The New Normal in IT: How the Global Pandemic Changed Information Technology Forever

By Gregory S. Smith

Learn how IT leaders are adapting to the new reality of life during and after COVID-19

COVID-19 has caused fundamental shifts in attitudes around remote and office work. And in The New Normal in IT: How the Global Pandemic Changed Information Technology Forever, internationally renowned IT executive Gregory S. Smith explains how and why companies today are shedding corporate office locations and reducing office footprints.

You'll learn about how companies realized the value of information technology and a distributed workforce and what that means for IT professionals going forward. The book offers insightful lessons regarding:

• How to best take advantage of remote collaboration and hybrid remote/office workforces
• How to implement updated risk mitigation strategies and disaster recovery planning and testing to shield your organization from worst case scenarios
• How today's CIOs and CTOs adapt their IT governance frameworks to meet new challenges, including cybersecurity risks

The New Normal in IT is an indispensable resource for IT professionals, executives, graduate technology management students, and managers in any industry. It's also a must-read for anyone interested in the impact that COVID-19 had, and continues to have, on the information technology industry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Feb 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781119839774

Book preview

THE NEW NORMAL IN IT

HOW THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC CHANGED INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOREVER

Gregory S. Smith

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Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smith, Gregory S., 1963- author.

Title: The new normal in IT : how the global pandemic changed information technology forever / Gregory S. Smith.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2022] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021056410 (print) | LCCN 2021056411 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119839767 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119839781 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119839774 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Data processing service centers. | Information technology. | COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020—Influence.

Classification: LCC HD9696.C62 S548 2022 (print) | LCC HD9696.C62 (ebook) | DDC 005.74—dc23/eng/20211228

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056410

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056411

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Image(s): © amtitus/Getty Images, Who is Danny/Shutterstock

In memory of Sondra Lundy Schaeffer.

This book is dedicated to all the professionals in the medical community, first responders, essential employees, and IT experts for getting us through the worst of the global Covid-19 pandemic.

PREFACE

For the past 30 years, I've had the pleasure of working in the IT industry across a variety of sectors (financial services, Big 5 management and IT consulting, U.S. national security/defense, environmental, public policy, education, and healthcare). During my career, some areas of knowledge and experience have become more important in the strategic role as a chief information officer/chief technology officer (CIO/CTO) than others. Until 2020, the information technology (IT) operational and strategic playbooks for various industries were pretty set and focused around deploying applications, knowledge management systems, technology infrastructure via a mix of cloud and on-premises installations, and security – mostly centered around physical office buildings and data centers where most staff worked. As a result of the global Covid-19 pandemic that originated in early 2020, everything IT related has changed and will likely remain different forever. Companies are moving to full or partial remote workers with more tolerance for broader geographical ranges of resources. In addition, they are shedding corporate office locations or at a minimum, reducing the office footprint significantly to reduce costs. Why? Because the pandemic of 2020–2021 showed how valuable information technology can be to an organization and that we have proven that organizations are more productive working remotely away from expensive corporate office buildings.

The role of the CIO/CTO going forward will change globally forever as a result. The purpose of this book is to share with others my experience and predictions alongside other CIOs across a diverse set of sectors (energy, manufacturing, academia, transportation, consumer products, financial services, and nonprofits) regarding the future strategy deployment of technology post Covid-19. I plan to cover three broad areas. First, what the postpandemic new normal looks like for IT leaders regarding resource sourcing, the office of the future and how collaboration tools will continue to accelerate a hybrid office/remote work force across the globe. Second, I will discuss how risk mitigation and specifically disaster recovery testing and planning will adapt to include worst-case scenarios. Third, my CxO (CIO, CISO, COO, and CEO) panel and I will share how today's CIOs are adapting their IT governance approach to meet the new IT normal and how key performance indicators will likely change as a result.

Approach

The Contents takes the reader on a logical path to learning and obtaining the key skills and approaches best-practice IT leaders are adapting as a result of what they've learned from the recent global pandemic. I leverage my own experience, along with a group of CIOs, chief information security officers (CISOs), chief operations officers (COOs), and chief executive officers (CEOs) from a variety of sectors to communicate the best and most helpful approaches used by leading CIOs today. I'll also seek research support from the best IT advisory research firms on the market to support my conclusions and predictions.

Target Audience

The target audience of this text includes IT professionals from middle-management (managers, directors, VPs) to senior management up to and including the roles of the CIO and CTO. As a result, the market opportunity for this book is quite large, given the large-scale audience of middle managers to the top information technology (IT) spot in most organizations – the CIO.

In addition, the audience includes a large number of global undergraduate and graduate technology management or information systems academic programs.

