SNAPSHOT: Whether your company has landed on remote work, hybrid setups, or return to office (RTO), each model presents unique IT challenges. We recommend letting strategic optimization be your guiding star, armoring your company against volatile changes. Here, we delve into the reality of modern workplace structures. We’ll explore how to ensure your IT infrastructure is fine-tuned to thrive AND support long-term success, finding opportunity as you navigate ongoing economic uncertainty.

Emma Mak • Staff Writer

Long-Term Work Structures and the IT Implications

Long-term work structures have solidified over 2023 and 2024. As of 2025, 36% of enterprise workers in North America are hybrid/remote, while the rest are back to full-time office schedules. 

While there continues to be a lot of back-and-forth about which work model fosters better productivity, the truth is, regardless of your company’s final work setup, the transition hasn’t been easy and there’s likely been some impact for your IT environment.  

Adding to the complexity, in early 2025, the Global Economic Policy Uncertainty Index reached its highest level this century — creating a challenging business landscape that necessitates a strategic approach to IT infrastructure to ensure resilience and adaptability.

 We’ve pinpointed four major IT pain points related to work setups that companies are facing:

1. Unsuitable network architecture 
2. Inefficient cloud vs. on-prem balance
3. Connectivity and collaboration issues
4. Inadequate office setup and print infrastructure

The silver lining: By proactively addressing these pain points, your company can significantly enhance its operational efficiency, giving you a strategic advantage over your competitors.

Pain Point 1: Unsuitable Network Architecture

Remember the mad scramble five years ago to get everyone set up with laptops, switch to SD-WAN, and create a decentralized workforce practically overnight? In the rush, most infrastructure setups weren’t designed to last. Many of you are asking if your company’s reliance on SD-WAN, which is more complex to manage and troubleshoot, is still appropriate. 

Solution: Enhance Network Resilience and Adaptability

Here’s the deal: moving to SD-WAN was likely the right move, as it offers flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency. However, your network shouldn’t remain stuck in 2020. It’s 2025 – are you using best practices for network management to maintain security, performance, and user satisfaction? We can help evaluate and optimize existing network setups by: 

• Conducting thorough infrastructure assessments. 
• Identifying bottlenecks.
• Implementing tailored solutions that align with current business needs.

To significantly enhance the resilience of your company’s SD-WAN, consider adopting a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) security framework. It integrates multiple security functions and provides users with secure and seamless access to applications and resources from anywhere.  

A key component and enhancement to SASE is the Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) security model. Unlike traditional security models that rely on a perimeter-based approach, ZTNA operates on the principle of “verify explicitly, use least privilege, and assume breach”. 

ZTNA and SASE help you to: 

• Reduce unauthorized access risks with identity-driven, context-aware application access.
• Integrate networking and security into a single cloud-native service, simplifying complexity and reducing cost.
• Scale with business needs, providing secure access to applications and data anywhere.

Solutions implementing these frameworks can help companies update their SD-WAN and build a more resilient and adaptable network infrastructure. In partnership with Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and other vendors, we will help you implement a tailored solution for your business, achieving a network that’s robust, faster, and built to stay ahead of your needs — and get you ready for whatever comes next.  

Pain Point 2: Inefficient Cloud vs. On-Prem Balance

During the height of remote transformations, with limited options and an urgent need to maintain business continuity, organizations lifted applications to the cloud – fast and without much room for debate. Unfortunately, not every application belongs there. The two main concerns being cost and security.  

Cloud solutions have not proven to be as universally cost-efficient as initially hoped, leaving companies burdened with inefficiencies and higher-than-expected costs. 

Although continuing migration to the cloud and cloud workloads (especially with AI-related public cloud services blossoming) are greater than “repatriated” workloads, over one-fifth (21%) of workloads have been brought back to companies’ data centers. 

Solution: Smarter Workload Placement

Not everything needs to live in the cloud, and that’s okay. By taking a step back and assessing your workloads, we can cut through inefficiencies and figure out what belongs there. 

Sensitive or high-performance applications? Maybe those are better off on-prem where you have tighter control. 

Cost-driving workloads? We can help you chart a path to optimize or even pull them back to save money without sacrificing performance.  

We leverage several key partnerships to provide you the best solutions to optimize workloads, ensuring flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency. Our vendor-neutral approach allows us to offer a diverse range of solutions, including: 

• Hybrid Cloud Solutions: Microsoft Azure, AWS 
• Infrastructure Optimization: VMWare, Cisco, Nutanix, Dell EMC
• Networking Solutions: Cisco HyperFlex, Juniper Networks, Arista Networks, Huawei
• Scalable Infrastructure: HPE GreenLake, Dell APEX

At the end of the day, making choices that actually work for your business is always the right move. Our approach isn’t cookie-cutter, it’s customized to meet your specific needs. We have experts ready to assist with every aspect of the technology procurement process. With long-standing partnerships with Tier One suppliers and relationships with more than 300 OEMs, we ensure the best solutions tailored for your success.   

Pain Point 3: Connectivity and Collaboration Issues

Regardless of the work model your company has, a higher degree of flexibility is now the norm. Over 1 in 4 paid workdays in the U.S. were done from home in 2024, compared to just 1 in 14 from pre-pandemic days. 

Even if your company isn’t officially hybrid, today’s employees want the flexibility to juggle appointments, work, travel, and family obligations, while still staying productive and connected with their teams.  

