Last year was the biggest disruptor tech leaders have ever faced. Some have benefited from the disruption, others have been bled dry by it. Globally, Covid-19 has hurt their revenues and business models of many businesses across a wide array of industries. Though the pandemic has pushed CIOs to the limits of their capabilities, forcing them to be more innovative than they have ever been. Many businesses have folded in the wake of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. The role of CIOs has never been bigger, with technology playing an ever more vital role in the survival strategies of companies and ensuring good customer and employee experience.
The pandemic has led to a number of trends, from a digital transformation that has seen businesses migrate data to cloud solutions, to an increased automatization of services, as well as increased use of analytics to uncover insights from data. Now more than ever, developing a hybrid work strategy to set a floor on employee experience.
Drog Poleg has spoken about the rise of remote work and how, because so many tasks have been shifted online, remote workers have more market power than ever, because they can compete globally, without the pressure to live in a particular locale. Remote workers can now choose where to work based on the quality of life rather than job opportunities. This makes the work of CIOs even more important because they have to find ways to compete with a global marketplace to create employee experiences that will keep job satisfaction high and develop loyalty to the company. The company today faces the possibility of workers leaving the company or staying and underperforming. Without a great employee experience, a business will lose talent or fail to attract talent.
Expectations about remote work have changed what people think about work. People expect to work more flexible hours, to be less tied down to their offices, and spend fewer choirs travelling between the office and home. Overall, the experience of remote work has made people feel that physical offices should have less of a gravitational pull than before. People expect to commute less and only for vital matters. In response to the shifting economics and dynamics of remote work, companies have begun to leave big cities and create satellite offices in suburban hubs, reducing their footprint in high-cost metropolitan areas.
Companies with an eye to the future have realized that in this period, they have a global talent pool so long as they accommodate the desire of their potential workforce to exercise control over where they live.
Many companies have appointed a head of remote, to oversee compensation, taxes, benefits, employee experience and remote working laws. Alternatively, they create committees made up of CEOs, CHROs, CFOs and other stakeholders, to oversee remote work.
The digital transformation is at the heart of the hybrid work model. CIOs therefore, have a central role to play in providing the technology that enables and underpins remote work. This ranges from installing SaaS technology to facilitate video conferencing, digital whiteboarding, file sharing, as well as augmented and virtual reality solutions that allow for virtual employee meetings, and customer showcases, as well as many other essential collaborations.
CIOs also need to put resources to work in getting applications that allow remote workers and guests to book desk space, as well as in applications that enable contact tracing. Contact tracing is a vital service that is rife with the possibility of abuses. Companies need to pay added attention to preserving the privacy of their employees.
CIOs have been wise to these developments, and have incorporated these solutions into their tech stacks, while reshuffling their agendas. IT leaders will continue to innovate and adapt, with many working to achieve deeper levels of integration of these tools, across all enterprises.
Collaboration technology has become extraordinarily important for business, as seen by Salesforce’s $27 billion bid for Slack. This has given CIOs a lot to think about. Given the uncertainty of Covid-19 and broader issues of tech adoption, CIOs must be flexible in what technologies they choose to adopt so that they do not get locked into certain technologies.
One issue that has arisen is that with the rise of remote working and the adaption of systems to allow for remote working, networks have been distributed over wider areas, often beyond firewalls. This has made them more vulnerable to hacks. CIOs have reacted by treating all connected devices as potential threats. Despite the security threats, CIOs must still find ways to balance the need for security with the need to make the employee working from his home office standing desk, more productive. One way of achieving this is to employ machine learning and AI-driven cyber security tools as well as device posture management technologies and single sign-on solutions and device posture management technologies.
In the end, no protection solution is foolproof. In meeting the challenges of cybersecurity, productivity and the need to create great employee experiences, CIOs will have to be open-minded, flexible and innovative.
