M&S Solution Architect, Shruti Karat, discusses three reasons why IT managed services may be right for your organization. – Video transcript – Hello, Everyone, I wanted to take some time and talk about three reasons why IT managed services might be right for your business. Jumping right into it, reason number one, it allows you to focus on your core competencies. Every organization has core competencies that make you unique. It drives your business and differentiates you from other companies. However, all organizations have functions that are not part of their competitive advantage but is needed to be performed for … Read More
Business Intelligence Hampered by a Lack of Clear Role Management
A top 70 national university uses an enterprise-level solution to report on important university-wide research data and business intelligence. Access to this data is managed by roles across a multitude of schools within the university, but the lack of role management across the university was limiting access and use. To complicate things, the various stakeholders were initially reluctant to adopt a university-wide role framework or standard policy for provisioning and de-provisioning. In short: identity and access management (IAM) were inefficient and disjointed. Our team developed and implemented a phased approach to implement role-based access control (RBAC) framework to upgrade its … Read More
Big Challenges Facing Higher Education IT Administrators for 2020-2021
Watch the video of M&S Director of Higher Education, Kate Hazen, addressing some of the big challenges facing Higher Education IT Administrators in the coming year. Contact us to discuss how we can help you meet these challenges. – Video transcript – With the increased pressure on higher education along with diminishing budgets, higher education IT organizations are faced with some difficult decisions in regard to where to focus valuable time and resources. I believe three key areas should be addressed: Number One, there should be an increased emphasis on training and support for faculty and students in online technology … Read More
Monitoring Employee Productivity and Welfare
During normal operations, a mid-sized consulting firm needs to track and report on several different parameters regarding their employees. The disparate data on employees reside in several different systems, making access, and review a time-consuming process. As the COVID-19 event unfolds, the company’s managers find themselves needing more data points for evaluating and monitoring employee productivity, morale, and efficiency. Several new fields are added to the various systems, many of which will remain after the pandemic is resolved. While this provided useful data points, it exacerbated the challenge of having multiple systems. Using a tool that we created, our team … Read More
Thank you for joining the 2020 work-from-home experiment (whether you wanted to or not)
You already know the situation we’re in: we have all been plunged into the world’s largest work-from-home (WFH) experiment with very little time to adapt. This grand experiment has changed the rules for almost every working situation. Workers and companies that already had the ability for effective remote work are finding new challenges, now that seemingly everyone has joined the party. We have been refining the way our company works remotely since we began in 2002. Knowing how to get started, what’s important, and having the ability to reduce friction for your workforce will help you navigate through this time … Read More
The Big Shift: Converting Academia to Online Education
Higher education institutions have shuttered doors and shifted to remote learning for the remainder of the spring semester. Although students and parents will give most institutions a pass for this semester’s technological struggles, discontent will become increasingly vocalized as new, fully online sessions begin. Meanwhile, instructors that are struggling to effectively migrate their content to a usable online format likely will not have time to focus on pedagogy, leading to dissatisfied students and instructors, resulting in attrition among both, and ultimately impacting an institution’s livelihood. The success or struggle of many academic institutions in the wake of COVID-19 may depend … Read More
Quote to Cash (Q2C): 3 Ways to Move Your Business Forward
Quote to Cash (Q2C) touches multiple business departments and potential multiple technologies. Businesses that are looking for ways to support current state and growth are hungry for the solutions for their Q2C challenges. We believe that by partnering with a strategic partner who is willing to help you define your current state, tie your Q2C goals to business objectives, and measure ROI, you can seamlessly move your business forward in your Q2C journey. Define Q2C Current State Finding the solutions for your Q2C challenges is going to require looking at the process, product, people, and technology. It is important for … Read More
Develop a Better Data Sharing and Integration Strategy
Today’s higher education institutions are facing a multitude of challenges around data analysis, security, and increasingly hybrid architectures. The issue of how to balance ongoing security challenges while connecting cloud and on-premises applications is common across institutions. These challenges may lead many organizations to develop an integration strategy to help in the alignment of these increasingly complex architectures. However, limiting the focus to only integrations can become overly technically focused. Instead of developing an integration strategy, institutions should instead take a holistic approach to data sharing and develop an information strategy. As information is a valuable asset for organizations and … Read More