Coronavirus has brought about the wave of working from home and for many, this is a first experience. WFH is a different lifestyle entirely and requires a level of established trust and it’s also where technology infrastructure begins to shine. I have worked on numerous projects involving various firms and remote working, conferencing and collaborative tools were always the core of our projects. Much of the freedom to be in and out of offices relied on IT infrastructure, security and performance of the overall systems provided. Refining this is very important and can completely transform a WFH experience. Companies that had remained with office based desktop setups have faced difficulty in adjusting their productive workforces due to missing infrastructure and general training of staff.
Data environments are important for projects and for remote working, having a central repo with permissioned access is the general approach that most companies have. Whether it’s Git, SharePoint or any other collaborative environment, file access and management is important. Larger corporations have had these systems for years and a full remote working protocol would have been easy to roll out with enough resource. Smaller companies that have maintained a more traditional approach to work may see this even as an eye opener to digital leverage and remote working necessity in certain circumstances. Perhaps some workplaces may rethink their approach to business entirely. If saving and productivity can be driven to new heights with enforced WFH policies in place, it might be the turning point for businesses to move away from archaic office culture.
The main issue that many will face is resource and infrastructure. I have multiple friends across different professional fields explain to me their experience when working from home. For instance, a construction engineer or architect needing live access to data rich files such as CAD models will often wait up to an hour or longer to sync their drawings and load this up into software. It’s important that companies consider infrastructure from the very beginning and lockdowns are an eye opener to a digital rich environment. I am not saying that offices should be a thing of the past, there are merits and development opportunities from human interaction that are currently hard to emulate virtually. Yet it’s clear in the current modern age where general infrastructure has improved, companies should assess their bottlenecks and put redundancy into place to deal with mass remote working events.
https://www.govtech.com/network/Internet-Speed-Issues-Arise-Amid-Coronavirus-Telecommuting.html