It’s likely meetings at your company feature a mix of in-office and remote participants. Without the right setup, this can quickly descend into frustration with glitchy video meetings and disengaged team members. 

Solution: Smarter Workload Placement

It’s vital to create a workplace where hybrid meetings are truly productive, bringing teams together, no matter where they’re based. 

To ensure your technology meets the demands of hybrid meetings, ensure reliable video conferencing tools, adequate bandwidth, and robust collaborative platforms.  

Here are some key strategies we can help you with: 

1. Unified Communications and Collaboration Tools: From video conferencing to file sharing and task management, these tools keep everyone on the same page. 
2. Optimized Network Performance: We can evaluate and upgrade your network infrastructure to ensure consistent bandwidth, minimal latency, and strong Wi-Fi coverage across all your locations.
3. Cloud-Based Solutions: Cloud solutions enable real-time file sharing and updates, as well as extraordinary scalability.
4. Enhanced Cybersecurity: Protect your communication channels with tools like multi-factor authentication and encrypted video calls.

Pain Point 4: Inefficient Office Setup and Print Infrastucture

The shift to a more flexible working environment has exposed cracks in traditional office setups that just don’t cut it anymore. Offices who reopened their doors are running into problems with legacy IT systems that can’t keep up with the demands of modern business.  

Solution: Smarter Workload Placement

We take a no-nonsense approach to fixing inefficiencies. That means assessing your current systems, pinpointing issues, and rolling out modern solutions that work. 

You may need targeted solutions, such as hardware refreshes to ensure equipment stays up to date and ready to perform, stronger cybersecurity measures to fend off evolving threats, or managed print services that eliminate unnecessary complexity and waste in office operations.  

Our technology sourcing and procurement services leverage partnerships with leading technology providers including Apple, Dell, Cisco, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, and more to supply the latest hardware and software solutions. 

The payoff? A highly connected and productive workplace where employees, whether remote or on-site, can focus on smashing goals, not battling outdated technology. 

And if printing is part of your operation — be it in corporate or customer-facing tasks — there’s a good chance your old, outdated print infrastructure is holding you back and eating into your profits.  

Despite digital solutions enabling reduced printing and the number of pages printed dropping 20% since the beginning of the pandemic (primarily due to hybrid work), printing remains essential in some sectors such as finance, healthcare, and legal services.  

With our Managed Print Services (MPS) we leverage strong partnerships including HP and Xerox to deliver a solution that can include cloud-based printing systems, automating workflows, and maintaining print devices to reduce downtime. 

We’ll help you implement energy-efficient print systems, reduce paper waste, and ensure you’re using eco-friendly supplies — because sustainability isn’t just ethical, it’s smart business. 

Compucom Helps You Pivot with Purpose and Precision

If the past few years have shown us anything, it’s the importance of keeping IT strategies flexible to support the way we work now, while planning for the future. 

This is an opportunity to make your IT operations more flexible, scalable, and efficient – the ability to pivot with purpose and precision is key. 

We specialize in helping you achieve operational excellence through cost-led optimization, ensuring you’re strategically positioned to thrive, no matter what comes next. 

Don’t wait for change to happen to you; partner with Compucom to turn uncertainty into opportunity and solve today’s problems while building a flexible, cost-effective foundation that’s ready for growth.  

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Nancy Outcalt • Sr. Account Executive

At the beginning of each year, we attend two important healthcare conferences, ViVE and HIMSS. These lively events allow us to come together with a dedicated community of healthcare thought leaders, connect with our existing and future customers, and learn what healthcare providers are prioritizing for the upcoming year.

2024 is an exciting time. A rapid surge in digital transformation over the past few years, spurred by the necessity of dealing with 2020 and the ensuing rise of patient expectations — mixed with innovations such as 5G, cloud technologies, and artificial intelligence (AI) — means that revolutionary improvements in healthcare delivery are not far away.

As I reflect on the many interesting speakers, exhibits, and discussions from ViVE and HIMSS, my main takeaway was the three main goals healthcare providers are focused on for 2024:

• Realizing the full benefits of AI to revolutionize healthcare
• Enhancing the digital user experience for clinicians and patients
• Enabling remote patient care 

Realizing the Full Benefits of AI to Revolutionize Healthcare  

Both ViVE and HIMSS spotlighted AI’s transformative potential in healthcare. The future holds promising advancements in improved patient outcomes and operational efficiency. From aiding personalized treatment and revolutionizing cancer treatment and surgical procedures to more practical applications such as transforming healthcare payment systems, the term AI was on everyone’s lips.

Nancy Outcalt and Marc Caponegro, Compucom Sr. Account Executives

As a managed services provider (MSP), we were excited to talk to healthcare leaders about the benefits of AI to their staff’s digital experience and its ability to optimize IT operations. Our experience and automation platform combines Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) and Digital Experience Management (XM) to drive transformation, innovation, and continuous process improvement throughout your IT environment. From increasing reliability and performance of devices to faster and more accurate root cause analysis for infrastructure issues, we help ease the burden on IT teams and help healthcare providers go beyond the buzzword to real-world AI benefits.

Enhancing the Digital User Experience for Healthcare Staff and Patients

Ongoing workforce shortages and staff burnout were addressed at both ViVE and HIMSS. With ViVE 2024 making nursing leaders a focal point. Interactions with technology shouldn’t add to the burden healthcare workers face. When staff have reliable tablets, smartphones, and laptops, can stay connected to an optimized network, and have technical support when they need it, they have more time to focus on what matters – their patients.

