As we approach the next century, we face the challenges of meeting the growing demands of our clients and of orchestrating our talents and skills to best serve the needs of our clients.

To meet these challenges, we are implementing our newest program initiative: The Douglas Resource Center.

Overview

The Douglas Resource Center is a multi-faceted, easy to use, and easily accessible communications and information hub established for our staff to assist in the support that we provide our clients. It focuses on improving communications between each other and outside resources, expanding and centralizing our knowledge base, and creating a virtual library of information about our clients, their people, and their systems. This information is, of course, kept confidential and secure, and accessed only with proper authorization.

What does this mean for our clients? We think it means even better service from each of our staff through improved responsiveness, the leveraging of technical information, and a more orchestrated effort in serving our clients.

Today’s organization has more than one computer system. It has an infrastructure of information systems that supports almost every aspect of its business. The effective use of these sophisticated systems requires the support of multiple skill sets. Many times decisions and recommendations to enhance these systems must be contemplated with the entire system in mind, not just a single computer system or software application.

The Douglas Resource Center enables us to provide the best possible technical assistance to our clients that we seek to serve. It enables us to work closely together, ignoring the issues of geography and logistics. We are linked to each other, to other key resources, and to key information about clients and their systems.

The Details

Communications. To best serve our clients today, we are constantly sharing information with our staff, vendors, business clients, and with our client’s staff. The Douglas Resource Center features email access to these resources, when email access to these resources is available. It features a seamless organization of contact information for the people we need to communicate with, including email addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, and more.

Now, information can be requested and received, then distributed to the parties who need to know with a simplicity that is unmatched.

It’s like having our resources and staff nearby, even when they are miles away.

Knowledge Base. As technical problems arise, and solutions are found, we find it helpful to make this information accessible to other staff members. This reduces the amount of time and effort needed to resolve an issue that has occurred at more than one location.

The Douglas Resource Center has an ever-growing database of problems and the solutions we found. This database is available to all of our support staff, no matter where they are.

Project Management. Because tasks to be performed for a project are outlined and delegated as the skill requires, The Douglas Resource Center minimizes administrative time and makes project management easy.

It ties project management into time entry. This is a huge benefit to our staff, because we would each rather be providing solutions than doing paperwork.

Documentation and Record Keeping. Information about our clients and their systems are easily accessible to staff members out in the field. Pertinent information such as telephone numbers, hardware configurations, support numbers, and access codes can be made available, enabling our technical staff to quickly assess each client’s environment.

This means we are better able to see the “big picture” when serving our clients.

In addition, The Douglas Resource Center allows each staff member to create his own documentation, immediately. The best time to document the features of an information system, or changes made to an information system, is when the changes are being performed.

This encourages accurate record keeping, which saves time down the road, and improves our service to our clients.

Summary

We at Douglas & Associates, Inc. are excited about our future. What we seek to achieve, in the end, are not systems frozen in historical time, but stable, reliable, functional information systems that better the firms who are our clients, so that they can better serve their customers, and so on.

Isn’t that what it’s all about? A system of interconnected-ness. Our firm and yours. Your firm and your customers. We live in an environment where our survival, our success, depends on each other. We hope The Douglas Resource Center will be a vehicle to encourage and nurture this inter-connected-ness, to all our benefit.