I believe that there is a significant need for a book of this type at this time. First – many organizations that were technically unprepared for the pandemic suffered greatly. This text will serve as a road map for how to move forward with a technology strategy so that prior mistakes are not made twice. Second, I will draw on the expertise of CIOs and other executives across a wide swath of sectors to tell their story on how well they handled the pandemic and what changes they are making going forward. This will reveal the path forward for middle IT management (managers and directors), who I see as a large target market opportunity. Third, since the technology revolution that started in the 1990s through 2019, the world has never seen something as disruptive to companies and organizations as the Covid-19 pandemic. It literally impacted all industrialized and technology advanced nations. This text will provide predictions and strategies based on my experience and my research panel regarding where technology development, adoption, and spending will go post-Covid-19 for one key reason: so organizations across the globe are prepared when another global event happens again, which it will.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A number of folks were instrumental in the development of this book, my fifth. First and foremost – thanks to my wife and family for continuing to support my dreams of academic and publishing excellence. The number of hours it took to research and develop this book were significant, taking time away from my family. Second, I'd like to thank the CIO, CISO, COO, and CEO contributors to this book. Your insights, experiences, lessons learned, and projections going forward will help organizations around the globe better prepare to live with expected future disruptions associated with Covid-19 and other disrupters that will inevitably challenge us all that we simply can't foresee at the moment.

I'd like to thank my supporting research teams. Special thanks to Joseph Poye, Christian Morrison, and Timothy Scannell at IDC. Access to your research and team was invaluable in the development of this book. I'd also like to thank my friend and colleague Rick Pastore at The Hackett Group for access to some of your terrific research studies and reports. They were especially helpful in showing readers the impacts IT planning had on the degree of impact from the pandemic.

I'd also like to thank the wonderful team of professionals who provided compelling endorsements for this book. Thank you Ed Anderson, Rick Pastore, Frederic Lemieux, and Kendra Ketchum.

Lastly, and most importantly, I'd like to thank my team at John Wiley & Sons. It's hard to believe that this is my third book with your esteemed publishing brand. What an honor it is to be backed by Wiley. Special thanks go out to Sheck Cho, executive editor; Susan Cerra, senior managing editor; and Samantha Enders, editorial assistant and lead for the cover design, for all your efforts to make this book a global leader.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gregory S. Smith is an internationally recognized IT executive with 30 years of experience managing complex IT and business systems. Mr. Smith serves as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for a Washington, DC–area organization. Previously, Mr. Smith served for a total of 17 years as the CIO for various organizations including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). His for-profit experience combines IT and business acumen from a decade in U.S. national security, U.S. financial services 100, and consulting experience from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Gregory S. Smith is an honoree of several awards including: SmartCEO magazine's Top 10 CIOs in Washington DC, Computer World magazine's Premier 100 IT Leaders, CIO magazine's CIO 100, and eWeek magazine's Top 100 CIOs. He was also recognized as one of the Top 100 Most Influential CIOs by CIO Insight magazine. In 2017, he received an excellence in teaching award from Georgetown University.

Mr. Smith is the author of CIO 2.0 (in Mandarin), Straight to the Top: CIO Leadership in a Mobile, Social, and Cloud-based World (John Wiley & Sons), How to Protect Your Children on the Internet: A Road Map for Parents and Teachers (Greenwood Publishing), and Straight to the Top: Becoming a World-Class CIO (John Wiley & Sons). He received a BS in computer science from a top-10 national program from the University of Maryland at College Park and an MS in business from the Johns Hopkins University. He served for over 10 years as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Carey Graduate Business School. Mr. Smith currently serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's graduate programs.

Mr. Smith has spoken at a number of prestigious conferences across the globe including keynote presentations in Canada, Denmark, India, Indonesia, Turkey, China, Singapore, and Belgium. He also keynoted the famous Interop conference in both New York and Las Vegas. As a practicing CIO and academic professor, he keeps his pulse on today's changing IT landscape and continues to apply those trends to business practice.

PART I

The Postpandemic New Normal

CHAPTER 1

Lasting Business Impacts and Resource Sourcing After a Global Pandemic

Occurrences can be unpredictable. If we have to endure a cascade of rumpling coincidences, it's fate that dictates our lives, taking over the common procedure of timing, and, thus, sealing the bondage of our free choice. Once our choice is kidnapped and strangled to the core, fate checkmates our destiny.

