The 5 levels of business resilience

What is the contribution of IT to a resilient company? A few, certainly not conclusive, considerations by Stefan based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Connectivity as a key basic requirement

What is the central goal of basic IT services in a company? I mean, it can be summarized under the title “Ensuring connectivity.” In order to be able to work at all, I need mail, voice, video conferencing, shared data storage. Because no one works alone: We are all involved in a social environment of colleagues, suppliers and customers. We can only achieve our goals together.

Yet too little attention is often paid to how inefficiently many companies still organize themselves because they do not make adequate use of the opportunities offered by modern means of communication. Bosses allow themselves to be visited at meetings and do not notice that their meeting participants cumulatively take another unproductive hour to and from one company location to another in the same city for every hour meeting. Or sales representatives - instead of being where their customers are - have to return to the company headquarters again and again. Of course: a session held physically at the same location is somehow richer and feels better. Or maybe just a lot more familiar? If you hold regular meetings via video conference, you will also learn over time that they will get to the relevant points more quickly and that the participants will start to think through their statements better. And anyone who - unlike me - was once able to operate a telephone with cryptic commands in the manner of *123 #456789, will sooner or later also have the tools under control. But of course, the following always applies: Form follows function — it is important to choose the right vessel for every occasion.

“My workplace is where my notebook is”

You become more aware of the travel problems as soon as you are no longer within the same city. You provide remote access to employees in the field so that they can work on the train, for example.

However, IT employees who provide this infrastructure usually do not have to use it themselves in their daily work. In my personal experience, hardly any other infrastructure is so neglected and normal productive work is often not guaranteed. The sales representative receives VPN software that, with every small interruption of the mobile data connection, immediately throws you out of the application or freezes it for minutes until the system finally recovers from it. Or the only browser installed on the Citrix environment is a 10-year-old Internet Explorer, which does not correctly display half of the web applications. And of course, all other software tools that you would actually need are missing. Anyone who chooses a remote-first approach is in good shape today. Anyone who can work productively from home, the customer or on the go will probably also be able to do it in their own office. Conversely, experience shows that this is significantly less certain.

What does the ideal solution look like?

As usual, no single solution can be defined as the right one for everyone. Google Apps and Microsoft provide the broad market with super cloud solutions. In addition, there are many other providers who can address specific problems even more specifically. We too run some collaboration solutions offered for session & task management, enterprise chat and video conferencing. We focus in particular on customers in industries with particularly high data protection or security requirements who would like to have their data processed in the EU or Switzerland. There are certainly enough solutions on the market.

But especially when it comes to basic IT services, it seems much more important to me that the “right” requirements are set. In doing so, sufficient consideration must be given to the usual work situations today. Because these have actually been gone for a long time modern, but simply normal. From part-time work, home office and geographically distributed teams to outtasking company tasks to external service providers who are integrated into the processes in practice just like internal employees: yes, the world has become more diverse. But it certainly doesn't have to become more inefficient because of this.

Okay, connectivity - check! Security — the next level — is coming soon.

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About the author

Stefan is a managing partner at linkyard and advises customers on digitizing their business. On a part-time basis, he is a lecturer in information security and project management at a university of applied sciences.
stefan.haller@linkyard.ch | +41 78 746 51 16