includes a large number of global undergraduate and graduate technology management or information systems academic programs.
I believe that there is a significant need for a book of this type at this time. First – many organizations that were technically unprepared for the pandemic suffered greatly. This text will serve as a road map for how to move forward with a technology strategy so that prior mistakes are not made twice. Second, I will draw on the expertise of CIOs and other executives across a wide swath of sectors to tell their story on how well they handled the pandemic and what changes they are making going forward. This will reveal the path forward for middle IT management (managers and directors), who I see as a large target market opportunity. Third, since the technology revolution that started in the 1990s through 2019, the world has never seen something as disruptive to companies and organizations as the Covid-19 pandemic. It literally impacted all industrialized and technology advanced nations. This text will provide predictions and strategies based on my experience and my research panel regarding where technology development, adoption, and spending will go post-Covid-19 for one key reason: so organizations across the globe are prepared when another global event happens again, which it will.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of folks were instrumental in the development of this book, my fifth. First and foremost – thanks to my wife and family for continuing to support my dreams of academic and publishing excellence. The number of hours it took to research and develop this book were significant, taking time away from my family. Second, I'd like to thank the CIO, CISO, COO, and CEO contributors to this book. Your insights, experiences, lessons learned, and projections going forward will help organizations around the globe better prepare to live with expected future disruptions associated with Covid-19 and other disrupters that will inevitably challenge us all that we simply can't foresee at the moment.
I'd like to thank my supporting research teams. Special thanks to Joseph Poye, Christian Morrison, and Timothy Scannell at IDC. Access to your research and team was invaluable in the development of this book. I'd also like to thank my friend and colleague Rick Pastore at The Hackett Group for access to some of your terrific research studies and reports. They were especially helpful in showing readers the impacts IT planning had on the degree of impact from the pandemic.
I'd also like to thank the wonderful team of professionals who provided compelling endorsements for this book. Thank you Ed Anderson, Rick Pastore, Frederic Lemieux, and Kendra Ketchum.
Lastly, and most importantly, I'd like to thank my team at John Wiley & Sons. It's hard to believe that this is my third book with your esteemed publishing brand. What an honor it is to be backed by Wiley. Special thanks go out to Sheck Cho, executive editor; Susan Cerra, senior managing editor; and Samantha Enders, editorial assistant and lead for the cover design, for all your efforts to make this book a global leader.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gregory S. Smith is an internationally recognized IT executive with 30 years of experience managing complex IT and business systems. Mr. Smith serves as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for a Washington, DC–area organization. Previously, Mr. Smith served for a total of 17 years as the CIO for various organizations including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). His for-profit experience combines IT and business acumen from a decade in U.S. national security, U.S. financial services 100, and consulting experience from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Gregory S. Smith is an honoree of several awards including: SmartCEO magazine's Top 10 CIOs in Washington DC, Computer World magazine's Premier 100 IT Leaders, CIO magazine's CIO 100, and eWeek magazine's Top 100 CIOs. He was also recognized as one of the Top 100 Most Influential CIOs by CIO Insight magazine. In 2017, he received an excellence in teaching award from Georgetown University.
Mr. Smith is the author of CIO 2.0 (in Mandarin), Straight to the Top: CIO Leadership in a Mobile, Social, and Cloud-based World (John Wiley & Sons), How to Protect Your Children on the Internet: A Road Map for Parents and Teachers (Greenwood Publishing), and Straight to the Top: Becoming a World-Class CIO (John Wiley & Sons). He received a BS in computer science from a top-10 national program from the University of Maryland at College Park and an MS in business from the Johns Hopkins University. He served for over 10 years as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Carey Graduate Business School. Mr. Smith currently serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's graduate programs.
Mr. Smith has spoken at a number of prestigious conferences across the globe including keynote presentations in Canada, Denmark, India, Indonesia, Turkey, China, Singapore, and Belgium. He also keynoted the famous Interop conference in both New York and Las Vegas. As a practicing CIO and academic professor, he keeps his pulse on today's changing IT landscape and continues to apply those trends to business practice.
CHAPTER 1 Lasting Business Impacts and Resource Sourcing After a Global Pandemic
Occurrences can be unpredictable. If we have to endure a cascade of rumpling coincidences, it's fate that dictates our lives, taking over the common procedure of “timing,” and, thus, sealing the bondage of our free choice. Once our choice is kidnapped and strangled to the core, fate checkmates our destiny.
—ERIK PEVERNAGIE1
Introduction
As I start writing this text, there have been 144,108,248 Covid-19 cases globally with 31,873,253 in the United States and 3,062,945 deaths globally and 569,530 in the United States, respectively (see Exhibit 1.1).2 I am relatively sure, as many public health professionals have discussed in the past several months, that there are far more cases and deaths globally as a result of various factors including improper counting, deaths occurring outside of hospitals, fatalities due to untreated fatal diseases such as cancer going undertreated during the height of the pandemic, and suicides. The global pandemic of 2020–2021 will go down in history as the most devastating impact on human life in our generation. The pandemic will have lasting effects on trade, commerce, travel, human behavior in business operations, and how employees work around the globe going forward.
Combine the likelihood that a fair percentage of the United States and global population will not opt to receive a Covid-19 vaccine with likely future variants that develop that make current vaccines less effective, this pandemic is long from over. CNN recently reported that 40 percent of U.S. Marines have opted to not receive the Covid-19 vaccine.3 The pharmaceutical maker Pfizer, which makes one of the Covid-19 vaccines, recently announced that for people to stay protected, they will likely need another dose within 12 months of their first pair of doses.4
Exhibit 1.1 The Johns Hopkins University of Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center
Source: The Johns Hopkins University of Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center.
From a historical perspective,
