A chief technology officer in a time of COVID-19: Keep calm and make the most of the whole business suddenly realising how important IT is
- Reference: 1586857273
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/14/cto_column/
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Right now, I'm following the advice to stay home. Like many IT professionals, my day is filled with domestic desktop support, ensuring the Wi-Fi behaves, making sure my children have access to school resources and helping their teachers get online, as well as assisting local small businesses and the vulnerable.
However, from the standpoint of the CTO, the incident that unfolded is unlike any disaster scenario we could have imagined or planned for (even though the likes of Bill Gates warned us it was coming). Indeed, most plans call for setting up shop at an alternate location when disaster strikes but it very quickly became clear that this was quite different.
The carefully thought-out plans had to evolve rapidly over hours and days rather than months. The executive board needed the company up and running quickly in the new, suddenly dispersed, environment, and the spotlight turned on to the CTO or CIO tasked to make that happen.
First things first
Those first hours after the button has been pressed are critical. The good news is that a digital revolution has been underway since the birth of the world wide web. The bad news is that lack of corporate vision, inertia and penny-pinching will decide most of what happens in the first few days.
While in all instances the CTO must demonstrate calm leadership and clear communication among the rising panic, a swift assessment of the situation is needed. For some, already migrated and running in the cloud, the next steps are simple. For others, things will be trickier.
Step one: Decide what is needed to keep the business running and allocate resource accordingly. The tatters of the existing DR plans should be of help here. It is also important to remember that there will be no going back to "business as usual" but also that there are opportunities to be had.
A CTO will already know how far along the digital transformation path the company is. Some apps may already be cloud-based and accessible by a browser from any handy workstation. Others will require more work. Those first few hours will see the IT team assessing resources and presenting a plan to the CEO before the purse strings are loosened.
The chief techie will have a rare opportunity to do what needs to be done. There is no time to tinker with workers' home machines, where legacy apps need virtual desktops, security and VPN configurations. BYOD is all well and good, but in the first instance corporate devices with standard images will be deployed to give the executive confidence that a breach or leak of confidential data is unlikely. Add in a 4G card, and that device need never go near the horrors of a user's home network.
Assuming you can track down those laptops – finding the things can be the biggest challenge as demand surges, but it is not impossible; there is always the social network of fellow CTOs and CIOs to leverage in tracking down stock.
A bit of downtime is not the end of the world
While it may not feel like it at the time, when every minute seems like an age, a half day or so of downtime is not the end of the world, and even in the worst case, where nothing is cloud and browser-based, the essential parts of the business will be up and running within days. Communication at all levels, again, is key – people are pretty sympathetic once they understand 200 computers are being delivered and know when their gear will eventually arrive.
The other critical issue to deal with during those first few days is Subject Matter Experts (SME). The knowledge and experience of these individuals must be documented and spread throughout the organisation via technology such as video training. Later, it may at last be possible to dispense with those SMEs entirely as the business finally wakes up to the dangers of knowledge bottlenecks.
The "what if X got run down by a bus" scenario has developed its own urgency as staff numbers start falling.
Some CTOs will also have specific physical business needs: distancing must be enforced for warehouse workers, and contact centre workers will need to work from home via technology such as soft phones.
Time can be bought in the first day or so by simply sending half the team home and applying social distancing to the rest by skipping desks, but it will be up to the IT team to come up with a longer term solution; more of that warehouse could eventually be automated and the rest of the staff made remote as systems are expanded to cope with the surge in home working.
While the CTO's time in the days following the emergency will be occupied by keeping the lights on and ensuring employees have what they need to allow the business to function, the importance of the role is going to grow as the pandemic continues.
The return to the office
Further into the future, a recession is highly likely, and the CTO will be, more than ever, a driver in moving the organisation forward. As enterprises look at their expensive, empty offices, IT will be the enabler; some employees simply won't want to return to the mothership and many will have taken to messaging and video-conferencing platforms as part of their daily routine; the phenomenal growth seen by the likes of Zoom and Teams shows how quickly people adapt.
However, working from home is not for everyone and even with technological barriers such as security, VPNs and hardware removed, some will struggle. Face-to-face video conferencing will help, but once the lockdown ends, some will want to return to an office. But in the new world, those offices can be considerably smaller.
And while the fall-out from the pandemic will present traditional opportunities, such as shifting remaining workloads to the cloud, and perhaps even dealing with that 20 year-old legacy application, the business will be receptive to suggestions from the IT department on how to further improve efficiencies.
As we prepare for the next pandemic, we should look closer at robotics and process automation. The current situation has shown us that many, particularly the elderly, much prefer a voice interface – what else could voice control be used for? There is also the promise of Machine Learning/ Artificial Intelligence, which can turn raw data into actionable insights and Virtual Reality, with its potential for education and training.
