Here are some key quotes from my latest podcast with Yohan Kim, President and CEO at RFA, on managed IT and the importance of data management.

“There was a fork in the road where I was able to use more my business acumen and understanding the numbers of the business and how that affected the direction that we took. And by applying that, I moved more into the business side of things.”

“I’ve been involved in most of the operations of the company over the last 15 or 16 years that I’ve been with the company. And because I understood how it functioned and ran, I was able to understand what was happening and how that would affect us.”

“What’s changed in recent years is that data has become democratized. And it’s become accessible to managers of all sizes.”

“The problem now is that there’s too much data to choose from. And now you need to be able to filter through the noise, and be able to be very direct and finding what you specifically need. So for the current managers, it’s about finding better methods to ingest that into their systems.”

“Having an effective data management strategy is no longer an edge. It’s more about keeping up with the new norm.”

“Where we come in is, we evaluate what you’re using. And then we first think about, ‘okay, if what you’re using is the right tool, or if it works for you.’ Then, we don’t really want to break that, we want to enhance that as much as possible.”

“I would say probably the biggest point of efficiency has been in automation, probably business robotics. And then, its after [clients] go through the process of structuring their data. And this could mean a very short time for startup. Or it could mean a bit of time that you commit your operations team to structure their current data that’s on a file server on multiple Excel documents.”

“[Managed IT] is still a very large portion of our busines – the end user desktops, laptops, and you know, the management of all of that has evolved as well. It’s just how we’re doing it and how we’re managing is changed significantly.”

“Build your IT environment to become more modular so that it will scale with your company because a lot of the way things are being developed now is all about just modular approaches.”

“COVID has greatly affected our company because this is when everyone really relied on the disaster recovery, or if they’re on the cloud, really relied on how well it’s working in a remote environment. And where we have to focus a lot on is the security.”

“I think the permanent changes [from COVID] are that everyone, including the very, very large companies have reevaluated what works. And what they’ve realized is that what works is cheaper. And it’s more effective.”

“The fact that because new tools have really been coming on board, the low code/no code aspect has really changed how we looked at our own software development.”