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.

As a father of a 13-year-old boy, I've often marveled at how different we are when it comes to using technology. Call me old-fashioned, but my son has it good.

Even now, lots of businesses first design their website to work on laptops and desktops. Afterwards, they will also make sure those same sites function well enough on phones and tablets, almost like an afterthought. Surprisingly, that's what most people mean when they discuss responsive website design. In an era when even Google has advocated for mobile-first development, such a cart-before-the-horse approach doesn't signal digital transformation leadership.

One of the biggest problems that most organizations deal with these days has less to do with the sheer volume of data they're working with on a daily basis and is more about just how much of it is unstructured. Unstructured data, as the term suggests, is that information that either doesn't have some type of pre-defined model, or that isn't organized in any pre-determined way.

At its core, federated search is a technique commonly used for searching multiple collections of text at the same time — thus making it easier for employees within a business to find the data that they need to better do their jobs.

When it comes to your organization's data, it's critical for you to understand that you're talking about so much more than just a series of 1s and 0s sitting on a hard drive somewhere. Contained inside that data is the true story of what is going on with your business. It contains the insight you need to do better and more informed work on a daily basis. To always make the right decision as quickly as possible given the circumstances.