New Delhi, Oct 6 2020 : In the wake of the pandemic, Indian enterprises have channelled their current IT spend towards enabling work from home (WFH), with indications that this spend will increase further in the next year. According to a new CIO survey by CyberMedia Research, this marks a 27% increase in proportion of IT spend channeled towards collaboration infrastructure, mainly focused on enabling a remote workforce in the neo normal. Education and Healthcare verticals are going to see maximum increase in spend on collaboration.
The study “The New Work Dynamic: Collaboration in the Neo Normal” was conducted in July-August 2020, with CIOs across large and medium enterprises.
Says Anil Chopra, VP-Research and Consulting, CyberMedia Research (CMR): “The current pandemic has brought a lot of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity to the world. Work from Home (WFH) has become a reality and traditional places of work are losing relevance. Every organization must learn to adapt to the new normal and explore the right collaboration tools that drive efficiency, enable seamless communication, and are secure and reliable at the same time.”
At the initial throes of the pandemic, there were teething enterprise challenges with ensuring business continuity. These included challenges, such as, lack of knowledge about co-workers' availability and location (55%); disconnect between business process and communication applications (52%); and, loss of business because of inability to reach decision makers on the first try (43%).
In the new WFH environment, marked by sudden spike in collaboration needs, enterprises seek to build agility to resolve them. Enterprise challenges include security concerns (75%), productivity losses (67%), team management (34%), and, the need for a greater number of devices (45%). They responded to the pandemic by building stop-gap infrastructure to meet the needs (93%), and provisions for increased bandwidth (36%).
Adds Thomas George, President, CyberMedia Research (CMR): “Most of the organisations are looking for accelerated adoption of digital solutions during their process of recovering and reimagining the business and its operations. However, this may vary, depending on the sector, but the reality is that there will adoption of digital solutions that can reduce operational costs during the next normal. The sectors for critical products, such as pharmaceuticals are localizing their supply chains and creating more stronger collaborative relationships with critical suppliers by building their digital capabilities.”
Given that the neo normal is here to stay, enterprises will focus more spend on enabling project task management and coordination – including employee time trackers (26%), project management systems (23%), and file sharing and management technologies – including version control (19%) and document collaboration (9%), among others.