Further thoughts
“When the pandemic started, CIOs all over the world were in firefighting mode to enable staff to work from home. The focus here was on business continuity, utilising existing tools and software to work remotely. Next stage was to enhance speed and performance and finally move to a hybrid model that looks to the future.”
Ahmed Elshanet
CIO, Emirates NBD Egypt
“Centralisation is a good thing, clouds are a good thing - however, ensuring that you don’t put all of your eggs in one basket is really important.”
Alan Donegan
EMEA Technical Manager, Alltech
“Automation in general is agnostic of whether Covid happens or not, simply because any automation is about reducing waste in the organisation and about getting product to market quicker. Covid will have helped some organisations to focus more and accelerate programmes for automation.”
Anthony Harland
Director, Head of European IT Programme Management, Global Payments, Inc.
“Culture dictates organisational loyalty - the workforce of the future will be driven by what the organisation can do for them.”
Anthony Torres
Sr. Manager, Organization Transformation & Change, Infineon
“Large scale remote working has led to people taking a more flexible approach. This has led to an immense increased demand for bandwidth, therefore causing companies to build private and hybrid clouds.”
Antonio Grasso
Founder & CEO, Digital Business Innovation Srl
“In some cases, home workers may not be comfortable with their home environment, and this could have a negative impact in terms of collaboration. Understanding people’s circumstances and being empathetic to their needs is critical in maintaining a good inclusive working environment.”
Ayman Mageed
Technology Manager (Cloud & Networking), Rockwell Automation
“Maybe offices will change too becoming more like Google’s offices, which have sofas and eating areas for a much more relaxed experience. Offices could become a sort of ‘corporate social hub.”
Bassam Harb
Business Development Lead - Cloud Network Services, Nokia
“There is risk associated with investing in only one cloud vendor. However, an organization that is constantly changing tools can cause disruption to operations. It is important to justify these moves.”
Carlos Jury
Sr. IT Manager, National Instruments
“What the Pandemic has highlighted is need for high levels of Trust of our people, the greatest gift that can be given to them, is the time and space to people to let them deliver. Going forward we need to ensure that the technology is available to enable employees to help them find their optimal way of working.”
Chris Pope
VP Innovation, ServiceNow
“The speed at which our people have adopted these tools is surprising. Informal social interaction has become more intentional so this has required things like online meditation sessions, training and cooking classes to be arranged and more subtly encouraged.”
Cristian Scarpa
Global VP, Customer & Employee Technology Solutions, Vertiv
“From a remote working perspective, we were building towards a model known as flex work, which would cater for 50% of staff having the potential to work from home. The pandemic meant that the process needed to be accelerated.”
Felix Bailer
VP of Global Business Services, Vertiv
“Covid-19 has had a transformational impact on organisations, it’s like a digital time machine, up to a decade of mindset shift has happened in 8 short months.”
Frederiek Van Tornout
Partner - Workforce Transformation Leader, Deloitte
“Today I don’t think you have a choice. Covid has shown that if you don’t do anything you simply will have difficulties in operating. You can no longer say: I don’t want to do that. For remote working you have to make it possible.”
Frederik Arns
Head of Digital Business & Technology Consulting DACH, Cognizant
“Innovation through automation has accelerated the controls and changes of working at the engineering level, resulting in no product delivery delays throughout the pandemic.”
Gilles Garcia
Sr. Director Wired and Wireless Group, Xilinx, Inc.
“Its a case of Digital Darwinism - adapt to survive and thrive. The goal posts have changed massively because of tech. If you do not adapt you will fail.”
Ian Hart
“A downside that has been noted is that people are increasing their work hours when working from home.”
Ian Spitzer
Service Transition Manager (Systems), Verisk Analytics
“The success of this comes down to being able to trust the people you work with and have the confidence that they will get the job done. We hire people that we trusted through our recruitment strategy.”
Jason Collette
“With the virtual transition, work focuses more on objectives. It’s about getting stuff done and you can see it in the results. Another benefit is the increased talent pool for organisations, location no longer matters.”
John Pawluk
Senior Privacy and Information Security Manager, Oracle
“Will the older model spring back? What if we have a 3rd or 4th lockdown? Some parts of the old model will return but key parts of the digital puzzle will remain, most significantly how to replace face to face.”
Jon Abbott
Technologies Director, Vertiv
“Costs of doing business will decrease in some areas, as an example travel and expense costs will come down. From an environmental perspective businesses should be able to reduce their carbon footprint as a result of that as well as finding new efficiencies in their supply chain.”
