How Covid-19 may change business and IT
2020 has not started well, particularly in Australia with bushfires, floods and now Coronavirus. It is undeniable that life and culture will be changed forever by the lockdown of business and society caused by the global pandemic that has gripped the whole world. The short, medium and long term effects will touch almost every part of our existence, and I would like to focus on the positives, and the outcomes that may change business and the IT world. No-one can deny that Covid is changing business.
Work is something you do, not somewhere you go
Business and individuals have now come to realise that there is a lot of value that people can still deliver from locations that are not a standard office environment. The evolution of Internet speeds at homes (which sometimes is higher speed than some offices), the consumerisation of IT software and tools, and the mainstream capability of Cloud – have all been instrumental in people realising that they really can be productive from home. Many businesses have realised that even free or consumer-grade tools and services can be used to allow staff to continue to be productive when they are not in the office.
Post-Coronavirus: Working from home may no longer be seen as a euphemism for taking a paid day off. In the long term, the ability for people who live extended distances from central metropolitan areas to contribute and work in large organisations is likely to increase, slowing the brain-drain of remote areas towards cities. No longer an edge-case for executives, remote working capabilities should become part of standard business operations, where a sick child no longer makes a valuable employee unable to contribute for a whole day or longer.
Open plan and hot desking
The concept of “Activity Based Working“, first raised in the mid-1990s by Erik Veldhoen in The Art of Working, had been steadily infecting businesses across Australia – where open plan offices and unassigned desks are the hallmarks of the often hated approach. Some of the things that staff dislike about it is the lack of quiet working areas, not being able to find colleagues or able to use preferred desk areas, and the easy transmission of illness. But the point of ABW should be on working together based on the activities that people do – using collaboration and ‘flocking’ approaches of rapidly forming and dissolving teams. With people able to contribute from outside a traditional office area, business has been able to see that using technology and toolsets, the activities of staff working together are not driven by removing office partitions and forcing people to waste the beginning of their day getting set up.
Post-Coronavirus: We may see a long overdue and final separation between ABW’s benefits, and the drawbacks of hot-desks and open-plan offices. The focus on reducing the transmission of infections that Coronavirus has brought, will bring back partitions and reduce or remove the daily desk swapping that some ABW approaches erroneously force. In the long term, we may even see office areas change, yet still retaining collaborative project areas for people to flock to for teamwork – and then they return to their regular desks and offices throughout the day to perform tasks in quiet and healthy areas.
Digital Transformation is about process and people, not technology
I have been involved in the drive for Digital Transformation for many businesses over the last few years, and time and again I see the spectre of misunderstandings appearing; it is an IT driven ‘project’, we just need this specific collaboration tool, digitise all our paper forms into an electronic version, all we need to do is upgrade and integrate our legacy systems… There is so much wrong with these misconceptions. However, with the current climate, many have been driven into depending upon the Digitally Transformed systems, and realised that the technology works, but it is the process and people who need to change. It is mostly about the organisational change management of engagement (it is the E in my “IT Projects fail for EVILL reasons” article) that makes Digital Transformation work, meaning that people need to let go of processes and activities that they have always done and put more trust in people’s ability to deliver benefits without the constraints of a legacy system and process.
Post-Coronavirus; Now that people have been have had the opportunity to use newly transformed systems, the lack of access to legacy systems proves that they need to transform them too. Covid is changing businesses, and they will see the benefit of moving to microservices, cloud based systems and the like, and may start to ramp up Digital Transformation initiatives to break the ties to systems that only work in one office building – because, once your people are empowered to do their work, the systems support them, instead of the other way around.
A new wave of modernisation is coming
If you cast your mind back to the Year 2000 bug, this caused a massive investment in IT systems. Legacy systems that could not cope with a 4 digit year were upgraded or replaced before the date was to strike failure into systems that may have been around since the 70’s or even 60’s. The benefit of this was to ‘clear out’ some systems that were being held on to by organisations that had no other drive to retire them. The time has come where Cloud is mature and capable (it has been for many years, but Coronavirus has proven it to be so), and many resistances that business has had in scalability, security, flexibility and usability have evaporated.
For businesses that have been able to hold video-conference meetings between people who have been self-isolating or in quarantine, this may have had some technical hurdles or novelty issues during the first occurrences, but then as people learn the Video-Conference etiquette that is appropriate for their team and business, it becomes mainstream and routine.
Post-Coronavirus; in the short term we will see more consumption of existing mainstream cloud services that organisations have been resistant to move to – collaboration tools such as Office 365 with Exchange Online and SharePoint Online will see an uptick in even smaller businesses subscribing, and big business can no longer use the excuse that it is too big of a task. In the medium term there may be more modernisation of systems to support remote working and distributed workforces, with a battle between video conference technologies and providers that will be more and more utilised.
The loss of jobs is inevitable
Unfortunately there will be many people who will be permanently affected by the global pandemic. There is no more of a testing time for business and people than the early 2020 closure of society and then business that was enforced for health reasons. With skeleton staffing and business having to trim back to only the essential processes and activities, it has shown that there are many aspects of a business – and people’s roles – that are not as critical as once thought. When people have been sent home, and the business continues to operate, it may give leaders the pause to reflect on what benefit these people actually provide. Even for people who have been working remotely, can these people’s roles be outsourced to another location? Interstate, remote regions, or even internationally? With collaboration tools enabling concurrent document editing and text-based chat, does the work require people are in the same building at the same time? Same timezone even?
Post-Coronavirus; With the increase of capabilities in automation tools, BPM, reduction in administration and streamlining of processes, there will be reviews by business on who they actually need to be in offices. There may be an increase in people working from home offices on fast Internet connections – where they can be in remote areas and not metropolitan centres (improving both rural areas and the lifestyle of employees). Roles will be lost to automation, but be re-born in roles that cannot [currently] be replaced; innovation, creativity and imagination based functions – doing tasks that are more interesting and rewarding.
In these trying times where there are many fears and concerns, we need to focus on what the positives may be, when this finally clears.
This article was also published to LinkedIn on 25th March 2020; https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-covid-19-may-change-business-christian-wickham-emba
