Just over one year ago, organizations of all kinds, shapes, and sizes were told by government agencies and their boards of directors to empty their offices and have everyone except essential on-site personnel working from home as rapidly as possible. While some organizations allowed some workers the ability to work remotely and the numbers of workers who were considered “mobile” had been increasing for years, this was different. This had to happen now.

The logistics were frightening. People who had never worked from home were going to be doing that for an unknown length of time. Did they have laptops? Would they need extra monitors? Did the organization have enough VPN access? Would their applications work from outside the organization’s physical network? If they allowed people to use their own computers, would they have licenses for the required software?

Existing budgets were swept aside and the overarching question for CIOs and other IT and business leaders became, “Can you do this?”

Service management is one proven way for businesses to keep their houses in order. It's why we were able to cope with the swift change in working, & how we prepare for the future. Here @RoyAtkinson explores. #ITSM Click To Tweet

Not just an IT question

Although much of the rapid movement to remote work hinged on IT’s ability to “make it all work,” there were other questions as well, including:

• Did HR have policies that prohibited or restricted working from home?
• How would the onboarding of new employees be done?
• How would teams communicate?
• How could employees who were inexperienced at remote work get up to speed on working from home?
• How could collaboration and innovation continue?
• Would people have access to the files and information they needed?
• How would managers cope with being separated from their teams?

In short, just about everything had to be reexamined. New ways of working had to be learned or invented. One set of statistics shows how massive the shift was:

In early March 2020, Microsoft Teams was supporting 560 million meeting minutes per day. At the end of March that number had risen to 2.7 billion meeting minutes per day.

If a journalist were writing the story, they might say, “Miraculously, organizations accomplished the changes and kept working.” While there might have been some lucky circumstances, there weren’t any miracles involved. It was an immense amount of work, but there’s an underlying reason why many organizations made it look relatively easy: They already knew what to do and how to do it.

IT, whether considered as a department or a capability, delivered rapid change when it was needed to keep organizations functioning, but could that velocity be maintained? @RoyAtkinson takes a look in this blog. #ITSM Click To Tweet

Service management is one proven way for businesses to keep their houses in order, as it were. Understanding how functions operate, how assets relate to each other and work as systems, and understanding the roles and responsibilities of the people involved – regardless of the particular framework used or how it is adopted and adapted –helps immensely in times of crisis or need.

SysAid’s 2021 State of Service Management Report highlights some of the aspects of service management that enabled rapid business change.

Self-service became immensely important as the shift out of the office occurred. Many workers were providing home schooling and/or providing care for family members, and working nonstandard hours in order to keep up. Providing robust self-service was the way to support these workers without increasing service desk staff.

As valuable as remote control tools have been in the past, they became an absolute must, since technicians no longer had physical access to employees’ workstations.

Having control of both software and hardware inventories through asset management allowed organizations to respond rapidly. One healthcare organization needed to provide 500 additional laptops to employees within one week. They knew how many they had, where they were, and how they were configured, and came up with a way to deliver the laptops without direct personal contact.

Ongoing trends that helped accomplish changes

In addition to the order and guidance organizations gained through service management, the pursuit of certain business initiatives during recent years set the stage for rapid response as the pandemic required massive change.

1. Cloud migration – For years, organizations have been moving away from housing applications exclusively in their own data centers (“on-premises”) and investing either in cloud-based applications or in moving their own software and systems to the cloud.
2. Work-from-Anywhere (WFA) – Before the pandemic, WFA initiatives were centered more around business continuity planning and allowing employees more flexibility. Having at least some WFA plans and tools in place made it much easier for many organizations to go remote rapidly.
3. Enterprise Service Management (ESM) – Using some common practices in different lines of business, enabled by a common toolset and data, simplified the delivery of information to the desktop for various parts of the organization as well as for customers.

Sustainable levels of change

IT, whether considered as a department or a capability, delivered rapid change when it was needed to keep organizations functioning, but could that velocity be maintained? Would executives now expect all the timelines for projects and initiatives to shrink from months to weeks or even days?

We don’t know when a disruption such as the global pandemic might happen again, but it’s clear that rapid changes in business & employment conditions will continue & likely accelerate - @RoyAtkinson #ITSM Click To Tweet

Many people will be returning to physical offices; many will not. Is work-from-home viable? What does work-from-anywhere really mean? The long-term answers remain to be seen as the business world adjusts to whatever the so-called “new normal” is.

It should be clear already that, even enabled by the best technologies and good ways of managing, the kinds of change that took place ­– and still are taking place –have taken a heavy toll on the humans involved. Insomnia, feelings of isolation, and working extra hours have been hallmarks of the pandemic. At least for some, the effects on mental health will be felt for a long time to come.

Lessons for the future

We don’t know when a disruption such as the global COVID pandemic might happen again, but it’s clear that rapid changes in business and employment conditions will continue and likely accelerate.

What is also clear is that well-managed IT enabled a huge, rapid transition when it was needed, and showed businesses and institutions that IT should never again be considered the “Department of No” because, when the need arose, the answer was a resounding Yes.

Here @RoyAtkinson shares three key concepts to keep front of mind as you move your organization forward - past the pandemic. #ITSM Click To Tweet

Here are some key concepts to keep your organization moving forward:

1. As organizations transform and every aspect of business becomes more digital, information technology is no longer the sole domain of an IT department, but is a capability throughout the organization.
2. Just as digital technologies are changing the business world, the world of the consumer/customer is changing as well. Organizations should be focused on providing a good customer experience, including the best technology for every part of the customer journey.
3. Business agility, sustainability, and resilience are, and will continue to be, qualities that enable organizations to thrive. These qualities are grounded in sound business strategy, appropriate technology investments, continued training and education, and adoption of good practices according to the needs of the organization.

Two pieces of advice from ITIL 4’s guiding principles are especially helpful when considering the future:

• Focus on value: Understand the business you are in, the value it offers, and your part in creating it.
• Start where you are: There’s no time like the present to begin and no place like here to take the first step.

Two pieces of advice from #ITIL4’s guiding principles are especially helpful when considering the future, says @RoyAtkinson. Here he explains what they are. #ITSM Click To Tweet