The ACCENT Learning Hub

More and more businesses are moving parts or all of their IT operations to the cloud. According to one estimate, in 2019 about 60% of business workloads were being hosted in the cloud. And that figure can only be expected to increase. For many businesses, the advantages the cloud offers, such as reduced costs, increased flexibility, higher scalability, and easier disaster recovery, are too compelling to forego.

The Memorial Day holiday is behind us, signaling the start of summer. I hope you were able to enjoy some family time along with your favorite foods over the three-day weekend. I am so thankful to everyone in all branches of the United States Armed Forces who currently protect our freedoms as Americans. I pay homage to those who have given their lives for us. As we move into June, I wonder how you spent the month of May. For me, this past month was used to get the planning and financial juices flowing. Here at Accent, we spend quite a bit of time with business planning and this includes thinking about the business of business, and the role that Information Technology plays in shaping the workplace.

The month of April has been filled with web meetings and uncertainty.  While we've been advancing our video skills more than we ever thought possible, we’ve also been figuring out how to maneuver through our new circumstances. Like many of you, I have been working hard on getting paperwork together and submitting applications for the Payroll Protection Program. 

I don’t even know where to start. If you’d have told me two months ago that we’d be debating over which businesses are “essential” and that millions of Americans would be sent home to work overnight, I would’ve told you you’re crazy. But here we are.

Operating a business is expensive. Between payroll, materials, taxes, equipment, legal services, etc., it’s no surprise that every business owner would like to lower their costs to improve their margins. It seems like almost every day, a business executive tells me that they want lower IT costs without sacrificing service. There are four key areas I tell business leaders to check first to ensure they are maximizing the results from their IT investment.

More than a decade ago, the U.S. economy was hit by the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.  In the early months of the recession, American businesses lost an average 800,000 jobs per month as the economic growth declined at more than 8% during the 4th quarter of 2009 and the 1st quarter of 2009.

Whether your company has 15 employees or 50,000, it is imperative that your technology consistently works how it’s supposed to. You need a clear vision of where technology is going in your business, and you need to get rid of roadblocks that are holding the company back from achieving its goals.

Many business executives see IT as a necessary evil. You definitely need it to get your job done – emailing, processing orders, billing, etc. – but it’s just something that keeps the business humming along. These executives are missing out because the most successful companies today are the ones that see a clear relationship between a well-executed IT strategy and its power to help move the business forward. What if there was a way to go from “humming along” to using technology as a competitive advantage – an advantage that could move the needle toward growth, increased profitability and improved customer satisfaction?

When you think about getting a better handle on data management for your manufacturing, distribution or logistics company, your train of thought might take you immediately to getting new software. While this is a step in the process, putting it at the front-end is the wrong place because data management isn’t about the software. It’s about changing the way that your employees and your business operates on a day to day basis.

As we move closer to the end-of-life date for Windows 7, Microsoft support for this popular operating system will be going… going… gone before we know it. January 14, 2020 might seem like it’s a long way off, but hopefully you’re already convinced that you need to upgrade. Here at Accent, we’re feeling a sense of urgency to get the word out that the transition process to Windows 10 needs to begin ASAP, and here are the two biggest mistakes that we don’t want you to make.