| | OCTOBER 20178CIOReviewBy Daniel M. Horton, CIO, Sallyport GlobalENABLING A COLLABORATIVE WORKFORCE AROUND THE GLOBEEnabling your employees to collaborate as a unified workforce despite their geography is imperative to the success of your organization. This should no longer be shelved as a second thought, if you want to continue holding a competitive advantage in your industry. Supporting the way your company operates, your culture, and business processes should be a technology solution that enables collaborative productivity no matter what time zone your employees work in. Cloud and mobile technologies can create an environment to secure, retrieve, and allow access to critical information regardless of location. To implement this technology, you must first have the proper infrastructure in place to support its success. Although this could present several unique challenges during the improvements, they should be considered small growing pains to get to the finish line of a high-performing and effective work force. Organizations must provide the tools to ensure their employees can share the knowledge they possess. Employees, who have access to standardized tools and resources, develop foreseeable results. This ensures all relevant information and resources can be accessed whenever needed which leads to faster and more effective decision making and easier collaboration.The tools should enable the users to break down all geographic boundaries, which opens your company up to expand its workforce and benefit from talent across the entire organization. This improves knowledge sharing and enables local SMEs to contribute to projects outside of their region from the comfort of their primary office. This will also provide the ability to recruit talent from a greater spectrum since the best person for the job will not always be in your backyard. We run a global operation providing best-in-class mission support services in some of the most complex, hostile, and austere locations across the globe. It is imperative that we deliver innovative, low-risk, and cost-effective solutions ensuring the success of each mission. Although our employees are spread across the globe, we still function as one unit no matter what region or time zone we're working in. Access to our environment is over a wide range of internet speeds and offering our users the same experience whether they are sitting in one of our offices, on travel, or in the comfort of their own homes. To achieve this level of collaboration, there were several actions that were put in place from a technological standpoint.First, we implemented an infrastructure that had the flexibility, scalability, and reliability that we required. To achieve this, the obvious choice was to use cloud and mobile technologies. Everything we use has a mobile interface. Keeping information available at our employee's fingertips is how we can be so effective and stay in sync with one another. We have a suite of custom corporate Daniel M. HortonIN MY OPINION
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