CIONET brought together one hundred digital leaders from across EMEA on Friday 20/03/20 to share experiences re- the spread of the Coronavirus. Here is a brief summary of the discussions held on the Zoom platform with a plenary followed by ten breakout sessions:.

1. What are the Urgent issues you are dealing with?

• Business continuity especially around supply chains, cashflow, employee moral
• Maintaining ongoing IT programmes such as ERP and Office 365 roll outs
• Establishing communication with all staff to respond to the crisis in real time
• Extending the work environment into homes including connectivity and collaboration
• Rebalancing infrastructures to cope with home working such as VPNs, Security
• Seeking advice from tech companies who seem well equipped for virtual working

2. What novel Solutions are you employing to cope with the crisis?

• Providing new ways to deal with work-life balance such as e-coffee breaks, happy hours and Yoga classes
• Trusting employees to work in this new environment and to support the business
• Rapid roll-out of hardware, broadband/VPN and associated collaboration tools (Zoom, Teams, Slack, Office 365, etc) to enable home working
• Daily virtual meetings and use of virtual workshop techniques to support project teams
• Working closely with Tech vendors who have greater experience of virtual working

3. What might be the implications of such a crisis for the Future?

• Dealing with Legacy infrastructures by adopting ‘Next Gen’ techniques such as SD-WAN, 5G and IoT as well as collaboration tools such as Slack, Teams
• Rethinking work patterns to improve employee wellbeing, engagement and trust
• Learning from Millennials about what work in the future might look like
• Placing greater emphasis on Innovation as a means of constantly adapting to change

Thank you all for your input and experience sharing! Thank you Roger Camrass for the write-up. #stayhealthy #staysafe