The Digital Workplace Adoption

The digital work place adoption just got a steroid shot. Nobody was “ready” to simply push entire office floors into home offices. Leadership was not ready and neither were the IT teams.  Then we entered a global pandemic and necessity fostered creativity.  When we are faced with dire scenarios, focus and clarity drive us to “just enough” implementation and trying options that may seem too risky in less tumultuous times.

A US Fortune 500 company with a campus of office buildings had been piloting a new remote work policy with a small group of individuals using VPN (virtual private network) connections.  Upon successful completion of the pilot program, they intended to roll out the policy in a phased approach for wider adoption. When the governor declared a stay at home order in their state, this “small controlled trial” accelerated into mass deployment over the course of days.  This would never have been approved or implemented in regular business operating conditions. The deployment was not perfect, nor did anyone expect it to be, but it offered the company’s employees a real way to continue to work. This company’s work environment will likely never revert to its pre-Covid state.

Small businesses found themselves in similar circumstances. We helped many of them deploy tools and enable remote work in ways they did not expect. Modern systems and technologies allowed them to make this leap without incurring big capital expenditures.

All of the organizations still have things to improve, secure, and define related to the digital workplace and remote work adoption. But when you consider how quickly we accepted and resumed “normal” operations with these shifts,  two things become apparent:  we are actually much more flexible than we think and we can find new innovative ways to thrive.

The “make shift” current state will become formalized and firm. It happened for us at Smooth-IT more than 6 years ago when we went 100% into the cloud and into home offices in multiple cities and states. It was not easy then and it still has many operational considerations and complexities now. As cloud technologies evolve, the risks and challenges of moving to the cloud decrease. More adoption patterns become clear for those of us who work and support this.

The cloud and all of its evolving capabilities will continue to offer better, faster and more economical ways to conduct business. Consider that 15 years ago we did not have an iPhone, Uber, or Airbnb…..more industry shifts are coming and fast.

We are happy to share our lessons and experiences with our clients and others who are inspired to collaborate!