COVID-19 work culture challenges for CIOs

The writing is on the wall – The World has entered into a new normal and the work culture will change. Technology will make sure that things fall in place, so that the world learns to live with the coronavirus pandemic. To that effect, technology tools will play a critical role in adhering to the new work culture.

Role of Technology to enable the new work culture
A major challenge will be to enable business to adjust to the new normal – enabling the sales team to interact with customers with enhanced customer experience without any friction and helping him make decisions. “This is also an opportunity and not a challenge, which will drive more digitalisation for the company,” says Suresh Iyer, Chief Information Officer, Blue Star Limited.

Scaling up the Infrastructure and supporting the change in work culture with technology will be the two major challenges for the CIOs. “With respect to enabling the work from home culture, more companies will go for the public cloud model,” says Sanjay Narkar, Chief Technology Officer, IDFC First Bank.

Piramal Glass is running trials for a solution to monitor the health of the employees and workers when they resume after the lockdown is over. The AI-based solution entails a thermal camera to check the temperature of the employee to give an indication whether there are initial symptoms to suggest whether he is infected. It will also have a facial recognition feature that will double up as an attendance marking. “We see this as an opportunity to invest more in Digital & cloud-based solutions to be able to work seamlessly with virtual teams,” says Poorav Sheth, CDO & CIO, Piramal Glass.

Social distancing is one major social and work norm to be followed. “CIOs will have to go for tools to manage social distancing in companies. AI enhanced solutions will have to be adopted to cater to the change in customer behaviour,” says Narkar.

CIO challenges: Managing and measuring security, costs, employee productivity
Measuring employee productivity will not only be a challenge for the CIOs, but also managers, in general. New ways will have to be adopted to gauge the productivity of the employees. “The COVID-19 situation is not going away soon, so by the end of the FY, how do team heads measure employee outcomes ?,” asks Rohit Ambosta, CIO and Asst Director, Angel Broking. Technology will play a key role in gathering data on calculating human resource productivity in companies.

Maintaining the Information Security posture will be a major challenge. “Since the employees, in many instances will not be guarded by industry grade security, they can be targeted with phishing attacks through the social engineering techniques,” says Ambosta. The data privacy of the customers will also be at risk. This is a big aspect that CIOs will have to look after.

Managing costs will be a major challenge for the CIOs in the times to come. “How do CIOs accommodate the ongoing costs like Annual Maintenance Contracts (AMCs) and juggle them into the impending IT budgets cuts ?,” asks Iyer. Moreover in all probabilities, when the revenues will also be down.