Meet Nolan Evans, Vice President, Ontario at Long View Systems
With more than 25 years of experience encompassing every aspect of IT, Nolan has been instrumental in building Long View's Central Canada branch from a team of 3 to 160 strong and serving a wide, cross-section of private and public sector clients.
In this Spotlight Series post, we get up close and personal with Nolan regarding the Digital Organization, tapping into his extensive knowledge and experience regarding the importance of having the agility to respond to a rapidly changing world proactively.
In your own words Nolan, what does the Digital Organization mean to you?
My answer is pretty straight forward; to not be digital is to be doing yourself a disservice.
We – being Long View, have been digital for some time. In other words, we walk the talk. From this standpoint of both experience and expertise, we understand the efficiency and speed to market advantage digital provides, as well as the ability to execute on new areas of business that only open up when you fully embrace the digital reality.
What is the digital reality?
It is taking full advantage of your data and real-time interactions with your clients and suppliers to become a digital supply chain to grow and run your business effectively.
In your role at Long View, how do you make the Digital Organization tangible and add value to clients?
In a word – speed.
Having the right data in the right context and format enables you to act on it quickly to make the right decisions with confidence in response to a rapidly changing environment.
Take, for example, the pandemic, which is a situation with which we have all been dealing. In the matter of a week, our working environments changed and with it the way we do business. Those organizations with a good handle on their digital platform seamlessly made the transition to remote working with minimal interruption of their day-to-day operations.
I also think about those businesses that were able to make a move from having a bricks and mortar physical presence with their customer base to building a rock-solid online presence. To be successful, they needed a good handle on how to effectively leverage digital technology on a timely basis to engage their market effectively. In other words, by having a reliable digital capability provided them with the agility to proactively respond to a changing situation as opposed to reacting to it.
Speaking of the above outcomes, why do you believe Long View is the ideal partner for clients?
As I said earlier, we have always been digital. As a result, we have a broad and diverse range of clients of all sizes spanning multiple verticals.
This experience uniquely positions us to provide a panoply of services from design and implementation through to managed services with deployment to any cloud platform.
However, if you are asking me what the real advantage is of working with Long View, it is unequivocally our people. Having the right people, able to do the right things, at the right time to make digital technology work for our clients is our greatest strength and key differentiator.
It is in this context that we say that we are a "tech-powered, people-driven" partner for our clients.