Compucom’s XM collects useful user experience data, such as endpoint telemetry, service and support metrics, event sensors, targeted surveys, and user sentiment analysis. We generate performance indicators from the data, which are then analyzed against our four dimensions of a successful digital workplace: making sure workers are technology-enabled, self-sufficient, well-supported, and have workplace flexibility. We then measure and improve our services against these dimensions.

Technology failures exacerbate workplace stress. Having XM to monitor digital employee experiences can identify pain points before they become an issue for healthcare staff, lowering stress levels.  

Enabling Remote Patient Care

Ensuring people in remote regions receive the same quality of clinical services as those in urban areas is why there was a big focus on enabling remote patient care at the conferences.  

Now that 5G has rolled out, it is starting to revolutionize remote patient care. Telemedicine has faced limitations due to slow internet connections. 5G’s capabilities allow for improved communication between clinicians and patients with smoother video calls. Remote patient monitoring opens the potential for doctors to access real-time data from monitoring equipment (such as heart monitors) from patients in their homes.  

5G phones are now mainstream, and every year, more and more 5G native devices are released. Samsung and Apple offer 5G tablets, and 5G laptops are becoming increasingly available, with Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung all offering them as an option.

We were excited to discuss our recent strategic partnership with T-Mobile for Business Advanced Network Industry Solutions with attendees at the conferences. As healthcare tech leaders investigate 5G private networks to prepare for the future of healthcare, device readiness is a major consideration, and our technology sourcing and device services can help.  

Exciting Times for Healthcare

I enjoyed connecting with healthcare IT leaders attending HIMSS and ViVE this year — it was clear that innovation is alive and thriving in healthcare. We are seeing some amazing technological advances that will dramatically improve healthcare access equality and patient outcomes. Advancements that could only be dreamed of are finally coming to fruition. At Compucom, we look forward to partnering with healthcare providers to enable this new reality. 

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Emma Mak • Staff Writer

Amidst the turbulence of recent years, patients have observed how healthcare, a former laggard in providing fast, convenient, digitally enabled experiences, was quick to innovate. And now they’re not easing up — holding providers accountable to maintain that innovation momentum. 

Digital transformation used to mainly refer to turning paper processes digital. Now, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud technologies, it often means thinking outside the box (or outside the hospital walls) to create new and innovative ways of improving processes, reducing costs, and delivering better patient care and outcomes to satisfy healthcare’s “consumers.” Let’s explore what consumer patients now expect and how digital transformation can help healthcare organizations deliver. 

The Intersection of Digital Transformation and High Patient Expectations 

Being a patient is stressful, and it just makes sense that they’ll appreciate healthcare providers’ efforts to make processes more streamlined and convenient. According to the American Hospital Association (AHA), provider organizations must work on “developing and implementing a tightly integrated mobile strategy that ties together all consumer-facing digital elements to create a seamless experience throughout the patient journey.”

Studies also show that most patients want to leverage technology to self-manage their care, have telehealth available, and schedule, change, and cancel appointments online. An effective strategy could include the following components:

1. Fast and Convenient Interactions

• AI Chatbots: These virtual assistants can handle routine queries and appointment scheduling and provide some general health information 24/7. They’re a quick way for patients to get answers, reducing the need for phone calls or in-person visits, which allows healthcare staff to focus on more complex tasks.
• Cloud-Based Appointment Systems: Cloud platforms enable seamless appointment booking, rescheduling, and reminders. Patients can access these services from anywhere, making them super convenient. Providers can analyze appointment data for optimization.

2. Digital Solutions

• Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in the Cloud: Cloud-based EHRs allow seamless data sharing among providers and easy scalability for growing data volumes.
• Telemedicine Platforms: Telehealth solutions enable virtual consultations, improving access for patients and making a great step towards healthcare access equality for rural and elderly patients.
• Mobile Health Apps: Cloud-based apps support health tracking, medication reminders, and personalized recommendations. Using them can keep patients actively participating in their health management and allow for easy data collection of health metrics to inform clinicians’ decisions.

3. Personalized Treatment Options

• AI-Driven Personalization: AI can help clinicians tailor treatment plans based on the analysis of patient data, including medical history, genetics, and lifestyle. Predictions can be made for optimal drug choices, and risk assessment can help avoid potential adverse effects.
• Patient Portals: Portals on the cloud empower patients to have access to test results, treatment plans, and educational materials. Patients are better able to self-manage their personal information and preferences and can securely message with their providers. 

How an MSP Can Help with Healthcare Digital Transformation 

A managed service provider can play a crucial role in supporting healthcare organizations as they navigate the intersection of patient expectations, digital transformation, and cost-effectiveness.  

Infrastructure and Cloud Services

Healthcare cloud usage is gradually replacing on-premises infrastructure. However, many healthcare providers are still early in the process and have yet to adopt mature solutions that maximize the benefits of the cloud and the opportunities it brings for better patient experience and care.

When selecting the right cloud platform to ensure security, scalability, and cost optimization, an experienced MSP can guide you to the right solution and take care of deployment and maintenance. Ensure the MSP you select has experienced resources who can properly integrate AI for IT Operations (AIOps) platform tools to ensure your infrastructure is properly monitored, optimized, and managed.

