Why every CIO should be fast-tracking their digital transformation strategy

With the sudden acceleration of remote work in the last two years, the need for streamlined content management systems has never been greater

These days, it seems like we’re talking a lot about labor shortages. From hotels to shipping companies to professional service organizations, everyone suddenly feels stretched a little thinner and a little more short staffed.

The Great Resignation is a real thing. According to the Harvard Business Review, the US had a record-breaking 10.9 million vacant jobs at the end of July this year. Companies are doing everything they can think of, from promising big bonuses to offering full-time remote work in order to keep the staff they have, and fill empty positions.

Looking at demographics in the HBR study, employees aged 30 to 45 are more likely to leave their jobs this year than any other group. Whether they leave your industry entirely, or make a move to a competitor desperately trying to fill jobs and willing to pay a premium for experienced staff, resignations within this age group are up 20%.

Why CIOs Should Be Paying Attention

Why should you care about this? It’s not just the hassle of trying to fill empty positions. It’s because the 30 to 45 tranche of employees probably make up the bulk of your mid-level management. They’re the ones leading your day-to-day teams. They know the Standard Operating Procedures and the pain points in ongoing projects. They’re the ones making sure reports are reviewed and signed off before they go to clients.

And if they leave? Do you know where their clients’ contracts are? Or where the most recent templates and style guides are kept? Every time someone departs your company, even though they leave all their files and work behind them, something inevitably gets lost into a rabbit hole of subfolders and directories, email attachments and files that exist only on cloud apps, desktops and in chats.

Remote Work is Changing Content Management

In addition to the Great Resignation, CIO’s are dealing with another phenomenon: How we manage files, data and content has changed. The truth is, it was already changing before the pandemic. Employees putting in late nights and long weekends needed access to information from home in a way that desktop computers and local networks wouldn’t let them do easily. Companies were moving away from older servers and temperamental VPNs to more easily accessible cloud-based systems. 

With the sudden acceleration of remote work in the last two years, the need for streamlined content management system has never been greater. New staff don’t get the same sit-down face-to-face walkthrough to show them where everything is on the network anymore. And departing staff often put their laptop into a pre-paid box and ship it back to the office, never to be seen again.

If you’ll allow me a quick digression, I saw a TED Talk recently where the artist Brian Detmer talked about how reference books aren’t the ideal way to store information. They’re cumbersome and linear, in the same way that onsite data servers with their linear directories and subfolders are. Just like an encyclopedia, these systems work, but they’re structured based on old understandings of how we look up information.

Isn’t it time to find a better way to manage your content? If we’ve learned anything from the Great Resignation, it’s that relying on one person to know if the contract documents on the network are the most recent version puts your company at risk. Maintaining version control is a huge challenge for any company, and has only gotten harder now that we can’t pop our heads over a cubicle wall or walk down the hall to ask. 

How We’re Using AI to Tackle this at Charli

Solutions like Charli bring content and document management into the modern working world. Instead of linear data organization and obscure file-naming conventions, Charli uses artificial intelligence to understand content and extract valuable information such as metadata, summaries and highlights.  And uses intuitive tags and cloud-based filing to help make sure content and information is available at everyone’s fingertips.

Our goal with Charli is to make content relevant and available to teams when they need it and where they need it.  This is critically important in remote and hybrid work environments.  Over the past couple of years we learned from our customers that they value the AI in Charli, and that they want it embedded in more of their work apps such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. 

Charli brings the documents and content from each platform into a single virtual hub, so employees aren’t wasting time looking for information in many different places, and they don’t have to worry about important files vanishing into the “black hole” when their most important manager decides to become a freelance digital nomad and hike the Inca Trail.

If you’re struggling with content management, I’d love to hear what your biggest challenges are. And if you’re ready to set your enterprise up for success in today’s modern workplace, let’s talk about how Charli can help.