For the past two decades, it has been my passion to help organizations enhance the way they work through process improvements and emerging technology deployments. When I started my career as a technical engineer, professional services leader, and co-founder at eDocument Solutions – a majority of my projects focused on taking organizations paperless and applying electronic workflows. I remember one of my first solo projects, helping a small Minnesota-based community bank in the late ’90s advance to paperless reporting and checking statements. Man, was I nervous! In what seemed to be the blink of an eye, we were then assisting a global life insurance company with a major enterprise content management (ECM) initiative. How quickly things progress!

Through these last 20 years, I have seen our clientele and the ECM (now labeled by AIIM as Intelligent Information Management) industry undergo many transformations – from the basic image capture, workflow, and process automation; to mobile field technologies, software- and infrastructure-as-a-service, and cloud-first initiatives. It has been rewarding to work alongside many of our same customers since the very beginning of their digital transformation journey and advising them over the years on the latest technologies in the marketplace. I have seen tremendous growth of so many of our partners – from paper files to sophisticated on-prem enterprise solutions and many who are now taking advantage of advanced on-demand, SaaS offerings and our complementary managed services. It definitely beats the days on installing the Hardware/OS and having to maintain it all yourself.

Now that I reflect back on my professional journey – the technology advancements, customer accomplishments, and remarkable teams I have been fortunate to be part of – it is apparent, at the heart of it all, there has only been one constant: human ingenuity. No matter the industry’s current trends, we have always placed value in hiring and cultivating top talent, an offer of quality and dependability that can’t be attained through technology alone. This is the backbone of our customer relationships and the reason we have successfully achieved what we have with our customers, as partners.

My last 6 years at DataBank – from leading architecture, customer success to sales and marketing, and, now, President and CEO – have been dedicated to ensuring we are following through on our purpose, and DataBank has all the needed resources to provide exceptional services to our current and future customers.

At the beginning of 2019, we made the decision to verticalize all teams – marketing, sales, architects, engineers, developers, account managers, support – to guarantee our service delivery would offer the highest value to our customers. It has been an amazing experience to watch us grow from a geographically focused organization (local, down the street) to an industry-focused powerhouse, building a bench of some of the best engineers, developers, architects, and subject matter experts in our industry.

As for 2020 and beyond, delivering thoughtful and solid services will remain our purpose and main driving force. Regardless of what the next new set of technology (AI, RPA … we have seen it all) may be, we inspire to provide the best services in our market segment, always. And, as emerging technology progresses more rapidly and organizations increase their expenditures on automated solutions, I believe advisors and service teams, who have the ability to problem-solve and think critically – while being empathetic to customers’ needs, will become an even more desirable asset to organizations in the future. Translating business and industry-specific challenges into applied solutions and interpreting data intelligence to make informed organizational decisions will continue to be a market need that depends heavily on a humanistic approach to be successful.

As the marketplace changes and grows, we are dedicated to changing and growing alongside it. We remain dedicated to spending time on the next DataBank frontier by creating an environment where our expertise only strengthens as new technology is introduced and establishing an organization that our customers cannot only trust, but rely on. The next several years will be spent building on this momentum and refining our solution set to be nothing more than crisp and relevant to the industries we serve today and tomorrow. I am looking forward to many more years of problem-solving with clients and working alongside my teammates at this wonderful organization!