An MSP can also help with data center management, ensuring high availability, disaster recovery, and compliance with industry standards such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Security and Compliance

While healthcare organizations must look to innovate and provide consumer-like experiences for patients, this must not be at the expense of losing privacy. Healthcare organizations are a favorite target of cybercriminals due to their data’s high monetary and intelligence value, including intellectual property and patients’ health records and financial information. Staying on top of constant threats can be too much for a healthcare provider’s internal team.

An experienced MSP can help make improvements that will enhance your cybersecurity posture. By conducting vulnerability assessments and designing and implementing robust security measures, an MSP with trusted security partners, such as Cisco and Stratejm, can help protect patient data, ensure compliance with regulations, and coordinate solutions that monitor for ongoing threats. 

Compucom: An Ideal Partner for Elevating Patient Digital Experience

Compucom offers a comprehensive portfolio of services, encompassing Technology Sourcing, Managed Services and IT Support, and Projects and Professional services, including IT staffing, to help you reach your digital transformation goals.

By getting multiple services from one provider, you simplify IT and gain a strategic partner who deeply understands your operations and can add value to all aspects of your business. Look to us for all things IT so you can give your patients great digital experiences while you meet their healthcare needs.

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Emma Mak • Staff Writer

Healthcare organizations are up against it. They must deliver high-quality patient care, ensure compliance with regulations, manage complex IT infrastructures, and cope with internal and external stakeholders’ increasing demands and expectations.  

Two powerful technologies can help: Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) and Digital Experience Management (XM) enable organizations to optimize IT operations and enhance Digital Employee Experience (DEX). Combined, they’re a remedy for what ails many healthcare organizations — inefficient systems and staff burnout — ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes. 

How to Get Started with AIOps and XM  

As with all digital transformation initiatives, successful implementation of AIOps and XM requires a strategic and systematic approach. Here are some steps to follow:

1. Assess your current state: Evaluate your IT maturity, capabilities, and challenges, and identify your goals and priorities for AIOps and XM.
2. Choose the right tools: Select the best AIOps and XM solutions and vendors that suit your needs and budget and can integrate well with your existing IT environment and processes.
3. Implement and optimize: Deploy and configure your AIOps and XM solutions and monitor and measure their performance and impact. Continuously refine and improve your AIOps and XM strategies and practices based on data and feedback.

These steps can be challenging for healthcare organizations on their own. Implementing AIOps and XM is more complex than purchasing software. A managed services provider (MSP) with expertise in implementing and integrating toolsets within customers’ systems can be a great partner throughout the process, helping you gain the best ROI. 

AIOps and XM Defined 

AIOps is a set of tools and techniques that use AI, machine learning, and automation to analyze, monitor, and manage IT systems and processes. Implemented correctly, it can help IT teams reduce complexity, increase efficiency, and resolve issues faster and more proactively.

XM is a holistic approach that measures and improves how employees interact with and perceive the digital tools and systems they use daily. This helps IT teams provide seamless, user-friendly, and personalized experiences that boost employee engagement, productivity, and retention. 

By using AIOps to group related alerts using event correlation, the healthcare organization successfully reduces alert fatigue and improves incident management for their EHR system.

AIOps + XM Benefits: Monitoring and Improving IT Infrastructure Health

By combining AIOps and XM, healthcare organizations can achieve the following benefits:

• Reduced downtime, cost, and risk: AIOps can help IT teams prevent, detect, and resolve incidents that affect the availability and performance of critical IT systems and applications, such as electronic health records, telehealth platforms, and medical devices. It can also help IT teams optimize resources, reduce operational costs, and comply with security and privacy regulations.
• Improved employee satisfaction and performance: XM can help IT teams understand which digital processes are slowing down and frustrating doctors, nurses, administrators, and researchers. By enabling the collection and analysis of staff feedback, sentiment, and tool usage data, IT teams can identify and address pain points, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement.
• Enhanced patient care and outcomes: Together, AIOps and XM ensure healthcare IT systems and applications are reliable, secure, and user-friendly, helping staff become less stressed and more productive and efficient. This leads to better patient satisfaction, safety, and quality of care, as well as reduced errors, costs, and risks. 

Real-World Examples 

AIOps

• Challenge: A hospital’s IT team is inundated with alerts when the EHR system experiences a network outage that affects multiple servers and applications. Meanwhile, an incident that affects patient privacy is lost in the alert noise.
• Solution: AIOps helps IT teams cut through the noise. In this case, it would have grouped all the alerts related to the network outage into one incident and prioritized the data breach incident affecting patient privacy, assigning it critical status so it could be resolved quickly.

XM

• Challenge: A nurse needs to access patient electronic health records (EHR) on her tablet. She’s having trouble— the app is slow and unresponsive, and she must wait to view each patient’s information. It’s the end of her shift; it’s been a difficult day, and she’s exhausted and frustrated.
• Solution: Using XM, the IT team would have been monitoring the performance and reliability of the EHR app, proactively identifying and resolving any issues that could affect user experience. While her day full of caring for patients would still have been challenging, her experiences with technology would have helped maximize her efficiency in caring for her patients rather than adding to her burden. 

Compucom’s Matrix Platform  

We’ve designed our comprehensive portfolio of IT services around user experience and XM, and we’re an early adopter of AIOps tools and techniques. Our experience and automation platform — Matrix — combines AIOps and XM to drive transformation, innovation, and continuous process improvement throughout your IT environment, freeing up time for your IT team to focus on other critical initiatives that can further improve patient care. 

