At IO Integration, our sole focus is bringing the best possible experience to our customers. This past month we gathered all of our employees from around the globe to meet for our bi-annual company meeting in St. Simons Island, Georgia. This is the one time that we gather to discuss ways to improve our overall business and deliver to our customers the best possible experience when partnering with IOI. This provides us a unique opportunity to analyze our service offerings and to ensure we are bringing the most value to our clients.

As we see companies, event organizers, and local governments preparing for the for the likelihood that the coronavirus outbreak will continue to spread, several tech industry leaders and local governments have already begun telling employees to work from home. Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Google have all made public announcements and informed their employees to work remotely in an effort to do their part in preventing any further chance of outbreaks in their offices and communities. We are also seeing state and local governments declaring state of emergencies in places like Washington State which has been the most severely affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. New York and Austin, Texas have additionally declared their own states of emergencies respectively, and in Austin, canceling that city's largest event, SXSW, which was scheduled for March.

The recent global viral outbreak highlights the necessity of having plans in place allowing your team to work remotely. Meeting your deliverables with minimal disruption while protecting your team members' health is vital to any organization's long term success. The challenge of maintaining business continuity for these employees falls squarely on the shoulders of management. How can managers maintain their team's cohesion and keep production moving smoothly? The content creation process makes this even more complicated when dealing with multiple contributors and tight deadlines. In this article, we look at the top four steps to manage a remote creative team successfully.

This article by Alan Porter, Director of Product Marketing at Nuxeo (an IO Integration Alliance Partner) originally appeared on the Nuxeo Blog and we think our readers will find it informative. Our interactions as consumers of goods and services are changing, and so are our expectations. We now expect to go online and conduct transactions immediately and see the results almost as quickly. Need something? Order it from my phone. It arrives the next day.

In the increasingly competitive space of marketing and creative design, accomplishing much with as few resources as possible has become many manager's biggest challenge. At IOI, we've noticed creative operations managers increasingly forced to assign team members duties related to implementing new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Project Management software that falls outside of their core competencies. Requiring team members to "wear a new hat" can lead to a situation where, even though you've invested in a new system, somehow, deadlines are missed, and team members don't know what they should be working on daily. So, while you are doing more with fewer people, have you gained efficiency, accomplish more, and are you getting a solid return on your investment?

This article is from Eric Fulmer, VP of Operations at ShotFlow, an IO Integration Alliance Partner and we think our readers will find it informative. Retail, Fashion, and Apparel (RFA) brands face a new and intimidating digital commerce landscape requiring rapid transformation to survive. One of the key strategic initiatives for RFA brands is building a modern and complete Marketing Technology (“Martech”) Stack. For those unfamiliar with the term, the Martech Stack is the collection of technology tools and platforms enabling Marketing effectiveness. Hot new trends such as data personalization, “big data” metrics, online assistants, “Shop The Look,” and related initiatives cannot be achieved without significant upgrades to the brand’s technology suite.