Ryan Easter couldn’t believe he was being asked to run a pandemic business continuity test.
It was late October, 2019 and Easter, IT Director and a principal at Johnson Investment Counsel, was being asked by regulators to ensure that their employees could work from home with the same capabilities they had in the office. In addition, the company needed to evaluate situations where up to 50% of personnel were impacted by a virus and unable to work, forcing others to pick up their internal functions and workload.
“I honestly thought that it was going to be a waste of time,” said Easter. “I never imagined that we would have had to put our pandemic plan into action. But because we had a tested strategy already in place, we didn’t miss a beat when COVID-19 struck.”
In the months leading up to the initial test, Johnson Investment Counsel developed a work anywhere blueprint with their technology partner Evolve IP. The plan covered a wide variety of integrated technologies including voice services, collaboration, virtual desktops, disaster recovery and remote office connectivity.
“Having a strategy where our work anywhere services were integrated together was one of the keys to our success,” said Easter. “We manage about $13 billion in assets for clients across the United States and provide comprehensive wealth and investment management to individual and institutional investors. We have our own line of mutual funds, a state-chartered trust company, a proprietary charitable gift fund, with research analysts and traders covering both equity and fixed income markets. Duct taping one-off solutions wasn’t going to cut it.”
Easter continued, “It was imperative that our advisors could communicate with clients, collaborate with each other and operate the business seamlessly. That included ensuring we could make real-time trades and provide all of our other client services.”
Five months later, the novel coronavirus hit the United States and Johnson Investment Counsel’s blueprint test got real.
“One day we were in the office and the next we were working from home. There was one major change, however. Our advisors were the busiest they have ever been. The stock market was swinging wildly and we needed to be ultraresponsive — both in terms of being accessible, but also being able to move quickly in the markets. Our systems and the plan operated perfectly,” said Easter.
Johnson Investment Counsel was in far better shape than most businesses due to their strategic approach, but the majority of companies never planned for anything like this. In those businesses IT rolled out remote work solutions without a long-term strategy or thinking through compliance issues and device security. They shipped desktops to employees with instructions on how to set up their home networks or said, “Go ahead, use your kid’s Chromebook, we’ll call you on your mobile.”
Now that organizations are beginning to move back to the office and investigate new remote, hybrid and in-office work scenarios, they need to rip off the duct tape and develop a permanent work anywhere strategy like the one deployed by Johnson Investment Counsel.
To be effective, the solution must employ technologies that are easy to use and manage, simple to implement, and be cost-effective and secure. Here are four considerations to start building a permanent work anywhere blueprint.
Define and secure user identities
Even before the pandemic sent workers scrambling home there was no way to support all of your end-users’ unique computing desires and scale your IT operations. Now your business has the unique opportunity to build profiles for the work your employees actually do, the applications they truly need and the level of mobility they require to be successful.
With those goals in mind, if you take the time to really think about it, your users realistically fall into three broad categories. Those that rely solely on web-based tools (SaaS users), employees that need SaaS and legacy line-of-business applications and individuals that require a full desktop experience — either a cloud desktop or a CPU with a natively installed OS.
As businesses adopt work anywhere processes, remote management and provisioning of these user types and their subsets become critical and should be handled by a highly secure, Identity and Access Management (IAM) tool that leverages single sign-on (SSO) with multifactor authentication (MFA).
With IAM and SSO users log into a personalized web-based portal at the beginning of their day on any device, no matter where they are. From there, based on their identity wristband, tiles are presented with access to just their corporate applications. They click on each service like Office 365, Salesforce, Concur, etc. and are granted access without having to login again. IAM tools are simple to use, ease employee onboarding/offboarding and application deployment, and reduce the business’ financial and security exposure due to poor password management.
One strategic consideration is that while major IAM tools deliver access to SaaS services, most do not integrate with legacy, line-of-business (LOB) applications. Often times, during a crisis or physical disaster, these applications become critical to operations as they may handle billing, purchasing and employee benefits.
Device management and remote-work security
Well before COVID-19 drove users home, organizations were working on bring your own device (BYOD) policies and procedures. As with seemingly everything else in IT, the coronavirus dramatically moved the timeline forward. Businesses had to figure out, seemingly overnight, the right way to support and protect devices they didn’t own, or perhaps weren’t even aware employees were utilizing.
To make matters more “interesting,” the influx of work-from-home employees showed business executives what IT has been saying for the last few years … the new corporate network doesn’t stop at HQ’s walls. It also doesn’t stop at the VPN connections. It’s everywhere. Unfortunately, using personal devices on lightly or unsecured personal networks (or Starbucks) opens the business up to malware and represents possible negative findings for compliance-focused businesses like healthcare and finance.
To solve for these noncorporate devices, companies have turned to a variety of solutions:
- Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) can protect the enterprise while enabling a more flexible environment for their employees. Note, their solutions can be costly and complicated to implement.
- Virtual desktops (VDI) or Desktop as a Service (DaaS). With these solutions, IT gives users access to a desktop OS from pretty much any device that has an internet connection while still being able to enforce corporate controls and security measures. While cloud desktops are effective they don’t suit all users:
- They typically don’t provide the native experience on Mac devices and tablets that user’s desire.
- The services can be expensive and are overkill for SaaS-only users.
- They can be difficult to deploy; requiring expertise that’s not found in all companies.
- VPN has been the de facto way to gain access to the corporate network for corporate devices that have been moved from the office to the home. However, there are limiting factors such as performance/latency and that should be considered as part of a business’ long-term work anywhere device strategy. However, these three solutions are not a fit for every business and certainly not for every user. Instead, businesses are now considering more modern remote workspaces that include combinations of identity and access management (IAM), access to line-of-business/on-premises applications, and cloud desktops in a single environment. This new approach is typically less expensive, more secure, easier to manage and presents applications the same way on any network-connected device, regardless of OS and whether its BYOD or corporate owned.
