Thom and Sam will discuss how organizations around the world have adapted and changed their workplaces from location-based to employee-based and the implications that it has on employees, culture, and technology. With an inside view demonstrating how the tools people use on a day-to-day basis have a huge impact on productivity, morale, and even retention.

This fireside chat will highlight not just the advantages of equipping your workforce effectively but also the pitfalls to avoid and the lessons learned along the way. Thom and Sam also discuss the long-term impacts of digital transformation and what challenges are faced as a result of the often rapid and chaotic adoption brought forth by the pandemic and other influencing factors.

The post Hybrid Productivity – How Sustainable is the New Working Paradigm? appeared first on Gigaom.

One time-honored business process that is clearly ripe for change is working with paper. Since its inception in 1993, the PDF electronic document format has enabled paperless document sharing, emerging as a true standard when Adobe “opened” the format in early 2007.

With businesses moving now to adopt 100% digital workflows, the push to the fully paperless office is well underway. PDF and eSigning are both core components of enabling digital document workflows, but neither has traditionally been widely deployed across organizations; rather, only certain users get such capabilities. This is now changing as organizations understand that digitizing document workflows is foundational to larger digital transformation initiatives.

This paper examines the drivers of increased digital workflow transformation, the benefits and challenges that await enterprises that engage in it, and the increasing necessity to make document workflows fully digital. In an effort to assist the evaluation of solutions that will enable digitization, the report also details the results of real-world testing of three market-leading solutions in the PDF and eSignature space. By running these solutions through a series of “use cases” that knowledge workers commonly encounter, we understand how well each solution might meet the broader demands of an organization looking to digitize its document processes.

The three products reviewed for this paper are:

• DocuSign
• Adobe Acrobat DC
• The Nitro Productivity Suite

All three products perform as expected. DocuSign holds its own in the e-signature space, but needs to be coupled with an additional PDF solution to enable a full digital workflow. Acrobat DC is slick, capable, and multi-platform. It is also the most expensive of the three solutions. The Nitro Productivity Suite is capable, cost-efficient, and easy to both learn and understand. It also successfully completed the most use cases of the products tested in this report. However, its desktop PDF component only runs on Windows.

The final recommendations from this field test offer valuable insights into the relative features and capabilities of the three solutions. However, it’s important to keep in mind that value ultimately depends on individual requirements and use cases. Among the findings:

• While Adobe has a significant presence in creative environments and departments using primarily Mac desktops, organizations can roll out Adobe Acrobat DC at lower head-counts to accommodate the higher per-seat cost.
• In environments where Windows is the primary operating system, the Nitro Productivity Suite provides full PDF document creation, manipulation, and signing capabilities across the workforce. The lower per-seat cost makes this more palatable from a financial perspective.
• DocuSign is the household name when it comes to eSignatures. In terms of functionality it is comprehensive, but imposes a price point that some companies may find too high for everyday use.

The Venn diagram in Figure 1 offers a high-level perspective of the capabilities offered by DocuSign, Acrobat DC, and the Nitro Productivity Suite. By understanding where each product’s capabilities intersect, organizations can better determine how these solutions can meet their needs.

Figure 1: High-Level Capabilities

The post End-to-End Digital Document Transformation Field Test Report appeared first on Gigaom.

In this business technology impact report, we review a leading organization’s effort to determine which regulatory framework to adopt and map to business results. We will refer to this company by a fictional name – Fides Ltd. They had started an internal initiative on certification but were getting caught up with details, overly burdensome policy, and procedure documentation. Only after a series of consultations and two workshops with a third-party, did they understand the positive, real-world benefits that a pragmatic security program could bring. Not just internally, but also to the client-deliverable work and bottom-line profits.

Key outcomes from the workshop and consultancy work were:

• Internal efforts at accomplishing information security certification can potentially hinder business efforts if not launched correctly.
• Security initiatives require senior-level support to succeed.
• Understanding the culture, goals, and values of an organization is equally important to an information security initiative’s success as it ensures senior-level support and understanding, sufficient funding, and aligns the security initiatives to the business.
• Assigning clear metrics to the broader information security program ensures implementation will be effective and successful.
• Senior management must have an evident understanding of measuring and treating information security risks to ensure they understand the principles the certification program is operating under.

As a result, Fides was able to implement the ANSI ISO 27001:2013 standard across the organization. In this report we look at the steps involved, and the key lessons learned in how to select and adopt a security standards framework.

The post Selecting and Adopting a Security-Standards Framework appeared first on Gigaom.