’t worry, I’m pretty busy.
Want to know my secret? Here it is: I keep everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, in the cloud. For example, if I need to take notes in a meeting, I grab my tablet or laptop and jam out notes on Evernote or store individual copies to Box.com to maintain organization and broader visibility, if necessary.
At Centric Digital, we enable our clients’ success by transforming their digital experiences and operations. Our team always practices what they preach when it comes to cultural and business best practices.
For example, take a client meeting where a group may need to take thorough notes.
Let’s examine a before and after scenario:
- Before: You’ve probably been here before. Your team heads into a client meeting (maybe one in an international locale) and promptly takes notes on notepads. In this scenario, each individual on the team is redundantly gathering the same information and worse, it’s not immediately available or easily distributed to the broader team who likely need the information to start work effectively.
- After: Instead your team whips out their tablets or laptops at the meeting and instead of various streams of note taking, they all contribute to one cloud based document in real time. Trust me, it’s not chaos! It’s very clear who is incrementally contributing what information or data.
What’s more, in appropriate settings, you can control access to each Cloud document to the appropriate remote team members so they can peer into the progress and even pose questions and ideas for your team as the meeting is happening. Collectively, you’re enhancing your team’s strength and demonstrating solid value to clients.
That’s the definition of transparency and visibility.
But this leads me to another best practice, which relates more to technology and even more to the way you approach your business strategy with technology.
In short: As a business, focus on your core competencies.
For example, hosting and data security isn’t a business Centric Digital is in, so we contract with leading partners to securely manage our hosting needs.
Hosting and data security is a growing concern of our clients, especially given the latest rise in incidents. Some companies believe they can be safer if they take security and data storage into their own hands. But if you think about it, that doesn’t necessarily mitigate risk. If major companies that are leaders in hosting are getting hacked despite their extensive security architecture, then it’s a reality that anyone is game to be hacked. While it may seem like giving up control, we tend to leave security up to security experts.
Don’t try to be a one-stop shop wonder and always keep true to the key value you offer to the marketplace. We combine our strengths with best in class cloud applications to deliver our services. Whether it’s internally or with clients, your business will operate more efficiently when paperless.
To learn more about Centric Digital’s collaboration with leading Cloud SaaS providers, click here.