The post Optimizing Healthcare IT Infrastructure with AI appeared first on Compucom.

Emma Mak • Staff Writer

Digital technologies such as cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) have unleashed enticing new possibilities for businesses. But they have also made enterprise IT infrastructures increasingly complex, especially with hybrid and multi-cloud environments.  

What’s the answer to this complexity? It’s Digital Experience Management (XM) and Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps). The effective implementation of these toolsets can help tremendously reduce technical complexity, allowing companies to get a better handle on the IT aspect of their business. 

AIOps: Anomaly Detection for Better Troubleshooting

XM is all about the users — it measures and improves how employees interact and perceive the digital tools and systems they work with daily, helping companies provide seamless, user-friendly experiences. When companies invest in XM, they’re prioritizing and promoting employee engagement, productivity, and retention.

Ideally, XM should collect useful user data, such as endpoint telemetry, service and support metrics, event sensors, targeted surveys, and user sentiment analysis. Then, performance indicators should be generated, which are analyzed against the dimensions of a successful digital workplace – technology-enabled workers, self-sufficient workers, well-supported workers, and workplace flexibility.

AIOps: Event Correlation to Lower Alert Fatigue 

AIOps, on the other hand, is focused on IT infrastructure. It helps IT teams improve the efficiency and reliability of their company’s IT management and processes. The ongoing goals are reduced downtime, costs, and risk.

By automating and streamlining IT tasks and helping collect and organize the massive amounts of data generated by IT Operations, AIOps frees up your IT talent and boosts their capabilities for smarter and faster incident resolution, root cause analysis, and capacity planning.

Compucom’s Matrix platform: XM + AIOps 

XM and AIOps use AI and automation, but they have different goals and perspectives. Both technologies are complementary and important for achieving digital transformation and organizational success.  

Compucom’s experience and automation platform, Matrix, combines XM and AIOps. We’ve made Matrix central to our services portfolio, providing smart insights and improvements for our managed services to deliver better user digital experiences and optimized IT Operations. 

We Focus on Your Business Outcomes  

While we are an IT services provider, our customers understand that we’re not just there to help them with technology. Our customers, many of them long-term, benefit from our focus on and understanding of their business.

As Brent Asbil illustrates, “You may have an issue, for example, at a bank branch, that possibly spans the networking and security towers. By combining different aspects together to create a business view within our AIOps toolset, we can create visibility into all the infrastructure that matters for a branch location. We can help customers bring those towers together to solve the issue swiftly and effectively.”

This is also true of our XM solution; we encourage our customers to focus XM efforts on the tools and systems most closely linked to desired business outcomes so that they’ll reap the most benefits.

Our Matrix experience and automation platform helps you leverage the latest digital technologies without getting bogged down by technical complexity, setting you up for success and resulting in optimized IT operations and an improved digital employee experience. 

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Troy Baldwin • Director, Offering Management

The days were brisk for NRF 2024, the National Retail Federation’s annual convention. However, the 40,000 attendees in New York City were warmed by sunny news: the holiday season was a success, with reported sales growth of 3 to 4%, and the outlook for 2024 is positive.

During the three-day show, our Compucom events team met with our customers, partners, and other retailers, took in the Big Ideas sessions, and interacted with some of the latest retail innovations, such as the bitHuman digital helpers, an interactive AI platform tasked with answering questions for attendees about navigating the event.

Here are our three main takeaways from NRF 2024.  

Constant Innovation for the Win

While retailers often realize that investment in innovation must be ongoing, knowing where to place your bets can be hard.

In our one-day spot survey asking attendees their primary concern for the technology aspect of their business, the largest number (40%) selected “Navigating technological trends to get digital transformation right”.

This is where having an experienced retail technology partner can help. Combining their expertise with your knowledge of your customers provides the best guidance for where to put your innovation efforts — because it’s not always the commonly advised path forward that will work best for your company.

Ed Stack, executive chairman of DICK’S Sporting Goods, related the story of how his company went against prevailing advice that brick-and-mortar stores were over, trusting themselves and their customers and instead expanding the size of their stores.

Winner of the 2024 Innovator award, Stack got it right. By shifting the role of physical stores to fit with their digital transformation, they created innovative customer experiences such as batting cages, rock-climbing walls, and the ability to scan a shoe and see all sizes in stock, helping them become the largest omnichannel sporting goods retailer in the United States.

Customers’ Expectations Have Risen Sky-High

A common theme was talk of the high expectations of consumers and the need for retailers to be highly customer-centric. This was reflected in our poll, with 22% selecting “elevating the customer experience by sourcing, optimizing, and supporting technology that helps you focus on the customer” as their main concern.

Innovations from a few of our longstanding OEM partners focused on this need:

• Microsoft had a prominent booth showcasing the value of AI for unlocking, among other things, new shopping experiences and store associates’ potential by using generative and conversational AI to build meaningful in-store and online experiences (phygital experiences).
• Intel showcased RealSense, a technology that gives devices depth perception capabilities and is transforming retail applications by creating better customer experiences. 
• Lenovo showed off their AI-powered end-to-end retail solutions designed to enhance safety, security, and intelligence for retailers and shoppers across various categories, including Smart Promotion, Smart Shelf, and Smart Checkout.

