Examining the Relationship Between Professional Services and IT

Professional services have a reputation for being the important kind of work that has to be learned through experience. However, that reputation doesn’t usually cover these businesses using very much technology, because for a very long time, professional services didn’t.

Didn’t, past tense.

Nowadays, professional services are experiencing a pretty major shift. While expectations were once based on the amount of effort expended on a given task, expectations today are more focused on results. Technology can prove to be a valuable resource when it comes to enabling this shift to happen. The first step a business can take is often to adopt automated processes as a way to improve their efficiency and generate cost savings.

However, there can be hang-ups when a professional service provider offers a more hands-on service, where automation isn’t so much of an option.

That, combined with the fact that many professional services firms can be split into two pretty distinct parts - outward-facing and internal - makes automation tricky to implement. Having said that, there are plenty of other ways that technology can benefit professional service firms and improve their operations. One means of doing so is to make a digital transformation.

A Digital Transformation?

Any shift that goes from an analog-based system to a digital one is considered a digital transformation - something that has been taking place more and more frequently over the past 20 years. The cloud has played a big role in this process - consider how it helps with time and resource management, productivity, collaboration, and archiving information. Plus, there’s the efficiency to these processes that a digital system can add to your operations.

Consider how the following establishments have begun to take advantage of technology to accomplish this.

Medical Practices

Due to mandated requirements, medical practices have seen some considerable IT improvements for the better part of a decade. The results of these improvements have been shown in a few studies. One from 2018 indicated that 60 percent of medical practices that had upgraded their information technology would describe their experience as a positive one, while 23.5 percent described their experience as positive-to-mixed. A relatively tiny eight percent found their technology implementation to be negative.

The nature of the healthcare industry effectively requires participation at every level for technology implementation and transformation to work effectively and accomplish the benefits that healthcare providers would seek to find - like access to electronic health records and other improvements that can cut redundant costs and facilitate more comprehensive care for the patient.

Legal Services

Law firms and legal representatives in general are often steeped in tradition. As one of the oldest professions in the world, there is an established standard that many - if not most - lawyers seem to view as sacred. It really should come as no surprise that the profession has barely changed - but that doesn’t mean that they have no use for technology. Solutions like document management, mobile device management, and other solutions that enable mobility and remote access have proven extremely useful to the legal representative.

Really, any professional services firm that adopts improved technologies is doing so for one underlying reason - to allow them to do whatever it is they do that much more effectively. Would you like to learn more about how technology can be a benefit to you? Give Horne & Benik a call at (603) 499-4400 to speak to one of our professionals.