And how you can overcome it
It’ll come as no surprise that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way companies work forever. Organisations have gone from working in an office or on site full-time, to working remotely, to where we are now in a working-from-home or hybrid working environment.
A recent poll by Gartner found that 48% of employees are likely to continue working remotely, compared to 30% pre-COVID. These working shifts meant that companies globally heavily invested in digital. In the UK, 55% of survey respondents indicated they increased their cloud adoption as a direct result of the pandemic, and it seems as though the world has become more reliant on technology and data than ever.
As lockdowns and pandemic-related restrictions are finally coming to an end, one thing remains the same: proper email and information management processes are key to your business’ survival.
Project and business-critical information has never been more dispersed, with platforms like Microsoft Teams reaching 115 million daily users (an increase of 50%) during the pandemic. And in October 2019, Slack found that their customers spend 90+ minutes every day messaging their colleagues.
The question is no longer ‘have I saved this document or email’, but rather ‘where else is the information related to X stored?’.
Organisations run on data, and any mistakes or missing information can have disastrous consequences. From operational inefficiencies, where your team are spending hours searching for one piece of information, to damaging your firm’s reputation by making an uninformed decision when mistakenly working from an out-of-date document, there are huge ramifications of unmanaged data.
By committing to a Single Source of Truth and storing all business-critical information in one centralised location, you can have confidence in your information, knowing that it is always complete and up to date. You can remove time wasted on onerous admin tasks, be comfortable that you have all the information to hand, and ensure your team is fully equipped to make the right decisions.
The two easiest ways to secure a Single Source of Truth in your company are removing manual processes and increasing visibility. Relying on colleagues to follow processes to a tee is enough to make anyone nervous. By automating what you can, businesses can save time and money by taking the grunt work out of their data. Something we see all the time is that even when companies are completely paperless, their project and client information are disparate. Different teams and departments may work separately from each other and so this information remains siloed.
By using a centralised location to store data, or a common data environment to manage recording and storing information, everyone in a team can see and amend the single source of truth. It becomes painless to track any document and information changes, safely stores document revisions, and removes the burden of saving information away from a single person or team, allowing everyone to keep the Single Source of Truth intact.