A CIO’s guide to extreme challenges

In crisis, we don’t have the luxury of figuring things out from scratch. We need to anticipate in advance how to react and make good decisions quickly.

Every crisis brings with it an element of the unknown. As the COVID-19 pandemic and other recent environmental disasters demonstrate, massive disruption to any aspect of life can arise suddenly, with follow-on effects that are both long-lasting and difficult—and often as not, also impossible to anticipate.

How can businesses and communities continue to function when employees, communications networks, and the ability to work together are suddenly disrupted? And how can they do so while limiting negative impact on employees, clients, and the communities they serve?

Reality of the now

It has been estimated that as of March 19, 2020, as many as 88 percent of global organizations have encouraged or required employees to work from home. While the situation in each country is constantly changing, if the 88 percent estimate is accurate for the United States, this would represent more than 127,000,000 people now working from their home or other non-standard location. 

In a 2018 analysis by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 29 percent of US workers indicated they had the requisite set up and equipment to successfully work away from the office, and only 5.3 percent usually did so—as few as 8 million workers.  Almost 120 million American workers may be trying to maintain operations and productivity without the systems and structures—or day-to-day experience—to successfully conduct their work remotely. A massive challenge for any organization.

CIOs are central

Enterprise IT is the mechanism that can keep a business operational and effective even under the current extreme and unprecedented conditions. And in this, CIOs are central.

While CIOs of course planned in advance for disruptions that were anticipated, they hopefully built capacity, redundancy, and flexibility to deal with disruptions that were not. But even in the most risk-averse planning for the unknown, the current situation has been so improbable and profoundly unique.

For decades now, IBM has had a deeply diverse, technically literate workforce. Our teams are accustomed—and immediately prepared—to work remotely. Like every other business, moving to almost 100 percent remote working was a challenge. But not nearly as great a challenge as for other organizations largely unused to and unequipped for remote working.

It’s likely that you as a CIO have already triaged for immediate business continuity and productivity. However, this paper discusses four steps you now need to take to harden systems and structures for the remote working environment to bolster resilience, stability, and security.