—ERIK PEVERNAGIE¹

Introduction

As I start writing this text, there have been 144,108,248 Covid-19 cases globally with 31,873,253 in the United States and 3,062,945 deaths globally and 569,530 in the United States, respectively (see Exhibit 1.1).² I am relatively sure, as many public health professionals have discussed in the past several months, that there are far more cases and deaths globally as a result of various factors including improper counting, deaths occurring outside of hospitals, fatalities due to untreated fatal diseases such as cancer going undertreated during the height of the pandemic, and suicides. The global pandemic of 2020–2021 will go down in history as the most devastating impact on human life in our generation. The pandemic will have lasting effects on trade, commerce, travel, human behavior in business operations, and how employees work around the globe going forward.

Combine the likelihood that a fair percentage of the United States and global population will not opt to receive a Covid-19 vaccine with likely future variants that develop that make current vaccines less effective, this pandemic is long from over. CNN recently reported that 40 percent of U.S. Marines have opted to not receive the Covid-19 vaccine.³ The pharmaceutical maker Pfizer, which makes one of the Covid-19 vaccines, recently announced that for people to stay protected, they will likely need another dose within 12 months of their first pair of doses.⁴

Photo depicts the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center.

Exhibit 1.1 The Johns Hopkins University of Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center

Source: The Johns Hopkins University of Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center.

From a historical perspective, smallpox remains the only human disease to be globally eradicated after killing 300 million people alone in the twentieth century.⁵ It took 184 years from the first-ever vaccine in 1796 to its eradication in 1980.⁶ Polio was almost previously eradicated except in Pakistan and Afghanistan until Covid-19 hit globally, which set back progress in 2020.⁷ However, cases are now on the rise and expected to climb even further in the coming months.⁸ So far this year officials have tallied more than 200 cases of wild polio and nearly 600 cases of the vaccine-derived form of the disease.⁹ Most of the vaccine-derived strains of polio are in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but now these rogue strains of polio are also turning up across much of sub-Saharan Africa, Yemen, Malaysia, and the Philippines.¹⁰

The combination of individuals opting out of the initial vaccine and those who don't take or have access to recurring booster shots with likely variants of the virus make for a longer-term cyclical Covid-19 transmissible virus. Combine this with the anticipated return of the annual flu virus in the fall and we have all the makings for cyclical resurgence and fear. Thus, the world will be dealing with a Covid-strained virus for years to come and, simply put, businesses, organizations, and universities need to adjust their operating environments including technology strategy to properly adapt and prepare for waves of reoccurrences. From a technology perspective, that includes more cloud-based solutions accessible via mobile devices. The traditional desktop computer will die a slow death as a result of Covid-19 as more organizations' employees leverage all mobile solutions including laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

India experienced a really bad second wave of Covid-19 in April 2021. According to CNN.com, healthcare and other essential services across India are close to collapse as a second coronavirus wave that started in mid-March tears through the country.¹¹ The article goes on to report that hospitals are running out of oxygen, beds are running low, and testing is nearly impossible to get.¹²

Impacts from Covid-19 on Businesses and Organizations

According to the consulting company McKinsey & Company, it could take various sectors more than five years to recover to 2019 level contributions to GDP.¹³ Specifically, the worst projected sectors globally that have the longest recovery period (up to 2025 and beyond) include arts; entertainment; recreation; hotels and food services; educational services; transportation and warehousing; manufacturing; and mining, oil, and gas extraction.¹⁴ McKinsey goes on to suggest that economic impacts across the globe could take one of three paths:

A quick recovery during which lower fatalities occur in younger people and working adults.

A global slowdown that assumes most countries are not able to control the spread of the virus, especially in heavily populated areas, affecting small- to medium-sized companies more acutely.

A pandemic and recession arise, assuming that the virus is not seasonal.¹⁵

During the early peak of the pandemic in 2020, there were 20,500,000 people who lost their jobs in the United States alone (14.7 percent) between February and April.¹⁶ The 10 most impacted sectors of the United States job markets included the following areas:

Hotels lost 42.7 percent of jobs.

Sports and performing arts lost 45.4 percent of jobs.

Furniture and home furnishing stores lost 46.3 percent of jobs.

Restaurants and bars lost 48.1 percent of jobs.

Motion picture and sound recording lost 48.3 percent of jobs.

Dentist offices lost 53.3 percent of jobs.

Laundry and professional services (pet, parking, dating, etc.) lost 53.5 percent of jobs.

Clothing and accessory stores lost 58.9 percent of jobs.

Amusement parks and casinos lost 59.9 percent of jobs.

