I’m working currently as a product specialist in digital workflows for dental laboratories and clinics. My customers are all located around Finland. I’m responsible both for the support of our systems as well as sales of respective products. In this position I use today’s hybrid knowledge work, together with dental industry specific digital tools, software and hardware. Combining work from home office with different locations anywhere in Finland and sometimes abroad, creates a need for the organization to have defined guidelines for information work.
M365 is a versatile tool to work with different apps that are needed in modern knowledge work. I use on a daily basis Teams, OneNote, Word, Excel, Sharepoint, Viva Engage and Outlook. All these tools can be accessed from the cloud with credentials, so it is really easy to access necessary files and engage with discussions and activities on the go and from different devices. Mobileapps are really important, as usually when you’re travelling and meeting customers you need to quickly check something or make notes, and all of this is really easy to do in the digital forms accessing the cloud. In addition to M365 we use Salesforce to track activities, opportunities, client data and events. Salesforce is a useful and broad digital tool to be able to work as a team rather than doing an individual performance. All expenses and travel invoices are also tracked in a digital format to an app. Whenever there is a receipt it can be digitalized in a few seconds and processed forward.
In addition to the basic digital work tools, also my own focus products are related to digital. Modern digital dentistry includes advanced technology which enables more accurate and faster processes. Digital tools also give benefits to the entire dental team members but also to patients. My focus is mainly on dental prosthetics, and for this the dental team can use intraoral scanners to digitalize the teeth and CAD/CAM devices that enable the design and manufacture of prosthetic work. I’m working also with dental software, milling units and 3D printers.
I use Instagram on a personal private account, and I really enjoy the visual and informative accounts that give positive value to me. Companies have guidelines about social media usage, and I have been used to that always. It is important to understand which accounts are personal and which represent a company and its values. Also, any paid marketing posts need to be clearly marked correspondingly. I could use Instagram for work purposes by creating a separate public work account, which would clearly state in the account name the purpose of the account. Our company has a certain text that needs to be added to these types of accounts, and they reflect the purpose of posting company-related information on the voice of an employee. The posts that could be shared could include highlights from events or trainings. It is always necessary to have consent from the participants to publish pictures or videos. Posts could also be about marketing products – this needs to be done certainly only in a way that is suitable for the company. And also, maybe some reflections of the daily life as an employee. I could see myself also using this as a gateway to educate the masses about dental technology in general, as Instagram is a free source for influencing. If social media is used in the correct way also from employee side, the content can create an original and holistic view of the company and its values.
Monday
This app is meant for project lead purposes. Right now, in my work this could be used for events, training planning or for publishing new products, for example. This kind of tool could be used efficiently and collaboratively as you can share the projects for your colleagues and modify the content simultaneously with team members. On Monday you could efficiently handle different projects but also use sales management tools, IT ticket handling and strategy planning. It seems to overlap a lot with salesforce and M365. When working with different applications it’s necessary to evaluate the APIs and possible intersections where the information is not flowing in an optimal way. Also logging on to several applications with multiple credentials creates the need for SSO log in, which works nicely in organization level where everything is integrated.
Todoist
Todoist provides also project lead tools, task management and integrations. Seems that todoist has integrated features that support natural task creation on the go. It provides tools for teams as well, which is really important in today’s work culture. Again, this tool seems to be very handy but looks like I have the same kind of tools already in M365 and it doesn’t make sense to double the tasks in different apps.
Issuu
This tool provides the marketing teams with the possibility to easily integrate their specific content into a format that can be shared. I assume that a lot of AI driven tools will become more and more used when handling a big amount of data and taking it to a published form for example. Right now, I could maybe use Issuu in making some advertisements for training or events together with our marketing team.
Evernote
Evernote can handle notes in digital format with the help of automation and AI tools. From notes Evernote can create tasks and timelines and keep track on the completion of the tasks. I could see myself using this kind of tool in the future. It would need to be really automatic in order to give benefit to everyday life. Maintaining different tasks and planning the calendar is really a task sometimes. I’m really looking forward if AI could arrange the calender schedules so that it knows how much time I need to reserve for different tasks and when and also if it can plan schedules when you need to drive and park to different locations. API’s will be important here, the Evernote needs to transfer information from notes to the correct applications.
I could use all of these in my daily life if these wouldn’t already been implemented in my current work IT portfolio. To be able to successfully use digital tools I think the preplanning is essential. As the different apps can be costly, before making the decision to buy an app, a good evaluation of the benefits and implementation process needs to be done. The app itself needs to have a good user experience and a tendensy to evolve and progress. Usually user experiences are good to check before making decisions as that can give also insights for the evaluation process. As it is necessary to use different apps, it will be good to evaluate the data flow and integrations, in order to maintain efficient work in digital formats. On the organization level effective work in digital platforms requires carefully planned and communicated playbooks. 360 degrees communication is must today, but the challenge is that the organization and teams need to have a clear map of guidance about what information is shared and where. Especially when all team members are not meeting face-to-face every day, the management need to clear ways how to engage with the entire team also on the go.
When working related to health care and patient data, it’s highly important to always evaluate the applications we are using from all aspects and preplanning is also essential here. Usability cannot be talked about enough, too often even myself have issues working with the different eHealth apps and platforms usability wise. We are expected to make tickets and report about issues, but sometimes even the ticket creation is too difficult to find in the digital systems. In society level we have to have more and more open discussions about how our personal data is used and who can make decisions about our health. Governments and authorities have to have strong knowledge and teams that take care that our regulatory processes and evaluations are applied across all the different eHealth applications and solutions to ensure patient safety.
Self-evaluation
All in all, I would like to use more digital tools, but from what I can learn from my customers as well is that in many cases we just don’t have the time to invest to learn a new application. Definitely we need to reserve time in order to learn something new and to efficiently integrate it to everyday life. I like to use social media to some extent and it seems to be a really great place for marketing. Right now, I have not implemented it much to work, because it also reserves more time, which I would rather like to reduce from social media presence. It is an interesting and timely topic to discuss how much we use our time in general in digital platforms.