5 Questions With…

In the new feature, 5 Questions With…Jim Hoefflin, CBORD’s president shares ideas and imaginative technology solutions for education and healthcare, plus offers insight into the future of CBORD and Horizon Software. 

What is the biggest challenge facing CBORD and Horizon Software today?

CBORD and Horizon face a major challenge that is inhibiting most businesses across many industries. We continue to struggle to find the talent we need to support our growth. Coming out of the pandemic, one may think talent is more readily available. That is true, but primarily in the service sector and roles that aren’t transferable to our business. When you scrutinize the roles we need to support our growth, we believe we are already at or below pre-pandemic unemployment rates. For a business like ours, it will continue to be one of our biggest challenges. To combat this, we are investing significantly in the areas of retention, onboarding, and retooling of talent.

What’s a major development in your industries that’s flying under the radar?

There is very little that flies under the radar in our industries, but there are developments that may not be receiving as much attention as they should. One of those is facial recognition, which tends to be marginalized based on security and privacy concerns. In our industries, there is a theme of a known, consistent population of people that lends itself to highly effective use of facial recognition, while minimizing the concerns around privacy. When we think about the application of technology, which will become increasingly affordable every year, we see a significant impact around identity verification, location access control, and retail transaction approval.

In five years, what is the biggest change the industries you serve will face?

From our perspective, our customers will also be significantly challenged from a workforce perspective and forced to look for ways to create more throughput with the same or similar labor resources. Across the board, this means they will need to find areas to convert to self-service, optimize, or automate. Five years from now, the retail operations of our customers will look substantially different, driven by automation in food preparation and efforts to streamline the check-out process. You will still be able to order, have meals prepared substantially to your specifications, and transact the payment, but five years from now you’ll be doing that process with no or significantly less human interaction.

What is the most interesting trend you see in 2021?

Adoption of cloud solutions, at least in the industries we serve, has not been as advanced as many other industries. As we emerge from the pandemic and combined with the labor challenges our customers face, cloud solution adoption has accelerated or jumped ahead, maybe 24 to 36 months of where it would have been. In anticipation of this, we began investing more aggressively almost a year ago to prepare ourselves to better serve these demands.

What’s one thing people would be surprised to learn about you?

Since the tender age of 10 years old, I have been an avid motorcyclist. In the early days, of course, it was mini bikes and dirt bikes. As I earned my road license, I rode just about everything from supersport to touring bikes. Italian, Japanese, American makers…I love aspects of every one of them. I happily rode until just a couple of years ago when I finally came to the conclusion that I had remained happy and healthy far longer than most bikers, and sold my last ride…a Ducati Multistrada, which I adored and respected. I would joke with people and say the bike and I had the same conversation before every ride, “You behave and I’ll behave, and we’ll get through this just fine.” We absolutely did.

For questions or comments regarding the 5 Questions With… series, email our marketing services director.