Secure approaches and empowering collaborative, productive workers will be the primary themes in the distributed organisation of the future, business intelligence vendor OpenText has suggested.
In an opinion piece for FastCompany.com, OpenText chief information officer Renee McKenzie says there’s no going back to the more centralised pre-Covid office approach, keeping the focus on cybersecurity and team collaboration.
“In essence, the pandemic has forced organisations to pivot into the uncharted waters of the distributed organisation and to the power of the edge,” McKenzie says.
“Any CEO, CIO or senior executive who thinks they can return to the ways things were pre-Covid is delusional. There is no turning back.”
McKenzie points to IDC predictions around hybrid ways of working that will require dynamic and reconfigurable teams that can adapt quickly, any time or place.
Her prescription? Investment in technologies that support secure, remote collaboration and the ability to access information quickly.
“Locking down applications, access, and information is pretty easy when all employees are connected to a corporate network. There are comparatively few vulnerabilities or points of entry for bad actors,” McKenzie adds.
Employees will need the right set of applications. OpenText’s view is that these should be highly automated, highly available, highly collaborative and contain real-time contextual information and data.
“All technical advances in the distributed world, whatever they may be, must be easy to consume, use, onboard, and adopt,” McKenzie says.
“In fact, as the Great Resignation has made clear, companies that fail to meet these evolving needs will struggle to attract and retain top talent.”
For example, OpenText Business Intelligence (OTBI) query and reporting can help business analysts and other business users more easily pose questions about their data and view the results in informative reports.
“Non-technical personnel increasingly need the ability to investigate enterprise data on their own so they can ask, and answer, important questions about the business,” OpenText explains on its website.
“Hiding in an organisation’s data is intelligence that can be used to provide better customer service, deliver higher-quality products, measure and improve operational efficiency, and ultimately make better business decisions.”
( Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay )
