By Sophie Danby
Charles Araujo, Founder, The Institute for Digital Transformation
I was recently speaking with my daughter, who works for the largest book distributor in the United States. She was concerned that her office was beginning to reopen and that they might try to force her to go back to the office soon. “I’m so much more productive at home, dad,” she lamented. I chuckled as I imagined them trying to pry her from home after she’s proven that there’s not a need to do so.
Around the world, the jig is up. Long-standing tropes about remote work being unproductive or inhibiting collaboration are now ringing hollow. But more importantly, the fact that they’ve been proven to be so spectacularly wrong is now calling into question every other long-held corporate bureaucratic notion.
So what does all of this mean for ITSM professionals? As we begin to find ourselves in a “new normal” there’ll be two significant impacts on your work. First, the broad success of the global #WFH experiment, not to mention the transformation of virtual events and other shifts that the pandemic demanded, which have opened the eyes of management to the fact that there are other ways of working that, well, work. Not only will we find that many of these “temporary work processes” become permanent, but we’ll see a much more rapid transformation of the enterprise operating model simply because enterprise leaders have become less fearful of the disruption they might have caused. These shifts will necessarily demand changes to fundamental ITSM operating practices to accommodate them.
