The New Normal in IT: How the Global Pandemic Changed Information Technology Forever by Gregory S. Smith. Gregory is CIO for the American Kidney Fund and previously served in the same role for Pew Charitable Trusts and the World Wildlife Fund.
He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and a former adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. The New Normal in IT is part of Wiley’s CIO Series.
The pandemic certainly changed everything. The information technology industry was no exception. The downstream impacts placed tremendous pressure on IT teams to maintain service delivery as the world went home and Zoom entered our lexicon.
Reflecting upon this move away from the office, how have IT leaders communicated the change necessary now and moving forward? Change is indeed hard.
We all witnessed the fundamental shift regarding remote work. From optional to mandatory over the next 18 months. How many organizations scrambled like mad to secure and deploy to every employee a laptop?
Can you recall the immediate infrastructure upgrades stood up in weeks versus months? IT faced many critical challenges starting in March 2020. Yet, our IT infrastructure teams kept delivering in those early weeks in order to keep their organization alive and employees functioning.
Pandemic supply chain contraints
Can you even recall how difficult it was to cut a PO for laptops? Add a global supply chain slowdown on-top of the chip shortage. In fact, since the summer of 2020 many organizations began shutting down their corporate offices (under rental agreements) to reduce costs and shed office footprints. However in saving rental costs, the information technology infrastructure baked into those offices including printers, networking equipment, scanners etc. all became idle.
Gregory outlines three information technology transitions as a result of the pandemic: cloud, mobile and cybersecurity. We are not going back to desktops. This is clearly the new normal and this book serves leaders and IT teams well for the next pandemic.
Chapter 5 IT Security For Corporate Resilience
Perhaps the most single important chapter. Cyber criminals were so successful as the pandemic kicked into high gear. Managed Detection and Response quickly became the new requirement to protect on-premise, cloud and laptops. There are leadership lessons similar to Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Stanford professors Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao.
In fact, cyberinsurance drives the bus today. Insurance carriers now require organizations to implement Privileged Access Management (PAM) and remove local admin rights. Gregory touches these issues across this chapter. He actually shows how organizaations came to realize the value of their remote workforce and how information technology teams can continue to support workflows regardless of location. In addition, information technology governance frameworks to meet new challenges, including cybersecurity risks became the new normal.
In conclusion, The New Normal in IT is an valuable resource for information technology professionals and executives across any market.