Scenic transportation lost 62.1 percent of jobs.¹⁷

Impacts in Academia

In academia, K–12 and higher education included, both had significant impacts as a result of Covid-19 during the 2020 academic year. According to the University of Southern California Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR), only about two-thirds of households with income less than $25,000/year had computers and Internet access for children's remote learning, compared to 91 percent of families with household incomes of $75,000–$149,000.¹⁸ In addition, students receiving critical services, like free or reduced-priced meals and other education services dropped dramatically once schools started closing their doors by April 2020.¹⁹ By October 2020, approximately 68 percent of K–12 children in the United States were either learning fully or partially remote.²⁰ In addition, nearly 40 percent of parents indicated that their children needed tutoring and indicated that their schools were not providing those services.²¹ Parents were also polled with regard to the overall quality of their children's education during 2020. Parents of remote learners graded it as less engaging, and of lower quality across all content areas.²² Parents of in-classroom learning or hybrid in-class/remote learning indicated no change or a small decrease of concerns compared to fully remote learning.²³ Unions representing K–12 teachers across the country fought to have teachers return to in-classroom instruction. Parents looking for alternatives sought private-school education where they offered in-person learning.

According to the New York Times, online schools are here to stay, even after the pandemic.²⁴ Bloomington, Minnesota, Public Schools has decided to keep running online school even after the pandemic due to preferences by families.²⁵ Other school districts in some states are doing the opposite. In March of 2021, Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey indicated that there should be no remote learning option for children in New Jersey in the fall semester.²⁶ New York State's Department of Education recently announced that it's canceling snow days.²⁷ Some parents are simply not happy. This is preposterous. These people are joyless bureaucrats. And you can quote me on that!²⁸ said one New York parent of four.

Higher education was also greatly impacted during the 2020 academic year, both financially and with in-person learning. Georgetown University, where I teach in a graduate technology management program, went virtual for most of 2020 and through May of 2021. The transition to online learning tools like Canvas and Zoom had mixed results of a transition. Those professors who had previously taught in either all online or hybrid-online courses were better prepared than those who had traditionally taught in-person courses for the majority of their careers. Courses needed to be migrated from in-person to online formats, specifically on Canvas. An aggressive training program was conducted to assist faculty with the transition to online learning.

Colleges and universities around the world had big impacts to their operations and revenue in 2020 and into the first half of 2021. In many instances, parents reevaluated whether their children would attend university programs for cost and safety purposes. Universities across the globe lost millions in revenue from a variety of sources including:

Tuition from international students

Room and board fees

Parking fees

Food and catering fees

Many universities compensated parents by offering them a reduced tuition fee for remote-learning options. According to the Understanding America Survey, a U.S. nationally represented study of American parents on the impacts of Covid-19, the following core conclusions were identified:

The overall impact on parents planning to send their children to university in the fall of 2020 fell by 2 percent.

Another 3 percent of parents indicated that they had changed where their children would go to university in the fall as a result of Covid-19.

The impacts to two-year community school and graduate programs had the largest impact with 20 percent of two-year programs and 8 percent of graduate programs' students indicated they would take fewer classes.

There were sizable gaps in impact by race, class, and institution type. White respondents (3 percent) and upper-middle-income respondents making between $75,000 and $149,000 per year (5 percent) stated plans to take fewer classes compared to Asian (29 percent), Hispanic (24 percent), and low-income households making less than $25,000 annually (18 percent).

Hispanic (27 percent) and low-income respondents (27 percent) were much more likely to say that Covid-19 affected a household member's reenrollment decisions, most commonly impacted by financial difficulties.²⁹

Clemson University in South Carolina recently announced that it was freezing undergraduate tuition for the 2021–2022 academic year.³⁰ The board of trustees cited the financial and emotional stress of the coronavirus pandemic on many students and the families as the primary reason for not increasing tuition.³¹ I believe many universities will follow suit because the impact to students and parents throughout the pandemic has been significant. I personally know many families who are pulling their kids out of high-cost universities and sending them to local community colleges for the first two years of their higher education experience as a result of complications (financial and housing) related to global pandemic. The cost savings is massive and the students don't need housing or food plans, saving parents considerable money. Once they complete two years, they plan to re-engage with their four-year school of choice. I also believe universities will start adjusting their tuition pricing for hybrid-online and all-online programs. I'm confident that smaller admission pools will drive universities to offer more affordable solutions for students that are accepted to hybrid or fully remote programs.

I asked some colleagues at several colleges and universities around the globe a few questions regarding the impacts of the global pandemic on their universities. Their answers are listed below.

Higher Education Question: What revenue impacts occurred in your university during the height of the pandemic in 2020?

University of Texas, San Antonio

We experienced a 10% budget reduction in the first year of the pandemic, which required a reduction in force in open positions while investments in remote tools increased as did adoption of the tools which really drove the value proposition positively.

—KENDRA C. KETCHUM,

Vice President for Information Management and Technology, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Collegis Education

This is highly dependent on the school and their funding sources. Some schools discount tuition heavily and make up for that in residential revenue, which was disrupted by COVID. These institutions suffered. However, schools that had expensive