GRIT Report: 3 Key Tech Priorities for 2021

As seen in GreenBook's Grit Report: Insights Practice Edition 2020.

There’s no doubt the post-pandemic world will be very different than the pre-pandemic. Lifestyles and habits have been forever altered. The impact of the pandemic on sales, marketing, distribution, audiences, and brand affinity continues to evolve. Businesses needed to react quickly to stay competitive. This is driving organizations across industries to search for technology to better support their teams, consumers, and business goals. In our work with insights and research teams, there are three key areas that are having the most impact.

WFH Enablement

Though the dramatic shift to work from home won’t be permanent, there will be long-term changes to how and where many people work. The pandemic changed employee habits and how they define the quality of life. To recruit and retain, businesses need to be prepared to provide for more portability and remote work than in the past. This has a profound impact on how people work together and collaborate. Working remotely puts an increased challenge on accessing the company’s tools and knowledge as there is a loss of organic “water cooler” talk or the option to turn to a colleague to ask a quick question. Running into the domain expert or leaving a meeting together and catching up have been lost. To fill this gap, businesses need to deploy technology that empowers employees to virtually share knowledge, collaborate and independently find answers.

Automation

Organizations that implement technology for employees
to do their job faster and better will gain an obvious advantage. Capabilities for automation today have vastly improved from just five years ago. Surveys, reporting, data collection, visualization, sampling, and social listening can all be done quicker, at scale, and for less cost with the right technology. New AI tools exist that automate data gathering, tagging, and access.

One warning when looking at automation tools—make sure you aren’t trading one burdensome task for another. Ask vendors how onboarding and ongoing management works. “What’s the time ramifications to my team?” Investing in tech that eliminates time-consuming research tasks will enable your team to quickly respond to ever-changing demands of the market.

Data Democratization

Organizations have vast repositories of data, millions of pages of PPT, PDF, Word, and more. We have seen that as much as 95% of organizational data is never accessed again after 90 days from creation. Imagine the expense and effort to create these decks, reports, plans, and insights, just to become permanent shelfware. Worse, imagine the same work repeated simply because it wasn’t known that someone else in the enterprise already did the work.

In the past, the goal of data democratization has been sabotaged by the struggle of navigating through too many files, systems, and tools to find what’s needed. This is why so many large enterprises are now investing in next generation knowledge portals capable of linking together answers from internal documents, subscriptions, data visualizations, and other critical tools. Building this powerful platform relies on working with data providers who openly partner with you and other vendors to build your vision. For our work in making Lucy a GPS to clients’ knowledge, we’ve worked with many vendors who value this importance—Zappi, Voxpopme, KnowledgeHound, Black Swan, Mintel, and Insider Intelligence to name a few.

This isn’t about finding one system that does it all. It’s about bringing all of your best-in-breed data solutions together to create a one-stop-shop for knowledge. Investing in the right technology will be key for businesses staying ahead of the curve in 2021 and beyond.

Cheers to a new year (Happy to ring out 2020!) and to us all thriving in the new normal.

Download the full GRIT Report from GreenBook: The #1 strategic planning tool in insights.GreenBook Grit Report 2020

 

 

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