COVID Lessons Learned
During the breakout sessions at the Elevate ITFM conference today, the talk turned to lessons learned from last year’s COVID 19 impacts – and the improvements that are emerging out of that experience.
After the obligatory discussion of laptops, VPNs, Network bandwidth and other remote working issues, the discussion turned to processes and culture.
Attendees talked about how vendor relationships were being handled and nurtured differently, the culture around remote was settling in, and internal corporate communications were improved, allowing IT to have better insight into business needs.
But all of these changes came through necessity. The COVID pandemic left organizations around the globe with no choices other than adapt or fail. IT staff did a thing they are excellent at- they rose to the occaision, put out the fires and were the heroes of the day.
As a result, many organizations are finding themselves accidentally improved. But now is the time for the organization to intentionally reflect and make decisions about improvements that can be kept, or which changes need to be made to avoid future near disasters.
As an IT Finance or IT Business Management office, you are hopefully seeing the utility of being able to tag , track and report on spend according to new initiatives. If this was a new experience for you- what changes are you making in processes and systems to allow this to happen easily for other critical initiatives ( crisis or not)? If you had this in place, were there tweaks or new reports that you should formalize?
Vendor relationships were ( and continue to be) a huge success factor to thriving in theever more rapidly changing market. How are you leveraging vendor insights from your cost models and other automation to understand and improve those relationships? Are you now driving discussions about vendor impacts to services and products and not just contracts ? What insights are you sharing with the vendors you partner with about the capabilities they support, so they can make the best recommendations for you?
What are some other changes you have made ( accidental or intentional) and how are you leveraging those forward as success factors in any future market change? If you are attending day two of the conference tomorrow, drop by the Thavron Booth and continue the conversation. If not, feel free to comment right here.