“AI” was the Buzzword on Everyone’s Lips

AI has been a buzzword in many industries for a while now. At NRF 2024, it was clear that AI is not just a trend but a game-changing tool for retailers. Most exhibitors focused on its ability to analyze customer behavior, predict trends, manage inventory, and provide personalized experiences, but as we discussed with attendees, AI can also help retailers:

• Solve networking challenges and operational inefficiencies through AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations).

• Improve the digital employee experience for their sales associates by providing insights on how your IT team can improve users’ interactions with digital touchpoints.

Implementing AI is not a simple task. MSPs can provide the necessary expertise and resources to implement AI solutions, allowing retailers to reap the benefits without having to build their own teams.

Another Great NRF Show Under Our Belt

Compucom’s team enjoyed seeing the excitement around retail innovation at this year’s big show. We know helping our customers innovate with the right technology is crucial for driving their success. Contact us today to learn how to advance your retail workplace with the right managed service provider.

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Emma Mak • Staff Writer

The rise of the “zero consumer” 

Are you a “zero consumer”? A rising global phenomenon, these consumers have zero boundaries (drifting between online and in-store), zero loyalty, zero moderation (either scrimping or splurging), and zero patience (they want it now).  

They also consider net zero as a buying factor. But while sustainability and social responsibility weigh on their minds – these shoppers don’t want to lose out on value. The average consumer is tightening their belt. As we begin 2024, The Conference Board projects real US consumer spending will drop 1.1% in the first quarter and 1% in the second quarter.

With this typical profile of who retailers are selling to, let’s dive into some trends that might help win over the zero consumer in 2024. 

Contactless Checkout  

Who relishes the thought of long line-ups that place you within easy sneezing distance of other mall customers? One good outcome of 2020 is raised awareness of the importance of hygiene, which accelerated contactless checkout trends. Customers like the option of paying for their purchases with phones or credit cards without touching a keypad or interacting with a cashier. This makes the shopping experience safer and speeds up the checkout process — a welcome efficiency improvement, especially with the current shortage of retail workers.

Not all consumers will choose self-service kiosks. Self-checkout may mean shorter lineups, but some don’t wish to contend with the frustration of scanning items and possibly troubleshooting for themselves (unless there’s very attentive customer support).  

A company that has really nailed creating a great checkout experience is Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing manufacturer and retailer. Dispensing with the need to scan items, they have a checkout process for which customers only need toss purchases into a container bin. Radiofrequency identification chips (RFID) embedded in the price tags detect and record the price of all the goods in the bin, making it an effortless experience for consumers. The self-checkout terminals have even become a signature element of the Uniqlo store experience — customers rave about them. 

Sustainability Influence 

As many grapple with climate anxiety these days, consumers want to know that the products they buy are sustainable and ethically produced. Retailers that embrace sustainability and social responsibility will not only be doing the right thing — they’ll elevate their brand in the eyes of consumers. This includes using eco-friendly materials, reducing waste, and supporting ethical labor practices.

A leader in the realm of prioritizing sustainability is Target. They are on their way to achieving key sustainability goals such as circular design principles (thoughtful material choice, durability, reparability, and recyclability) and 100% renewable electricity by 2030. The company claims its efforts have enhanced its brand reputation, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. This is backed by the numbers; their annual revenue for 2023 increased by 2.94% from 2022. 

Leveraging AI for Personalization and Customer Experience 

Zero consumers are authentic and well-meaning — but a little fickle. They’ll let loyalty fly out the window and give another brand a try if it makes their dollars go further. The rapid expansion of online shopping makes this easier as they can quickly bounce to competitors’ sites or find other sources through social media.  

Retailers can combat this by creating a stronger emotional connection via personalization. Using AI-powered recommendations to harness the power of customer data, such as past purchasing behavior and preferences, retailers can help customers find products relevant and interesting to them. Consumers love the value this creates. Tailoring marketing and sales strategies to the right audience increases customer retention which is smart business.

Today and in the coming year retailers are leaning into artificial intelligence (AI). According to Retailboss.co, “the retail landscape is poised for a transformative shift driven by the relentless march of artificial intelligence (AI).” 

Navigate the Trends with a Managed Services Provider (MSP) 

Innovation in retail has skyrocketed. In the last three years, there have been over 133,000 patents granted. Companies placing technology at the forefront of their business models continue to leave their competition in the dust.  

Keeping your business agile and knowing your customer will always make for solid strategy. With all the innovation competing for attention, it’s also crucial to not fall for hype and take a pragmatic approach to evaluating whether emerging technologies will help you reach your goals. Besides infrastructure support and services to keep your sales and back-office working, having an MSP as your strategic partner helps you make the right moves to transform your business and optimize the customer experience for today’s zero consumer. 

In this series:

• Retail Trends 2024: Let’s Get Phygital

The post Retail Trends 2024: Delivering for The Zero Consumer appeared first on Compucom.

Emma Mak • Staff Writer

Surprisingly, Olivia Newton-John’s lyric, “Let’s get physical,” was not actually about working out, but her aerobics-themed video helped make the catchy but cheeky song a runaway hit in the exercise-crazed 80s.

Just as the video transformed “Physical” into an aerobics anthem, phygital experiences enable retailers to dramatically broaden and enhance the experience of their brand and products. By integrating the in-person experience of physical stores with interactive and easy-to-use digital experiences, merchants can explore innovative methods to better engage their customers.

