Time for a little reflection: supporting work from home & getting back into the office

We are now roughly 13 months from the beginning of the covid shut down and sending our employees home to help reduce the spread of covid. That means for many organizations were just came up or are coming up on the one year purchase anniversary of many workforce solutions that were purchased this time last year to help fill the gaps in our IT portfolios to service our internal and external customer.

As we are now feeling the itch to get back into the world with the deployment of millions of vaccines, organizations are having to reflect back on those purchases made while also keeping an eye on the horizon to support the needs of the business; it is more important than ever to really assess our game plan here.

Many organizations chose speed over perfection last year. Needing a working collaboration toolset and solutions to support working from home was P1 as it should have been. Now that we have time for a breath, it is important to consider our key objectives and ensure that we can support the needs of a dynamic working environment. Some of the decisions we have made were sound ones and we should probably keep those tools in place. Others, made out of necessity, were not and those need to be addressed.

As you and your team and chasing the dozens of current and upcoming projects, I urge you to take a moment and reflect on the decisions that were made over the last year and how they tie into the plan moving forward. The technical debt of staying on the wrong platform for too long can really create some unnecessary pain in the future.

Ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure.

Every client that I am meeting with really wants some concrete plans on how the business is going to proceed forward as it relates to office space and work from home. My recommendation when working with those teams is to take a step back and treat it similarly to BYOD. We want IT to be an enabler and someone who is ready to take on challenges with innovative solutions to help the business and not drag it down. Architecting and supporting your business with offerings that are dynamic in nature and can support the business regardless of location is going to remain key moving forward. So with that, picking the right platform(s) to support you will be some of the most important long term decisions to enable your users and make their life easier, more efficient and effective.