At the end of 2014 The Guardian wrote, “2015: The Year Businesses Recognize that Climate Change is Real”, this is because of the new trends in ranking businesses according to their climate readiness and making sure that they have “sustainability goals” going into the future. These are all new points that the market was looking at throughout the year. So, what is your business doing to keep up with the times not only from a marketing standpoint, but a customer’s perspective?

Staring at a display monitor has become a standard in the American work environment. Few industries allow any of its workers to avoid the use of a computer altogether, and those workers who do not have to spend their workday managing tasks and exchanging information using a computer often use a portion of their free time to navigate their mobile devices, tablets, or personal home computers. Nonetheless, it is no secret that humans are spending more and more of their time using computing devices, but it is important to notice the mandatory nature of this phenomenon. Although businesses and scientists alike are constantly discovering new ways to improve the capabilities of these computers and devices, less time is invested into decreasing the negative effects of spending so much of our time looking at these screens and living virtually. Recently gaining momentum, however, is a computer software called f.lux that acknowledges one of the problems with fixating our eyes on displays that is regularly ignored. While we are becoming more careful about adjusting our brightness to match our environment, there is no built-in setting in our operating systems that allows us to manage the color temperature of our screens. f.lux resolves this concern.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is arguably the most revolutionary step within industrial progress since the development of computing technology. Not only has it changed the entire business network, but our understanding of social organization has been significantly altered. All individuals have the ability to share their ideas with the entire online community, and the traction of an idea is not necessarily limited by a content author’s authenticity. In fact, the IoT allows anyone to become the leader of a movement and to develop a strong reputation alongside the expansion of their idea itself. This is valuable to both the environmentalist trying to save the world’s ecology and the marketer trying to drive traffic to his or her business’s website. As businesses create new ways to take advantage of the Internet of Things, they encounter a greater need to understand how IT will support their online retail platform, customer and lead organization, content publishing, project collaboration, activity monitoring, and computer or device management. Smartphone devices allowed the IoT to become what it is today by giving users the ability to interact with the Internet at any moment in time, and it is this observation that demonstrates the importance of using mobile device technology to stay connected as a business. Ultimately, the IoT changes businesses’ approaches to operations by modifying the structure of their information systems and creating a demand for new IT solutions.

There is no better asset to an individual trying to reach a conclusion than a fact. The same is true for a decision maker within a business. Management, finances, marketing, sales, development, and other operational details require vital decisions to be made that will play a direct role in future success. Historically, facts have not always been fully available to business decision makers. As a result, they have had to reach conclusions founded on intuition. They have had to ask themselves what results they expect to see when influencing a business variable using solely their own previous knowledge and experiences. While this is a skill that can be developed, it forces assumptions to be made on the part of the decision maker. Fewer facts are utilized, and the context of a particular situation is never fully recognized. The results of an action taken become far less predictable. Consequently, as information supplies both fact and context, it is important for a business to develop a means of acquiring and distributing relevant information to all decision makers. Using facts, these individuals are able to make a stronger argument to themselves and their coworkers as to why a particular conclusion reached is also the most valuable. It is this acknowledgement that highlights the importance of a versatile information system and demonstrates the potential business value of actionable data.

With cloud services developing so rapidly that it seems as if every new application and platform is being sold “as a service”, it appears that business information systems are slowly being freed of the risk that is associated with keeping hardware and data on-site. As one might expect, disaster recovery is evolving as a result of cloud services to such an extent that disaster recovery itself has become institutionalized as a service. The driving movement of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) coordinates well with a business that is using several cloud services while also allowing them to have their own applications and data integrated into the DRaaS providers system. Although this service is similar to life insurance in the sense that stakeholders likely hope to never have to take advantage of its function, DRaaS acts as a proof of concept that the virtual migration of a business’s information system to the cloud can change collective operations altogether. Furthermore, a service such as this that is truly effective may change a business’s understanding of what a disaster means.