in a remote and hybrid environment is different than on site. Making sure there are opportunities for face-to-face/in-person events, as well as those that can be done virtually. Trying to combine the two became cumbersome and not as effective as creating separate event “types” that appeal to each environment. More importantly, finding methods to keep a hybrid workforce engaged with each other and fostering trust within the team when we were accustomed to face-to-face/in-person [engagement] which seemed easier/more comfortable.4 Business Development/Sales – finding opportunities in an environment where face-to-face networking was shut down was a major impact to our new client sales. The need to diversify the sales strategy/approach for inbound and outbound sales became critical. We pivoted by increasing SEO/SEM and more online marketing in an attempt to accomplish what was typically done through networking groups, events, and face-to-face referral introductions.
5 Individualized Flexibility – COVID taught us that one size definitely does not fit all. We had team members with small children at home that had no options for out-of-the-home day care and needed flexibility in their workday. Our team really rallied around each other to make anything and everything work as best as they could. There was a lot of empathy for those with home environments that were not ideal work environments and any notion of “policy” around work schedules were quickly tossed and replaced with a 100% flexible mindset.
—NICK DAMOULAKIS, CEO/President, Orases Inc.
1 Remote work works, but there are a lot of trade-offs.
2 On-premise technology is vestigial.
3 Double down on risk management and security.
4 Perhaps the most important lesson learned is that IT should pursue a SaaS only strategy.
—PETER BASKETTE, Vice President, IT, Riverbed Technologies
IT suddenly launched into the forefront of operational sustainability, becoming more relevant than ever before by moving beyond the “ticket taking” mentality and into the strategic X-as-a-Service thinking. We learned many lessons through the progression of this pandemic and continue to stumble upon realizations of the importance of business and academic alignment with our rollout of our Agile Strategic Plan. We had lessons in resiliency, learning to adapt and overcome challenges, while in a remote setting. We had lessons in empathy as we held up and supported colleagues while Covid crept in and pulled workers toward supporting their loved ones. We also learned that work/life balance morphed into work/life integration. Much like the work we do to connect systems, we had to pivot into all things work and life at the same time. This also demonstrated intentional leadership as guiding a team in an ambiguous time absolutely required adaptive intentional leadership. I was able to create weekly fireside chats to share with the group about important organizational updates and how it affected them personally. In addition, we used this challenge not to just survive but to thrive and grow. This concept was new to a group that really only knew operations.
Intentional leadership required me to have town halls, leadership retreats, and constant communication on WHY we were doing the important work … not just the bits and bytes of it. Lastly, I would be remiss to not mention cyber hygiene and protecting our digital assets. With all of our workers going remote, we had to ensure our faculty, staff, and students were secure as they completed their work from home. This included investing in transformational technology as well as launching several awareness campaigns. This pandemic has challenged and stretched the normal technology work into a framework of agile operations and autonomy in our work.
—KENDRA C. KETCHUM, Vice President for Information Management and Technology, The University of Texas at San Antonio
Things I've Done in My Career to Prepare
I have spent decades working with IT teams to prepare and test for various types of disasters that could impact operations. Halfway through 2017, we set out on an aggressive multiyear strategy to modernize information technology. The strategy included multiple goals:
1 To reduce our reliance of on-premise solutions and reduce our data center's footprint.
2 To expand into the cloud and integrate systems with near real-time web services integrations.
3 To remake vendor management by focusing on the right strategic partnerships and outsourcing noncore technologies to vendors where the technology was their core competency.
4 To develop a world-class IT disaster recovery and business continuity program that included testing production cutover with non-IT staff for mission-critical systems including voice.
5 To create a best practice IT governance framework and cybersecurity approach that, simply put, reduces risk and aligns IT spending with the organization's key business goals and initiatives.
In 2017 and into 2018, we replaced physical servers with a robust and redundant virtualized environment that included consolidation and replacement of corporate storage area network (SAN) disk systems. In 2018, we removed our virtual desktop (VDI) platform and replaced it with a combination of laptops and mini-desktops with virtual private network (VPN) capability. We also started an aggressive strategy to move applications into the cloud within the boundary of a secure single sign-on multifactor authentication portal that included our messaging applications along with other cloud applications including the IT helpdesk service desk. In 2019, we launched our new SaaS-based grants platform and integrated payment services capability with multiple levels of redundancy across the country, deployed a new cloud-based business intelligence and data visualization solution, and migrated our on-premise private branch exchange (PBX) phone system to a cloud-based voice-over-IP (VOIP) solution with an intelligent call-center menu and routing system. In Q1 of 2020, we launched the first three modules of our new human capital management (HCM) system in the cloud. Two and a half months later, we vacated our corporate offices for nearly 100 percent remote work.
Simply put, we had a great strategy with a traditional IT disaster recovery and business continuity plan but got lucky on the timing of the Coronavirus pandemic. If the pandemic had hit us earlier, the negative impacts would have been felt with increasing severity in 2019, 2018, and 2017. Not all organizations were lucky, and many CIOs paid a heavy price for their organizations not being as prepared as they could have been for a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic. This text will provide readers with factual information from CIO, CISO, COO, and CEO contributors, as well as researched information on what worked and didn't work, lessons learned, and how organizations are changing their IT strategy for the future so that when another global pandemic, or other significant business disruption or regional emergency affects their geographic corridor, the impacts will be far less than the Covid-19 pandemic.
Recommendations and Predictions
To close this chapter out, I advise CISOs, CIOs, to CEOs to take a hard look at their organizations over the past year and a half and ask hard questions regarding what they'd do differently to prepare for a long-term revenue and staff impacting issue like a global pandemic. While I hope that we never experience the severe health, economic, and organizational impact of Covid-19 again, I'm adept enough to know that we've had worse in the past and will continue to have challenges that rise to a global response in the future. That said, I have the following predictions and recommendations regarding topics in this chapter.
Recommendations
Organizations should continue their adoption of cloud services postpandemic and integrate where possible through encrypted application programming interfaces (APIs) and web services.
