The current COVID-19 pandemic has everyone finding a ‘new normal’ in the way we have been quickly forced to change our social and working habits. What will this mean for our industry once the world gets past this crisis? We spoke to Mike Schembri, Senior Executive Advisor at InfoTech, the world’s fastest growing IT research and advisory company, to get his take.
Mike, what is the most common conversation the InfoTech team are having with your members?
Initially, we had questions regarding disaster recovery planning (DRP), business continuity planning (BCP) and ‘rapid scaling’ of remote working capabilities. However, not as many as you might expect, mainly because these are areas that we have always had very solid content in and clients were able to self-serve and stabilise their environments. Once these areas were stabilised, we are now seeing our customer questions pivot to two main areas:
- Employee engagement, especially ‘remote worker’ care.
- Organisational change, particularly cost containment/cash management and business model changes.
Can you expand a little on those topics?
I am not sure that anyone was ready for, or expected the rapidity with which we have pivoted our workforce to a mostly remote worker model. We are fielding lots of questions regarding our research content on how to effectively care for people working from home in the medium term. Especially as in both Australia and New Zealand, employers have legal (and moral) obligations regarding the safety of their employees while working from home. For example, the member webinar we had scheduled on How to Effectively Manage a Remote Team ‘maxed out’ the attendees allowed by the technology and a repeat session had to be rescheduled!
Supporting remote teams is an area that IT are well-served to lead and actively support in the wider business, as we (IT leaders) have been used to daily scrums with remote colleagues and engaging with offshore teams and partners as a matter of course.
The organisational change imperative manifest in two primary ways, initially businesses are focused on cash and survival, and then business model change. We have seen multiple organisations suspending their annual financial planning cycle while they focus on short term survival, and we are helping IT leaders to proactively engage in discussions around cost cutting with the business to ensure mid-term viability. Once organisations have established a viable medium-term business model, they are beginning to ask deeper questions around how they can pivot the longer-term business model to leverage their newfound capabilities.
Do you have any practical tips for our readers who are working through these things themselves?
When Wayne Gretzky, a famous Canadian ice hockey player, was asked why he was successful, he said “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”.
As an IT business leader technical delivery, while DRP and BCP are a given, you also need to understand the organisations functional model and particularly the cash flow and impacts to that cash flow. Be prepared to have proactive and meaningful discussions regarding IT costs and cash impacts, and to align all IT operations and changes to maximum positive effect on cash.
One tip is to avoid Magic Pudding budget changes! The Magic Pudding is an Australian Children’s story about a pudding that keeps growing back to full size after you cut a slice. All choices have consequences, and as we work with the business to adjust IT costs to support the new business model, we need to make the consequences of these changes clear and ensure business buys in to these changes with a completely understanding of long term impact.
We can’t do exactly the same for less or we would have already done it!
What lasting changes do you think we will adopt?
The most obvious is, if our organisations get the remote working model right in a post ‘pandemic world,’ you can expect greater focus on digital workplace. Considering office costs are usually the second highest overhead for businesses, this makes economic sense.
In addition, we can expect a much more rapid and widespread acceptance of remote or ‘tele-service’ models. As Rosie the Riveter once made women working socially acceptable during WWII, I wonder whether COVID-19 will usher in Ollie the Online Service Desk agent (who will ultimately be an AI bot) and make remote service the preferred model of our society?
So while sadly some organisations will fail, others will adapt, evolve and prosper. These organisations will be more resilient and agile and my hope is they will help build a… well, a better world for everyone. IT leaders will be at the centre of this change and the new world. So in the words of Winston Churchill, “let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if… (our societies) last for a thousand years, men will still say: this was their finest hour”.
Info-Tech are the premier ‘how to’ IT Consulting with offices in Australia, Canada and the USA We have established several pandemic response sites to gather relevant response resources for key areas such as Remote Working, Business Continuity Planning and Cost Containment, as well as other helpful resources. To learn more, please visit: