How to Plan Your Return To Work Strategy

The return to the office—and the hybrid workplace—are hot topics for C-level executives across the nation, as companies decide how and where team members will work going forward. But creating a new way to work, in which some people work 100% in the office, some work 100% at home and others do a bit of both, presents a challenge for employers. How do you start? Who works from where? How do you set up your offices differently today?

Healthcare IT vendor Allscripts recently faced a significant and costly upgrade for its operating system environment. At the same time, its premises-based contact center system was up for annual maintenance renewal. Allscripts decided to take the opportunity to simplify contact center operations and move to the cloud—a move that was in line with its general commitment to cloud migration.

I consult with companies from many markets that are scattered across the United States, and most of them had to pivot last year when the COVID pandemic hit. Scrambling for answers for a remote workforce, some were better prepared than others. Almost universally, they took budgets they had for things like data center and sank those funds into remote workforce initiatives. With the change in our work standards, we must define what our new “normal” is and determine what investments we should make in the core, edge, and cloud.

We cannot go back to normal, and even if we could, we shouldn’t. Why? The normal we knew was not sustainable. Too huge of a carbon footprint, too slow to meet the demands of the “fast fashion” economy, too stressful for associates, and too high of a cost to support.

We're excited to introduce the ConvergeOne Tech Exchange, a podcast series that connects the technology community with top-of-mind insights that you can put into action. ConvergeOne believes that leveraging technology to connect people with purpose is vital to achieve business outcomes.

One of our Lead Solutions Architects at ConvergeOne (and a long-time member of the Ski Patrol), Leif Haslund, has told me that the most important piece of information to ask in an emergency is, “Where are you?” When an emergency happens and his team gets called, they must know where to go in order to give assistance.

It goes without saying that 2020 has been the most chaotic year of our lifetime, and changes we have experienced this year are likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future—if not indefinitely. The way that we collaborate with each other at work, the way our children are educated at school, and even how we spend our personal time with clubs, family, and church have changed.

Campus Security

We ask our educators to do a lot. The threat of school violence on campus and from remote sources has district decision-makers needing answers. Risks need to be identified, with consideration given to protecting the student wherever they are. Security needs to be conducted in a way that doesn’t feel like a prison. What’s more, innovation with physical security provide new feature sets only possible on IP networks ⏤ meaning that IT teams now have partial or new responsibility for physical security. ConvergeOne coordinates a mix of digital applications to shield against/respond to threats and other hazards. Key areas of focus include:

In today’s pandemic times, we are finding more and more customers and end users are working remotely from home. This requires users to access a number of devices, including laptops and tablets, while at home. Is this secure? Absolutely not.

It’s an irrefutable truth: COVID-19 has quickly changed the modern workplace. At the onset of the pandemic, many businesses rushed to put temporary solutions in place to protect their employees and keep up their operations. Because these solutions were only meant to be short-term, they are now starting to show their weaknesses and concerns around their reliability and security are beginning to arise. The result: Obstacles are looming everywhere for CIOs.