Welcome to our March/April issue, which includes opinions and bylines covering a variety of topics from process automation to environmental responsibility, from Covid-19 to Brexit - and somehow all linked in some manner to the DM/ECM sector.
Two separate but connected articles address different aspects of the growth in home-working since the start of the pandemic: one examines how the lack of workable productivity tools is adding to the stresses of staff working from home, while the other addresses the potential security risks of sending a large proportion of your staff to work on devices and networks over which you have little or no control.
Some of our readers may be surprised to hear that there are strict GDPR regulations around printing confidential work-related documents outside of the workplace - but for many people, there is no alternative. Are enterprises turning a blind eye to compliance in order to keep staff productive? As Go Shred's Mike Cluskey says in his article: "… since the government first advised against all unnecessary social contact on the 16th March 2020, home workers have potentially printed an average of 2352 confidential documents to date. Businesses need to be aware that printing anything from meeting agendas to expense forms, CV's and internal documents could put you at risk of breaching GDPR regulations."
Elsewhere we look at how the pandemic has heightened the already urgent need for more effective data sharing in the NHS. As Simon Hill of Kodak Alaris comments: "Back in 2015, the NHS set out a very public ambition for Paperless 2020, which aims to eventually eliminate paper at the point of care and support the overall digital evolution of the entire organisation. This has now been revised into a new target to reach a core level of digitisation by 2024. Covid-19 has forced digital transformation upon healthcare organisations and the use of digital services has increased at a speed previously thought unimaginable. Now is not the time to put the brakes on as the ability to effectively and efficiently unlock the value of information will be critical for the NHS' ongoing digital transformation."
We've touched on this before with regard to business generally, but it is interesting to see how the last year of lockdowns has forced organisations large and small to focus their minds when it comes to ways to share information more effectively. There appears to be a window of opportunity to build on the progress made during the pandemic to truly transform services in the public and private sector alike - let's hope the will is there to maintain the current momentum.
Dave Tyler Editor david.tyler@btc.co.uk