Covid-19: CIO’s top priorities today

Covid-19: CIO’s top priorities today

It is critical to get all leaders from across functions on the same platform to ensure that they are on-board and understand the risk implications.

We are all together in the middle of something unprecedented, something we never imagined we would face as one global entity. Technology has suddenly become the fulcrum of everything that is happening around us. We are all realizing the power of a digital existence. As the CIO of a global company, where remote locations, customer locations are of paramount significance to our business continuity, there are few essential steps we all need to take to ensure that we are leveraging the full potential of the technologies available to us. In a nutshell, this is what I would recommend-

Implementation of a short term customized IT strategy:

I would look at an employee centric strategy and a customer centric strategy that works in cohesion. Ensuring all remote working frameworks are in place, scaling up IT infrastructure, adhering to security standards and most importantly communicating to all global employees and our customers on how they can be enabled is of utmost importance. Customer centric strategy involves communicating to them on our DR and BCP preparedness and how we are working towards ensuring that all customer projects are going about undisturbed, while we ensure our IT systems are always up and running.

Management alignment

It is critical to get all leaders from across functions on the same platform to ensure that they are on-board and understand the risk implications. Business leaders need to be empowered with regular and frequent updates from the CIO organization on all initiatives as they are implemented. Budgets need to be realigned wherever necessary to ensure that all remote workers have the support they need to perform at their optimal levels. Monitoring and timely course correction It is important to maintain flexible approach towards monitoring the efforts and taking stock on any issues that may need immediate attention. This helps to keep a proactive approach to incident management and a strong BCP protocol.

One-view approach In this digital existence which is today more evident than ever before, it is important to offer a one view platform where all senior management teams can view how they customer projects, teams are performing in these trying circumstances and if there is any intervention needed, they can be prepared to offer the same. Decisions can be taken swiftly, as well as guidance can be sought at the most crucial time.

The long-term impact of this scenario will play out and we will see a more immediate need to build in a digital workplace strategy that is tested for such situations and work with vendors who align with us during such tough and unexpected times. Additionally, BCP and DR awareness training is required across the IT organization as well as a larger group of teams who can be trusted to make this more seamless and productive. We hope that the situation comes back to normalcy sooner than later, but we need to focus on robust digital led enterprise strategy more so than ever before.

The author is CIO at Zensar Technologies.