We certainly don’t want to be flippant about the current crisis and the efforts that IT professionals have put in to enable firms to transition successfully to homeworking are frankly staggering. I doff my hat to all the doers and applaud the decisive decision-making and rapid action that so often goes walkabout on technology projects in normal times. Amazing what we can do when needs must!
I cannot remember any time in my working career other than the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001 when so much has changed so quickly.
Looking at the hundreds of LinkedIn posts about home working did rather remind me of the excitement of a snow day at school with people genuinely enthused about doing things in a different way.
There are undoubtedly going to be disruptions and interruptions that businesses will need to manage but the smart organisation should be leveraging this ‘excitement’ for long-term benefit.
…It’s a slush day
If we think of this week as snow day excitement that means next week is going to turn to slush day boredom. But that is also the time when we start to deal with what we are facing and getting on with coping. The slush effectively becomes the new normal until such time it disappears and we all go back to how we were pre-snow.
The new normality?
Personally, I’m hoping we never do return to normal or the old pre-virus normal.
I’ve just come off the phone to a conveyancing client of ours who has had VoIP technology and MS cloud Solutions for around four years. They have used them from within the office and benefited from ‘multi-office use’ but have never really used the telephony system to its fullest capabilities.
For example, they hadn’t used the chat or conference features as it was easier to talk to people in the office and meetings were just arranged for when people were around. And while their fee earners have laptops and so are used to remote working they’ve not really behaved any differently at home or used the tools available to them beyond what they’re used to in the office.
So I was very pleased to hear today that the firm has been running daily team videoconferences on Microsoft Teams; that the Horizon telephony system is brilliant; and that the rollout of the MS virtual desktop had gone very well.
In a week of negatives that was a huge positive. I really hope that this marks a turning point in terms of how technology is perceived and that it will continue to be fully embraced when eventually the grey slush gives way to bright sunshine.
Written by…
David Baskerville
