The pandemic has thrown off balance, the best-made plans of organizations and individuals both. IT leaders need to focus on updated strategies to ensure planned productivity standards are met
The technology strategies crafted by organizations for the year 2020 have all gone for a toss due to the pandemic. Currently, the world is slowly emerging from the throes of COVID-19, and organizations have adjusted well to the remote workforce environment.
CIOs will now need to revisit the key factors of the strategies and restructure it to match the current scenario. Some of these strategies could help to step towards a better future.
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Stay away from COVID-19 “stasis”
IT leaders unsure of the future circumstances will resist taking any decision for long-term planning. It is prudent to avoid this practice since, while the second wave of the pandemic may or may not occur, organizational stasis is the improper way to tackle an insecure future. CIOs should rethink and update the strategy to manage the scenario instead of completely avoiding the long- and medium-term decision making.
Gartner Survey – Nearly 75% of CFOs to Make Remote Workforce Permanent Post COVID-19
Analyzing the remote workforce and IT resilience
Remote working culture and resiliency were present in most organizations for a long time, but these strategies were not given priority initially. The pandemic has given most IT leaders the chance to reconsider and update these strategies. Now for the remaining 6 months of 2020, they can consider how the tools acquired as a first response can be further streamlined and more refined tools that can be industrialized. A good place to start will be by investing in worthy video conferencing platforms.
Restructuring the hiring process
CIOs had to reconsider the conventional hiring process and workforce environment as the geographical dynamics changed overnight. The current cry for a more inclusive and diverse workforce has also become a major reason for consideration and changing the strategies. The advantage of these factors is that most of them don’t require long-term systems implementation or significant investments. However, these changes will have a major impact on the organization’s image and intra-company morale.
IT leaders should analyze the external service providers on the metrics of skills, on-demand resources, and responsiveness and not the only cost. They may even consider collaborating with the service providers to create an internal “consulting” department with skilled resources to handle sudden off-hour and critical issues. Earlier considered costly and unnecessary, innovative staffing ideas can now be considered as cheap insurance for the uncertain future.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Digitizing the HR Processes
Investing in systems and services
IT leaders state that organizations that had implemented flexible solutions both technically and on an organizational level are the ones that have responded well to the pandemic scenario. CIOs are taking steps to transfer IT from legacy and complex systems to discrete services that aren’t dependent on the underlying software. There’s a need for a strong business case that is necessary to gain approval for investment in microservices and updated integration platforms. Experienced leaders will use this opportunity to field the current crisis and to allow their strategic future planning.
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