Covid-19 Increases the Need for Virtual, Collaborative Work Environments

The Covid-19 pandemic should cause technology companies to rethink their development road maps. We all hope and pray for an effective vaccine to be developed and distributed as soon as possible. In the meantime, we need to do everything we can to slow the spread of this virus, which includes millions of Americans now working remotely. The question then becomes, how well does your company’s critical business applications support a virtual, collaborative work environment?

While generic software solutions like Google Docs and SharePoint have provided a collaborative working environment for years, not enough specific business applications offer the same highly collaborative, and decidedly more productive solutions?.

If you doubt the productivity gains associated with working in a virtual, collaborative environment, just think back to what business life was like prior to solutions like Google Docs. Remember the days when a team of individuals would each be working in their own Word doc or Excel sheet, and one “unlucky” individual would need to merge or cut-copy-paste everyone’s edits into a single document? I was good at never volunteering for that task. Fortunately, we no longer need to work that way. Instead, the team can all be working in the same document at the same time. The document is always up to date, with a complete record of all the edits and who made them. Imagine if all your business applications provided support for that same virtual, collaborative environment. You would see productivity increases with fewer errors, and you could more easily invite and leverage the expertise of additional co-workers, regardless of their physical location.

So in summary, technology firms would do well to tweak their development road map a bit, improve support for using your business application in this new Covid-19 work environment, and put a couple of the new features you have planned on the back burner. Just an idea.

Steve Watt

President / CEO

Bridgetown Software, Inc.

www.bridgetownsoftware.com