Jordi Montoliu
Global Information Architect, Brambles
“It’s a different challenge for every function – sales cannot meet onsite and bounce around or discover ideas from clients or walk the halls and make contacts like they used to. This means we have no field sales anymore all sales are inside sales, a dramatic change for Salesforce.”
Karen Semone
Senior Director, Innovation, Salesforce
“We had a remote work policy and several collaboration solutions in place prior to COVID-19, so we were able to leverage those resources for a smooth transition from office to home. From a workflow standpoint, the transition from office to remote was nearly seamless.”
Kristian Truelsen
Head of Solution Innovation, Wrike
“With the shift to Virtual First, it is important to also create spaces for meaningful in-person collaboration. This model is a flexible and scalable approach based on geographic distribution of employees.”
Marc Paczian
Head of Channel Solutions, Dropbox
“Communications tools are important and fill a gap during times of pandemic via video which is key, as we need to interact in real time, visual queues are very important for human memory and quality video is an absolute key for this!”
Marcos Reis
Service Transition Manager (Systems), Turas Mobility Services
“A problem with remote working is video where people feel uncomfortable to be seen in their home environment - so they don’t use video and this further reduces the personal contact.”
Massimo Pizzari
IT Manager / Information Technology Director - Italy, Dekra Italia
“In some cases, home workers may not be comfortable with their home environment, and this could have a negative impact in terms of collaboration. Understanding people’s circumstances and being empathetic to their needs is critical in maintaining a good inclusive working environment.”
Mauli Tikkiwal
IT Director, BTS UK&I and iRef EMEA, Johnson Controls International PLC
“Our workforce were both responsive and innovative in response to Covid-19. Everybody wanted to get the work done but there were some challenges around ensuring the employees were using the collaborative tools that were standard within the organisation.”
Mike Lai
Regional IT Lead, Aptiv
“Changing guidelines is a challenge alongside battling with regulation and fear.”
Nir Metzer
Director - AI Solutions Scaling, Intel
“There are cost elements that have been impacted positively. For example, saving on physical spaces which is an area of possible cost reduction. This money is redirected to enabling people to be able to work from home with the necessary tools.”
Paolo Cinelli
Chief Digital & Information Officer, Ikea
“Good governance and good processes needs to be established along the now available tools to create real value for the companies.”
Jan Patrick Saslona
Global Lead Manufacturing Digitalization, Kostal
“IT is now becoming much more into its true form in serving and enabling the business, as it always should have been, and the more centralising approach is dying.”
Paulo Rodriguez
Sr. Director Solutions EMEA, Dropbox
“When you start to look at the environmental market conditions of sales, at least in the US, from November sales increased over 22% and existing home sales reached its highest in years as talent is looking to move from cities into suburban and even rural areas.”
Peter Nichol
Head of Portfolio Management, Lean Agile, IT Strategy, Data Science, ERP, Product Management, Regeneron
“The pandemic has happened at a time when most organisations globally had mapped out and were on their digital journeys. The pandemic has forced humans to accelerate that journey.”
Pranay Sinha
VP - Commercial IT, AmerisourceBergen
“Our people have adopted the technology very quickly. Just accepting the fact that every area has a certain level of restriction and difficulty and knowing that you’re going to have to find a way to still do your job from home, Once you get that mindset it helps you move forward.”
Ray Craven
Director, IT Operations, ICON plc
“What has been proven during the pandemic, is that companies can work with a more geographical diverse pool of people. They can tap into resources that were never available to them previously. They can also leverage collaboration tools to did not exist previously and have these diverse groups of people interacting and collaborating on their projects.”
Richard Duke
Chief Cloud Solutions Architect, Avid
“It’s difficult to see the productivity equation as a whole, there’s a process of discovery that businesses need to complete and some businesses, especially the technology ones, will probably be more productive other less so. It will be a while until we know what metrics to look at.”
Robert Noga
“The new normal in collaboration is there to stay. Enriched with face-to-face contact.”
Rob Klomps
VP Digital Transformation Financial Services, Salesforce
“Everyone should have autonomy working remotely and a very well-defined role and responsibility - it’s not easy to have all of these.”
Sivananda Hanumanthu
Director of Enterprise Architecture, Rubrik
“Security risks of having large numbers of people and assets not on a corporate network are a problem, so it’s always good to be looking at investing in ways to get better visibility and control.”
Todd Mazza
VP, Enterprise Architecture & Technical Operations, Rockwell Automation
“Email doesn’t cultivate that space for innovation and cross-collaboration between workspaces so you can fall back on being stuck in siloed spaces and not achieve what we wanted to.”
Whitni Smith Watkins
Support Infrastrucfure Program Manager, Analog Devices
Share this page