Showrooming and Webrooming 

Today’s consumers shop online a lot, but more than 85% of US retail sales still occur in physical stores. Savvy consumers want the best of both worlds. Showrooming — visiting physical stores but buying online — gives them the tactile experience of the products with the convenience and savings of online shopping. It’s especially useful for trying out higher-priced items before buying.

The opposite side of the coin, webrooming, is popular among Gen Z customers, who prefer to research products online before buying them in a physical store. Its perks include getting items immediately, more straightforward returns, no shipping costs, and supporting local businesses.  

Having both options available to consumers can work in a retailer’s favor: online shopping has lower overhead, but online advertising is expensive; in-person shopping provides a chance to increase brand loyalty through personal interaction and the creation of a real “brand experience” that is harder for retailers with only an online presence.

Great Customer Experience (CX) For the Win 

Retailers are increasingly turning to phygital experiences to enhance customer engagement and satisfaction. CX matters; it’s so important that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for great CX.  

Examples of raising the bar on CX include:

• In-store retail media using interactive displays and kiosks that can help capture attention and drive sales. For example, Walmart’s kiosks help customers locate specific products in the store and provide wayfinding.
• Incorporation of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Many examples of the use of these technologies can be found in the beauty industry, including Estée Lauder.
• Expanded digital content coming directly from store shelves or in the fitting room. For example, digital signage or QR codes with recipes, coupons, or product information or H&M’s smart mirrors.

Instant, useful content accessible right where a potential customer stands, product in hand, deciding whether to place it in their cart or back on the shelf, can dramatically increase value for the customer and influence their decision to buy.  

How a Managed Services Provider (MSP) Can Help 

Unlike fads that have come and gone, like legwarmers and outside-of-the-gym headbands, phygital experiences are an ongoing trend in retail. Creating successful ones requires that  retailers get omnichannel right. As a bonus, omnichannel gives them access to valuable data that can help increase sales opportunities and customer loyalty. 

MSPs can help retailers stay on the cutting edge in CX Besides infrastructure support and services to keep your sales and back-office working, having an MSP as your strategic partner helps transform your business to make innovative phygital experiences possible.

In this series:

• Retail Trends 2024: Delivering for The Zero Consumer

The post Retail Trends 2024: Let’s Get Phygital appeared first on Compucom.

Emma Mak • Staff Writer

If you’re reading this, perhaps you’re trying to figure out if Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) could help your company, or maybe you’re just brushing up on the latest IT lingo with a black coffee or latte in your hand. Either way, you will come away with some real-life examples of how AIOps can — more than humanly possible — help IT teams improve the efficiency and lower costs of their IT operations. 

AIOps: Anomaly Detection for Better Troubleshooting

Today’s complex IT environments make monitoring very noisy, with frequent or irrelevant alerts crowding out the most important ones. Anomaly detection uses machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and trends in data and detect deviations from normal behavior. This means monitoring can more easily adapt to seasonal or cyclical variation without manual tuning to avoid false positives or negatives.

A significant advantage of anomaly detection is that it can help you discover unknown or hidden issues you may not have anticipated or defined thresholds for, enabling proactive action before users are impacted.  

Example

A retail business implements AIOps for more proactive troubleshooting. Normal operational baselines are built, accounting for spikes in ordering patterns during seasonal changes.

One day, AIOps detects an increase in average response time for a crucial ordering application, indicating a spike in demand outside the expectations for the time of year. Happily, stakeholders identify the likely cause as the introduction of a new line of unexpectedly and wildly popular products – they’re riding the latest TikTok fad!  

Since AIOps is trained in handling an increase in usage corresponding to seasonal changes, it recommends an automation to create new instances of the application so that ordering processes are not impacted. Based on knowledge of the organization’s topology, AIOps also provides operators with details of this remediation for cohort devices and applications so they can proactively ensure the unexpected spike will be handled smoothly. 

AIOps: Event Correlation to Lower Alert Fatigue 

Even the most dedicated system or network administrator will learn to tune out alerts if too many have turned out to be false alarms.  

AIOps uses machine learning algorithms to analyze the alerts from different sources and find the patterns and dependencies among them. It then groups related alerts based on common attributes, such as time, location, source, or type, and filters out irrelevant or false alerts based on predefined thresholds. Then, natural language processing generates meaningful incidents that describe the issues’ nature, severity, and impact.

Example

A healthcare organization has a cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) system monitored by various tools for performance, availability, security, and compliance. However, many of the alerts are redundant or irrelevant.  

AIOps helps their IT team:

• Group the alerts – for example, if the EHR system experiences a network outage that affects multiple servers and applications, AIOps groups all the alerts related to the network outage into one incident.
• Filter out irrelevant alerts, such as those expected due to routine maintenance or testing activities for the EHR system.
• Prioritize incidents based on their urgency, importance, or business impact. If the EHR system has some incidents that affect patient safety or privacy, such as data loss or breach, AIOps prioritizes these incidents and assigns them a critical status.

By using AIOps to group related alerts using event correlation, the healthcare organization successfully reduces alert fatigue and improves incident management for their EHR system.

AIOps: Faster and More Accurate Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

Getting to the root cause of a performance issue can take up a lot of time, especially when teams are siloed and have limited visibility into the complete picture.

