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