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Human beings are an adaptive species. If there has been one immediate learning from the consequences of coronavirus, it is that individuals must adapt and transform to stay active, relevant, and engaged. This applies to organizations as well. As companies have faced existential challenges to the continuity of service and operations, firms have stepped up to the challenge and demonstrated how complex organizations can adapt and transform in a remote-work world.
Over the course of just a few weeks and months this Spring, leading companies across industries undertook a wholesale transformation of their working culture to enable remote work. Central to this transformation has been the ability of organizations to leverage digital capabilities and data to support remote work on a community and global basis. As one Chief Digital Officer of a leading financial firm expressed it, “We have realized more progress in our digital transformation efforts in the past 90 days than we achieved in the previous 3 years — all driven by client and business urgency”.
I spoke recently with Greg Keeley, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for TD Bank Group (TD), who recently expanded his mandate to encompass overall corporate responsibility for advancing and accelerating the bank’s technology strategy. Keeley joined TD following a 20-year tenure with American Express as a Global CIO and technology head. Keeley has overseen the rapid transformation of TD to support remote work since the bank’s Singapore operation went on “yellow status” on February 11, triggering a prompt action plan and daily “war room” meetings.
Keeley credits the TD team with a “clarity of purpose, organizational focus, and prioritization of what’s important” as critical factors in enabling an accelerated transformation. He underscored the necessity of ensuring the safety of customers and colleagues, running the bank by remaining operational, and the need to support remote work within a stable and secure operation. Keeley noted that TD completed a “rapid pivot” which resulted in triple capacity for digital solutions, with U.S. mobile access up 26% and a 100% increase in money transfer activity.
Many firms across industries have been engaged in similar transformation efforts during the past few months. These firms have been undertaking new investments in infrastructure and capabilities, most notably in customer self-service. The investments are expected to have a lasting impact and represent a vision for the future which combines ease, speed, and simplicity of response to support remote work and remote customer access.
Companies are recognizing the need to adjust digital and data organizations to support a remote-work world. The coronavirus pandemic forces companies to rethink how they work and deliver products and services to their customers. The result is that firms are expanding the concept of working remotely, while accelerating the digital transformation of the enterprise.
Team Performance and Speed-to-Market
Increasing time-to-market is more important than ever in a digital and remote-work world. This requires that organizations change and adapt they ways that they work. For example, individual and team performance must be managed differently. Organizations face new opportunities for Agile and technology modernization. Firms must ask themselves how best to maintain and improve team performance and speed-to-market in a predominantly remote-work environment.
In a world where organizational size and complexity can become overwhelming, organizations must seek to “measure everything”. One way to achieve this is through the delivery of meaningful dashboards to every manager, every day. As it becomes harder to measure employee effectiveness in a remote-work world, organization can take steps to reduce the time-to-feedback loop by breaking down the smallest increment of work to enable frequent measurement of output using Agile methodologies.
For many organizations, now is a time to consider a migration to modern technology solutions and modern data architectures that create cross-functional collaboration, drive higher velocity, and facilitate streamlined processes and organizations.
Data Security
Firms must think about how they can expect to be impacted in unanticipated ways working within a remote-work environment. For examples, what new data risks exist in this environment and how can firms better protect critical data assets?
Access management is one area which firms need to address. This represents a multi-dimensional problem that is complicated by remote working. In response, access controls can be simplified and Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) can help insure greater data security. Given the high-volumes of data that flow through most organizations, it is increasingly necessary to govern information security classifications.
Actionable considerations include review of information security classifications — down to the data field level — and application of information security classifications to data-egress monitoring. Data governance programs need to be coordinated and consistent, given the rapid evolution across areas of risk management, data retention, and regulatory and compliance reporting.
TD’s Keeley reflects, "In our war rooms, we bring risk and control, channels (e.g. Digital), business, technology, and security teams together – a process that we started with our Fusion Centre approach. As part of this approach, our Fraud, Cyber and Customer Assistance teams work together to prepare and anticipate increased threats from bad actors looking to defraud TD and our customers. We've also initiated bank-wide programs reminding colleagues to be vigilant about security — particularly phishing attacks."
Remote-work represents both an opportunty and a challenge to organizations to formulate and execute on an organizational change strategy, and to identify and establish meaningful metrics for measuring team performance and client satisfaction. Digital and data transformation will be key elements in ensuring a successful transition to a remote-work culture that is sustainable and operational for the future.
Note: I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge my colleagues for their extensive thinking on remote work – John Ahrendt, Bill Bain, Paul Bergamo, Blaise Heltai, and Greg Holcombe.