Choose your collaboration service
During the pandemic no single technology received more attention than collaboration. Reports showed Microsoft Teams usage jumped to 75 million daily users in just weeks. Zoom found itself the bell of the ball, at least until its security flaws were identified.
With video collaboration, employees found that they could maintain relationships, meet with clients and communicate as they did in the office. But, limitations have also been exposed and organizations need to think about their long-term strategy based on several components.
Workstream collaboration
Gartner predicts that by 2022 70% of teams will rely on workstream collaboration as their primary means of communicating, collaborating and sharing information. And that data was published before businesses were forced to collaborate by any means necessary just to keep their companies running.
The reality is that employees were already headed down the collaboration path, with or without IT’s oversight, and the last few months have probably made the situation even more dire. Now, as employees trickle back into the office it’s time to land on a solution and drive it strategically throughout the business.
If your business relies heavily on Microsoft tools it likely makes sense to investigate or switch to Microsoft Teams. The Microsoft Office productivity suite is tightly integrated into Teams, which will make your employees even more productive in a work anywhere environment.
If your business is using the Google suite of services you may want to explore integrations with third party collaboration/video-only providers as Google has changed its video/collaboration strategy numerous times over the past few years. Similarly, for Apple, FaceTime is an option for video conferencing but is not tightly integrated with its iWorks productivity suite.
Integrated voice communications
Think about integrated voice and collaboration from several perspectives. The first is quality and reliability. Does your business require crystal-clear voice quality and five nines reliability to ensure your employees always sound professional? Or, is a glitchy robot voice an okay source of amusement?
Ryan Easter noted the following about his advisor’s experiences with voice communications, “Clients are just amazed when they find out our advisors are at home. They can’t tell the difference and it gives them a lot of comfort to be able to reach us regardless of what’s going on in the world and it always sounds professional.”
Next, how important is business continuity to your company? In the event that your collaboration tool goes down, would you want your employees to be able to leverage an office phone at home, use their computer or tablet as a fully functional soft phone and receive calls from customers on their mobile phones?
Also consider the services that are inherent in an enterprise-quality, cloud PBX. These are not part of most current collaboration tools and include services like contact centers, multilevel auto-attendants, integration with current SIP phones, overhead paging, executive assistant features, receptionist clients, advanced hunt groups and more.
Video drivers or business drivers
Today, most collaboration tools are driven by video. For the future, think strategically about how people work, software tools and how to integrate it all.
For example, today, during a group video call you can likely share a PowerPoint or Word document from your desktop. After the meeting, you can send it around via email and then compare edits to finish the file. In the future, would you want your team to be able to jointly edit that document in real-time by simply posting it to the group chat for people to notate?
Further, think about where you want that document to live. Do you want it to live on the corporate file server or a user’s local hard drive? Or, would your business be best served with the file living where your employees are congregating and exchanging ideas? Much like the rest of your life, your business probably operates topically, and a complete collaboration tool allows for a truly Agile organization where cross-functional teams seamlessly spin up and wind down as projects are created and completed.
Enabling work-from-home contact and support center teams
During a crisis, your contact center and support employees are on the front line, often times playing both offense and defense. How they respond to your clients and partners at this critical time will leave a lasting impression and define your company’s brand.
Unfortunately, during the coronavirus crisis, some businesses were forced to shutter their contact centers almost overnight or start forwarding phone calls to home phone numbers and cell phones with no regard to quality, consistency or cost. Those with on-premise solutions were left in a bad spot while those with a cloud contact center and distributed agent capabilities with work-from-home policies were able to pivot quickly and resume business that was at least close to normal.
There are several strategic IT decisions that need to be made before landing on the right cloud-based solution.
Unified versus overlay
Cloud contact center software is deployed in one of two ways: unified with a provider’s hosted PBX or as an overlay onto a third party voice solution/phone system.
With a unified solution, organizations work with a single provider making billing, installation and support easier. There are also functionality improvements for agents and managers as call handling is improved due to a deep integration with the PBX. These call handling advantages offer productivity gains for agents and empower them to deliver higher customer satisfaction.
Overlay solutions also have benefits and can be a great choice for businesses with use cases such as a phased migration where the contact center migrates to the cloud before the rest of the organization. This allows the entire organization to continue leveraging their existing phone system investment while empowering the contact center with the advanced capabilities of a cloud solution.
Key Integrations
Contact and support centers require some of the most necessary, and difficult, integrations in a business. From collaboration and unified communications capabilities, to deep hooks into the company’s CRM, in order to do their jobs effectively, agents and managers typically rely on multiple systems; the same systems that also feed other departments.
Because of these factors it is critical that the business look at the contact and support center holistically, with IT’s direct input, and not as a one-off software solution.
Remote hiring
A final incentive for employers to continue with a work anywhere model will come in the form of hiring, as the best candidates will go to organizations that enable them to work in ways that fit their lifestyles. To compete, businesses will need to implement a proven work anywhere blueprint that includes onboarding/offboarding via user identities, secure BYOD programs, seamlessly integrated collaboration and communications tools and more. With these capabilities in place, businesses can hire the best candidate regardless of where they live and reduce expenses at the same time.
The pandemic of 2020 has forced everyone to reevaluate how they live and work.
As Bill Gates noted in his pandemic LinkedIn podcast, “in some ways, you can create something that’s actually more efficient and better than what was there before.” If there’s a silver lining in all of this it’s that companies have the unique opportunity to reset; to develop a flawless work anywhere model that will position the organization for success in the both the near-term and long-term future.