The IT world will never be the same, and the role of the CTO is at a turning point. It may be possible for some to slip back to their old ways for a little while, but those that seize the opportunity to demonstrate the vital role technology plays, as a force for good and effective businesses, will be well placed once the crisis abates. ®
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[1] https://go.theregister.co.uk/tl/1936/-8579/choosing-a-low-code-vendor?td=wptl1936
Re: Let's make something clear...
"... this pandemic didn't strike on-premises data centers and turned them off. They keep on humming along just like cloud ones."
In fact, the cloud data centres are on-premises. They're just somebody else's data centres on somebody else's premises. They're also working to somebody else's priorities under somebody else's control.
"And once the connectivity exists, there's little difference if you VPN into a company on-premises network, or access a cloud application."
Well, there is. Cloud apps access patterns are unchanged by covid-19, but VPN access patterns are a lot higher than in normal circumstances.
I found my company's VPN is very often saturated and unavailable, now. What is even worse is only some rare apps need VPN, but it seems everyone goes VPN for everything ...
Silver lining
Maybe !
so NOW it seems IT is seen as important, well that's nice
it would also be nice if we are still seen as important once this is over
Re: Silver lining
But we're always told we're important (right up until the point our jobs get offshored to Elbonia...)
What about the Foot Soldiers?
Just been told of an instance where a member of a team in his 50's whose job meant he had to remain onsite has died as a result of the virus.
Everybody else in his team caught it as well, but luckily survived.
As enterprises look at their expensive, empty offices, IT will be the enabler;
To be honest, for a lot of places Office365 will be the enabler. IT just need to plug in the usernames and email addresses, and set up SSO with other tools.
Office 365?
Only if you set up your laptops to use local egress instead of the central internet access point as most big companies do; which puts a strain on your VPN infrastructure that doesn't have the capacity to handle all the users connecting from home at the same time (and it is too late to order more hardware).
Don't forget also that unless you are working in a non-productive part of the economy you need something besides Excel and Outlook in order to work.
You need to be able to access your on-premises applications, and again the lack of VPN will impair your ability to work@home...
Very few companies have set up the needed infrastructure for working without VPN.
But for their IT one can expect to see the users being grateful.
(they were in the company I am currently working with)
>However, from the standpoint of the CTO, the incident that unfolded is unlike any disaster scenario we could have imagined or planned for
Nah, sorry. Any business of sufficient scale to have real disaster recovery scenarios should have planned for this. Global pandemic has consistently ranked #1 or #2 in national risk registers for as long as I've been doing this. Having even a skeleton plan for answering the question "What do we do if *all* of our offices close?" is not just prudent disaster planning, it's prudent business scale planning. The answer to that likely shares significant components with "What would we do if we needed to temporarily double our scale?" or "How do we facilitate flexible working?"
This can even happen by accident to many organisations through penny pinching. For example A Major Global Bank that I work with decided, several years back, that it didn't want to spend money on any more physical work space. Instead it decided to pinch some pennies and make everyone work from home 2 days a week. While a blatant penny-pinching/offshoring manoeuvre, the end result is their COVID response plan basically involved executing a straightforward `s/2 days/5 days/g` on the remote working policy (and some crash investments in VPN concentrators, but those heroics are a story for another time...). Because the business was already accustomed to remote working as BAU, it has ridden out this storm easily - the same goes for most of the global banks.
This was an unlikely event, but it was not by any measure unimaginable. That's *exactly* why you have a disaster plan for it. If it's a likely event it's not a disaster.
Let's make something clear...
... this pandemic didn't strike on-premises data centers and turned them off. They keep on humming along just like cloud ones.
The only real problem are the pipes connecting those data centers to the rest of the internet - and many users connections as well to the internet.
Telco lack of investments outside big cities because ROI is measured in years instead of months, and government inertia about building a nation-wide fibre infrastructure for the XXI century means real broadband connectivity too expensive for many companies, and often not available to end users.
Even when such projects were started, some are failing among incumbent fights to maintain a dominant position, and lack of management capabilities to sustain such efforts.
Even if you put all your applications in a shiny-shiny cloud datacenter, it's quite useless if your users have to access it through slow ADSL lines that may have to be shared among family members for work or education. Even FTTC may be slow if you're away from the cabinet enough, or many concurrent users means a lot of cross-talk interference. 4 or 5G with a data cap will help up to a point - and cells can become saturated as well.
That's very different from the 1Gb/s LANs at the office.
And once the connectivity exists, there's little difference if you VPN into a company on-premises network, or access a cloud application.
CTOs and CIOs shoud ask their CEOs to make clear the deploy of a real broadband network is no longer "nice to have". And we can't wait for greedy telcos to deploy them.