Musings of a Technology Evangelist

In the past few months, we have all learnt many new terms…. “social isolation”, “contact tracing”, “self-quarantine”, “shelter in place”… (more here) All thanks to COVID19. On March 22, COVID-19 infections have surged to more than 28000 cases with more than 11000 deaths worldwide, infecting 187 countries worldwide. It is slowly dawning on each of us, the problem is not going away soon.

Businesses continuity call to action

Business Continuity leaders across the world who have initiated their business continuity plans or its subsection on pandemic response are now busy establishing how to operate at minimum levels, to cope with this hitherto unforeseen business disruption. And the most common business continuity strategy is remote working or working from home. While working remotely is not new, the scale of the current workforce working remotely is. It is estimated that about 70 million would be impacted in the US alone.

Working from home was a great idea once.

In 2009, IBM reported that 40% of its 386,000 employees in 173 countries were working remotely. That policy allowed IBM to sell off its office buildings at a gain of almost $2 billion. Hailed as a savvy business strategy, the trend of telecommuting was soon in full swing. Working remotely took off due to several factors coinciding: the rollout of good broadband connection, the changing nature of work, competition for talent and demand from employees for a better work-life balance.

But soon it fell through

2013 saw a big surge in initiatives by enterprises on “bringing employees back to the office” because working from home was a problem. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey showed that the number of U.S. workers who worked partially or fully from home dropped to 22 percent in 2016. Organizations were citing a lack of culture, team building, and work ownership as key issues. Not only was working from home began to be frowned upon, but organizations would first remove the remote workers, when staff reductions were due. Yahoo was one of the first to announce and many large enterprises followed suit. Working remotely nearly died a natural death, and was used stylishly in business continuity plans and for helping people emergencies (personal engagement, sickness, family event, travel).

COVID19 is bringing back remote working

Face to face working has its advantages in being information-rich. We interpret nonverbal cues to build trust and professional intimacy, subconsciously match our body positions, movements, and even our breathing rhythms to people around us, especially when we gauge how well our ideas are being accepted. This helps us achieve the desired results.

However, face to face is blowing a pandemic like COVID19 out of proportion. More and more countries are enforcing social distancing. At the time of writing this, many countries have stopped people gathering in one place. Offices are being closed, and those who can, are working from home. Considering that we are in for a long haul, the current lockdown should train us to work productively without needing to see each other.

Workplaces are now being forced to go digital and that set me musing….

Here is what I think we could be doing…

COVID19 has given us a new working arrangement…remote working/work from home, and we probably need to do this for a few months. This forced situation will train us to develop operational mechanisms to become more productive than earlier. Let us monitor how each of our business units handles this new and hitherto arrangement. People will learn newer skills. Let us capture this as data and build Remote Working Statistics. And it would be expected to differ by organization and by department initially until a much larger picture emerges.

These statistics should be used to evolve a Digital Workplace Strategy, that would help enterprises define how they would work from offices and at homes, in-country and across borders, across information infrastructures that are on-premises and on the cloud to achieve their business objectives within the boundaries of risk and acceptable cost models.

This strategy should then be translated into an Integrated Workplace Framework. The Integrated Workplace Framework would be able to guide how to set up the operational capabilities to meet business objectives that use resources across borders and information infrastructures, their security and privacy dependencies and arrangements. and the benefits vis-à-vis current models of working from offices.

It is common knowledge that establishing the Integrated Workplace Framework is not easy. Establishing it requires the intent to collect information from across the organization. But the benefits far outweigh the operational challenges. It is important to know that an Integrated Workplace Framework would need to consider multiple other factors beyond the success or failure of people working remotely.

1. The Risk Factor

Most risk experts agree that it is easier to develop strategies and determine actions to address risks and opportunities when uncertainty is reduced. The Remote Working Statistics, when captured diligently, will provide unprecedented insight into areas that affect business operations. These would include issues affecting travel, staff benefits, and other expenses in office arrangements, perceptions about working from home, people avoiding work, work culture getting affected, work-life balance, establishing a feeling of togetherness, etc, amongst other information that affects risks in an enterprise, broken down by department or type of work and the locations. The Remote Working Statistics is a great decision-making tool when deciding upon risks.

1.  The Resilience Factor

There can be no better example of resilience as it is today. Almost 100 countries or more are heading into lockdown as I write this article, and yet many organizations continue to work. Some are suffering business losses, businesses dependent upon face to face interactions are laying off people, stock markets are crashing. However, some organizations (especially those that embraced the digital model) continue to operate, some minimal, many almost close to normal business because their business models allow them to. And these organizations are raising the bar on resilience. The Digital Workspace Strategy will fuel these organizations to streamline work from workspaces in offices and remote, to achieve higher business agility as organization resilience will reach greater heights. 

1. Cybersecurity & Privacy

Almost everyone in the cybersecurity world are aware that more and more people of an enterprise will increasingly seek access to resources within the enterprise from outside the firewall. The traditional perimeter is dead. With increasing cloud adoption, we now have computing infrastructure sitting beyond a firewall. The new perimeter needs to be established around data. Enterprises have adopted or are in the process of adopting newer information protection technologies. Zero Trust Architecture will ensure that multiple verifications would be performed before providing access. Granular Identity Governance ensures that access is given as needed and denied when not in use. Behaviour Analytics and Response can demonstrate and restrict unauthorized access for people with access. There are more. (Probably needs another writeup)