The good thing about IT is that it helps during both good times as well as
bad times. When business was booming, there was a need to figure out how
technology could help grow the business. Now, when times are bad and companies
are reeling under pressure of the economic meltdown, there's a need to find out
how technology can help to not only sustain the business, but also lower
expenses.
So this is the time to think innovatively about how IT can help do this, and
the challenge is to do it without letting any prior biases hinder your thoughts.
Don't shoot down an idea, no matter how silly it sounds. For all you know, even
the silly ideas you shot down during good times could be your saviors now. In
order to get those ideas, you have to foster an environment that encourages
innovative thoughts and ideas. For instance, one company I spoke to in Bangalore
has reduced its employee to desktop ratio in the office, so that only a fixed
number of employees would be able to come to office at any day. Rest would have
to work from home.
The work from home concept hasn't really gelled with a lot of Indian
enterprises till now, even though it's a standard practice amongst a lot of
international organizations. Indian companies still stick to the old school of
thought that employees won't work if they don't come to office. Maybe that was
the case during good times, but now, when any cost cutting idea is a good idea,
this might be successful. The challenge for the IT department is to ensure that
it's convenient for employees to be able to access the company's IT
infrastructure remotely, and it doesn't put too much pressure on them in terms
of cost. For instance, it shouldn't happen that employees have to upgrade their
Internet bandwidth at home to ensure they can connect to the office VPN. Plus,
you'll need to work closely with HR and top management to build the case for it.
The idea is to try and build a virtual working environment for employees so
that they can work from anywhere. Video conferencing, VoIP, online
collaboration, and SaaS are all good candidates that could make this possible.
You just have to ensure that your IT infrastructure, especially your WAN links
are optimized to take on the extra load. So that's what our cover story on
enterprise WAN management is all about this time. Though WAN management is an
old concept, it has a whole new meaning in today's time, because it could just
make the virtual office concept work.
Anil Chopra, Editor anilc@cybermedia.co.in |
And we could see a paradigm shift in the way organizations work after the
slowdown.