Every day, the worlds' businesses produce and collect a mind-boggling amount of data. Contained inside that data, like a million needles in a million haystacks, are the key insights needed to create better products and services, forge better and longer-lasting relationships with clients, and operate more efficiently. But according to one recent study, poor data quality costs the United States economy as much as $3.1 trillion every year.

We're now more than a month into 2022, and one thing we can say for sure is that the world hasn't "gone back to normal." For many of us, remote working and online meetings are a fact of life. App and subscription services deliver our music, television, and groceries. Compared to just two years ago, the way we work and live has changed drastically.

In business, if you were to ask a group of executives to name their top five investments which have a measurable positive return on investment (ROI), you would probably see many of the same, usual suspects on their lists: ad programs, salespeople, fulfillment systems, marketing infrastructure, lead generation programs, to cite a few. That checks out. Sales and marketing investments are usually viewed through the lens of ROI, and as well they should. But what about the ROI of technology investments?

Regardless of the type of business you're talking about, organizations invest in digital transformation for a myriad of different reasons. Some turn to the power of modern technology to improve efficiency - empowering employees to communicate from department to department easier than ever before. Others want to guarantee that data can flow freely across the enterprise, making sure that the critical information that people need to do their jobs is always in the right hands.

The still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge for us all, to be sure — but it's also brought with it its fair share of lessons that will continue to be relevant and valuable long after everything has calmed down again. This is particularly true in terms of what it has taught us about data — something that has been an essential part of the response for communities, governments and businesses everywhere.

Out of all of the major changes to the way we do business that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, remote work isn't necessarily one of them. According to a study conducted in 2019, about 99% of respondents said that they would gladly work remotely at least some of the time for the rest of their careers.

One of the biggest reasons why most organizations embrace document management in the first place is because they're attempting to solve a number of crucial challenges, essentially all at the exact same time. If your organization is still living in a world of paper-based or even spreadsheet-based processes, simply finding the document you need when you need it can become an uphill battle.