One of the biggest aspects of running a modern enterprise is trying to handle the digital transformation process. There have been some incredible strides made within the last decade regarding the abilities of consumer IT, and they have started to inform larger changes in workplaces around the world. According to Forbes contributor Rawn Shah, there has been some serious change specifically regarding how the self-service culture and the established IT hierarchy are supposed to interact with one another. The challenges that initially stood in the way of things like bring your own device strategies, however, are beginning to fall away as more discussion and understanding occurs.
"Digital transformation brings back the notion that processes cannot and should not be entirely stripped of the person or role executing them," Shah wrote. "For years we have looked at a process as an idealization of how things happen, and stripped out the messy detail of who makes things happen. This is where knowledge expertise and experience improves or accelerates the process. Without it, we are simply looking at a system that ignores such accelerators just so we can have a lowest common denominator of predictable activity."
An area where there has been significant head-butting between employees and IT departments involves the fax machine. Many modern professionals don't see the point in using this kind of hardware when it's possible to send an email attachment that requires no printing or scanning. But the reason that faxing is still in place is because email encryption options are generally not advanced enough to provide proper security for sensitive messages. The solution here is not to ban email, but to find a solution more suitable for proper digital transformation. In this case, cloud-based or online faxing has proven to be an effective solution.
Businesses viewed as 'out of touch'
There are probably plenty of workers out there who would say they feel under-supported in the office. Recent research, however, suggests that this problem is not only prevalent, but working against digital transformation.
According to TMCnet contributor Mae Kowalke, "businesses need a reality check." Kowalke cites a new study from MetLife that found that only 46 percent of businesses believe that they are "a great place to work." Only 31 percent of the employees that actually work for these companies, however, would agree. Kowalke stated that the solution here is to listen to staffers and make serious efforts to meet their needs. Organizations that pay attention to the concerns of their team members are more likely to succeed on the modern enterprise landscape. Supporting workers by supplying them with more effective digital tools, for example, can go a long way when people feel as though the tech assets provided to them are insufficient.
Faxing considered a cumbersome task by many
While the consumerization of IT has created a workforce that is much better equipped to succeed, it has created some problems. Historically, tech workers have been the ones to handle everything related to hardware and programs. Operations like installations and updates were handled by IT, and that was that. But the unprecedented swell of personal devices in the workplace was the kind of power many employees were not ready to handle.
Restrictions and rules put into place by IT have purpose. They are not meant to purposely inhibit workers. But the staff itself doesn't always see things that way, and will knowingly disobey regulations if it means getting their work done faster or more efficiently. One place that this issue pops up in regularly is on the fax front. Faxes are still a federally-required channel for many different industries, and opting to use email attachments instead is considered a risky move that can result in significant data loss. This is something that many employees don't understand, and even when they do there is no guarantee that they will heed the requests of the IT department.
In order to reduce the chances of this happening, businesses have to invest in a solution that marries the security of fax with the mobile-friendly convenience of email. Digital transformation can only succeed when decision makers realize they must embrace an employee's way of thinking and take their concerns seriously. In terms of faxing, this means moving the system online. Like other communications channels, more people are realizing that faxing no longer requires a physical machine and can be turned into a software-defined asset. As long as the actual fax servers are still in place, how the faxes are sent and received are up to the preferences of those performing the actions in question.
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