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Like many other CIOs, Prakash Kota of Autodesk is closely monitoring the pronouncements about the new coronavirus disease, COVID-19, coming from governments and health organizations. The $34 billion design-software giant has already had to close some offices near to affected regions and to ask employees there to work from home.
Plenty of other organizations are facing significant disruption to their activities as a result of the disease, which was just classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Google just asked all of its staff in North America to work from home and many other companies are instructing their workers not to turn up to offices. Universities and colleges are shifting to online lessons and medical centers are prioritizing telemedicine offerings to free up capacity at their physical locations.
As executive teams grapple with the fallout, CIOs such as Kota have become key players in crisis-response plans. “The CIO role has definitely become more central [to contingency strategies] because technology mediates almost every single interaction in business these days,” says Vijay Gurbaxani, the director of the Center for Digital Transformation at the University of California, Irvine.
The top priority for CIOs is to ensure companies can manage the huge and sudden spike in demand for remote-working capacity caused by the closure of offices and other facilities. “This required my team to make some adjustments to the way we supply necessary equipment and remote access to [our] networks,” explains Kota, who says Autodesk has created a self-service toolkit so that many more employees can quickly set themselves up to work remotely if the need arises.
Nikolaj Sjoqvist, the chief digital officer of Waste Management, a $47 billion waste-management and environmental-services giant, says it has increased the number of licenses available for virtual private networks and is scaling up its networking capacity to support more remote work. Sjoqvist is also tapping cloud-based applications and services that can quickly be spun up to support the effort. For employees used to working on desktops, his team is leveraging virtual desktop infrastructure technology to give them access to applications on their personal computers.
Exploring remote work’s limits
The spread of coronavirus is also leading CIOs to explore just how far offsite work can be stretched. “I’ve spoken with functional leaders to understand whether there are any critical services that could not be performed remotely for a sustained period of time,” explains Julie Cullivan, CIO of $1.6 billion cybersecurity company Forescout. Cullivan, who also runs the company’s human resources function, says its top priority is the health and safety of staff, so it needs to plan ahead carefully for any tasks that still need to be performed on its premises.
As they expand remote-working capabilities, CIOs are keeping a close eye on cybersecurity risks. Hospitals and other places that don’t typically cater for a lot of remote work need to pay special attention to this area, notes Drex DeFord, a former CIO of Seattle Children’s Hospital and Scripps Health who is now an executive at CI Security. “In a time like this, when it might be even more chaotic than usual, organizations can ease up on [security] requirements and that creates risks across the board.”
Autodesk’s Kota is expanding the use of two-factor authentication and other measures to help protect Autodesk’s remote workers. He’s also closely monitoring risks in the company’s technology supply chain, taking proactive steps such as stocking up on laptops from a vendor whose manufacturing has been disrupted by the spread of coronavirus.
Cloud computing can be a huge help with issues such as remote work, but it’s also another potential source of supply-chain vulnerability. “With so much now being done in the cloud,” says Roberta Witty of research firm Gartner, “CIOs need to ask vendors how they are managing their own way through the crisis.” Sjoqvist of Waste Management says he and his team have been checking whether cloud companies and other suppliers have access to backup pools of labor if they experience staff shortages in critical areas because of the coronavirus.
Powering virtual connections
Of course, the capacity to work remotely isn’t much use if employees can’t easily interact with one another from afar. Many businesses are already big users of web-based video-conferencing technology from companies like Zoom and Cisco, which has built up its Webex service. As part of their contingency planning, CIOs say they are adding more remote-conferencing capacity and expanding the use of services such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, which enable employees to collaborate together online. (Microsoft, Google Cloud and other firms have been beefing up free versions of some of their services to help smaller businesses cope with virus-related disruption.)
Technology can also help employees engage with customers in a world where physical contact is likely to be much more limited. Telemedicine, which many CIOs in the healthcare industry have already been pioneering, is a great example of this, but there are others too. Tech leaders in the commercial real estate industry think COVID-19 will likely boost the use of augmented and virtual reality technology to create virtual tours of buildings for clients. And more software bots are likely to be deployed in coming weeks to answer customer-service queries, helping human teams depleted by the virus.
The good news is that much of the tech infrastructure to support contingency plans is already in place at many organizations. The challenge will be to scale it effectively and securely. Another challenge will be to ensure employees can get access to accurate and timely information about COVID-19 and businesses’ plans for dealing with its impact. Waste Management’s Sjoqvist says his team is accelerating the rollout of WM Now, a smartphone app that can keep employees updated on various issues, including steps being taken in response to the coronavirus. By taking such initiatives, CIOs can help their companies build trust and resilience at a time when both are needed more than ever before.
