We recently held CIO roundtables with a wide variety of organizations to discuss their experiences to quickly shift their organizations to remote workforces, hosted by Dell Technologies and VMware. Needless to say, everyone in the room had stories to tell as they all raced to facilitate remote workers in their organization. What we recognized in the discussion was that all of the CIOs had responded the best they could to a challenging situation. Now, they each had an opportunity to Reflect and Rethink how they were going to approach their remote workforce going forward.
One of the big lessons learned from CIOs response to COVID was that it was key to invest in and test your infrastructure prior to the crisis. Those that did avoided major issues once they had to really scale their remote workforce. This lesson also applied to many areas of healthcare IT. Those who invested prior to COVID were better positioned to handle the crisis. The same will be true as we encounter future disruptions.
Another interesting insight from these CIOs was how they used the move to a remote workforce as an opportunity to enhance security. Whether it was rolling out two factor authentication more broadly, training users to use a VPN from home, or the shift to VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) which allowed for improved management and patching, these CIOs saw the changing workplace as an opportunity to help their organization improve their security while meeting the new demands from their users.
As these CIOs reflected on their experience, it was amazing to see how important being able to scale was to their response. What was a bit surprising was the number of things that needed to be scaled including: devices, VPN licenses, multi factor authentication (MFA) technology, virtual desktop licenses and infrastructure, video capabilities, cameras, and user education. A few CIOs mentioned that finding a camera, any camera was a challenge. Let alone scaling the number of cameras needed. Another CIO leveraged their EHR trainers to help them improve their various VPN, MFA, and virtual desktop training. The challenge of scaling required planning to scale both the physical and the digital.
Another insight shared was the collaboration fatigue they were starting to see in their organization. This isn’t that staff were tired of collaborating together, but that they were tired of trying to manage the plethora of collaboration and communication applications that existed in the organization. Not to mention trying to remember who preferred which application. Knowing which one to use and which one to check was causing some challenges and burnout in their organizations. No doubt, it’s hard to tell someone that you will no longer be supporting their favorite old chat application. However, everyone acknowledged the need to consolidate as much as possible to avoid this collaboration fatigue. Not to mention, consolidation is the fiscally responsible choice that will be required sooner or later.
As the CIOs started to rethink the future, everyone agreed that having the ability to scale their remote workforce infrastructure up and down as needed was going to be essential. One CIO expressed concern over how they could more effectively monitor worker productivity in the remote work environment. While no great answers were shared to measuring remote produtivity, it will be an important topic of discussion going forward and likely starts with understanding and collecting the right productivity data.
One CIO pointed out that in many respects they were actually more productive in the new work from home environment and the healthcare organization had been able to get back to full capacity while most were still remote. This was a good thing considering their CEO prior to COVID was largely against any sort of work from home arrangement. Now it will be the job of the CIO to communicate these productivity gains to the leadership team. Most acknowledged that the future will likely include some sort of hybrid mix of remote work and in-office work. However, one suggested that this probably would not happen in their organization until kids are fully back in school since his CEO was family oriented and thought it was important to allow for flexible remote work while managing family duties.
As you reflect on how you responded to the shift to remote work and rethink the path forward, it is worth considering this great insight shared during the roundtable: “IT has gone from being a luxury to almost a utility. When IT is down, your business is down.” Given the shift to remote work, this is even more true today than it was a year ago.