AIOps augment teams’ abilities to find the source of an issue and collaborate to speed up Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). By leveraging AIOps to detect the pattern of impact from an event, operators can use events and their root causes as modeled “fingerprints” within the time series data and logs, speeding up AIOps’ ability to recognize and resolve incidents.

Example

A government organization implements AIOps, hoping to reduce the number of and increase the quality of generated service desk tickets:

1. Monitoring tools pick up a recurring CPU spike on a server at 2 AM every morning.
2. AIOps generates a ticket each time, but after checking for signs of the spike an hour later, closes the ticket with no known cause.
3. During Problem Management processes, an operator notes the recurring tickets and creates an automation to query the device as soon as the CPU spike is detected, taking a snapshot of running processes.
4. The operator identifies the pattern; an antivirus process runs daily on the server at 2 AM. 
5. The operator trains AIOps that, before creating a CPU spike ticket for the server, it should check to see if it’s just the antivirus process running.
6. This remediation is suggested to operators when other incidents match the fingerprint.

Get a Handle on Your  IT Operations 

In our five-part AIOps series, we’ve explained what it is, how it works (part 1 and part 2), and offered advice on how to go beyond the hype to get its full advantages (hint: it’s all about the proper integration of toolsets with your IT systems). Finally, we’ve concluded with some real-world examples of its benefits.

To optimize IT operations, your IT team needs to understand the big picture by correlating metrics, events, and logs and then connecting the dots to figure out solutions. AIOps gives them automation and advanced tools to help them achieve that.

Partner with a provider with real-world experience, like Compucom, and go beyond the buzzword to truly effective AIOps. 

In this series:

• The Big Deal About AIOps
• How AIOps Works: Tame Big Data and Get to the Crux of the Matter
• How AIOps Works: Continually Smarter & More Effective IT Operations
• AIOps: Going Beyond the Buzzword

The post Real-World AIOps: Examples and Benefits appeared first on Compucom.

You don’t see much about Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) in today’s headlines. News about AI leans toward its more controversial capabilities to create content and (creepy) “art.” And the world wonders, is this what we want from AI?

When the camera was invented in the 1800s, a critic decried photography as “the mortal enemy of all art,” echoing fears of contemporary painters that it would make them irrelevant. Luckily, that was far from what happened — photography inspired Impressionism and the modern art movement.

Just like photography spurred artists to new levels of creativity, AI is at its best when it builds on our human capabilities — freeing us from drudgery and allowing us more time for creative, challenging, and fulfilling work. AIOps, isn’t intended to displace IT teams but rather help them better cope with the significant issues they face today:

• Sorting through overwhelming infrastructure data from many sources
• Ever-present and escalating cyber threats
• An ongoing shortage of IT talent 

Successful AIOps Hinge on Integrating the Right Toolsets 

This blog is part two of our more in-depth look at how AIOps works. As we discussed previously, the key to a successful implementation is integrating the right toolsets with your infrastructure to enable three main functionalities:

1. Data ingestion from across IT domains
2. Analysis, correlation, and recommendations 
3. Fixing the issue (through automated and/or human intervention) and proactive remediation

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the final part of the process in an advanced AIOps implementation: fixing the issue.  

Enable Your IT Teams with Automated Remediation and Better Insights

Automated Remediation

It’s possible for AIOps implementations only to provide monitoring and make recommendations, but this fails to realize its full benefits. A more sophisticated implementation includes the capability for automated responses through an execution engine.

This provides some key advantages:

• Rather than waiting on human engineers to respond, incidents can be resolved more quickly, helping improve IT operations and, by extension, the user experience.
• AIOps tools can use historical data to improve automated remediation over time, growing more effective the longer the tools are in place.

This doesn’t mean handing over complete control for incident response. Policies can be set to configure how AIOps tools respond in various scenarios. For example, adjustments to specific infrastructure components, such as a critical server, could require review and approval from a human engineer. 

Better Decision-Making and Proactive Remediation 

In order to have a strategic rather than reactive approach to maintaining effective and efficient IT operations, you need to be able to see the big picture. Today, that’s almost impossible without AIOps. The days of searching through log files to identify possible issues are gone. It’s no longer humanly possible to deal with the vast amounts of data from the metrics, logs, traces, emails, and tickets in a typical enterprise infrastructure, especially when functions may be siloed and perhaps come from different providers.

A well-integrated AIOps platform can help with these challenges by:  

• Determining a model of normal operating parameters for a system and then monitoring for anomalies. Anomalies can then either alert the right IT operators so they can work to resolve an issue before it happens or trigger an automation, for example, starting other instances of an in-demand application during predicted spikes in use.
• Creating an accurate topology that provides real-time insight into the state of critical systems and services so IT teams can focus on innovation rather than just responding to the everyday problems inherent to complex IT operations. 

Get Strategic About IT Operations 

In this blog and the last, we’ve looked at how AIOps can help you cut through the noise created by overwhelming amounts of data and alerts so you can get to the crux of IT operations issues and solve them proactively. 

Next, we’ll finish our series by showing how an experienced provider like Compucom can help you go beyond the buzzword to a truly effective implementation and hear some real-world success stories. 

In this series:

• The Big Deal About AIOps
• AIOps: Going Beyond the Buzzword
• How AIOps Works: Tame Big Data and Get to the Crux of the Matter
• Real-World AIOps: Examples and Benefits

The post How AIOps Works: Continually Smarter & More Effective IT Operations appeared first on Compucom.