Keep Safe, Adapt & Workstream !
First of all, I hope you and your families are doing fine and keeping safe.
It is a very special situation that we are all going through, as men and women, fathers and mothers, but also as employees and employers. Our lives in the last few weeks, and may be as much still, have been going through some very challenging times. Most of us are now staying and working from home, managing businesses, answering client needs, solving problems, providing support, and all that, remotely too.
As employees and employers, we might have done that before at certain times, but not at the scale we are forced to do it now. Accordingly, we have to adapt and change, and as much as we are prepared, or thought we were, going through the real experience brings new needs, new realities and new policies every day.
In a normal situation, the policies we implemented may be valid and thorough, but this might have changed with the new normal. Businesses are now being asked to review their workforce locations and travel, address their employees’ absence due to sickness or caring for relatives, review the protocol for visitors to the company sites, revisit their crisis and continuity plans, all that while not losing sight of other risks. There are new processes to define and follow for each of those new policies, there are new steps to automate, may be on the fly, and all that with the ultimate requirement to be simple, rapid, smart, and most of all easy. Let’s admit it, IT will not be able to address all those new requests for automation, it’s the business users that need to take charge over their own automation without relying on outside support.
The business users have always been looking for ways to streamline, automate, and accelerate activities in their daily work, without adding a new burden on IT. This need has always been there, and the COVID-19 situation just made it even more evident.
Many are addressing that through e-mails, in fact, they have been doing that for years. But is that efficient, easy to adapt, and reusable ? Let’s consider the new protocol for visitors to the company sites I was referring to earlier. It is definitely a solution that many would like to implement, and implement fast. It needs to gather information on the visitor, the time of the visit, any permits needed from the official authorities as many countries are under lockdown, a clear checklist of protection tools, and much more. Could all this be efficiently managed through e-mails ? I don’t think so.
IBM Automation Workstream Services is a business productivity tool that empowers people to automate common work patterns in minutes, with no technical skills or ramp-up required. It is a no-code solution that enables non-technical users to put together, publish, and run their own workstreams to streamline inefficient processes and fast-track activities in their everyday work.
It’s a tool to help business users with their everyday tasks’ follow up, a sort of checklist to keep all organized, within a collaboration team, around a set of instructions and context. It helps with the quick propagation of information between the team members, tracks their records of review of that information as well as their actions upon it. No e-mails, no notifications, no manual follow-ups needed.
IBM Automation Workstream Services is a very helpful solution in this new normal we are living, and is very much adapted to our remote working environment, keeping all lines of communication wide open – between you and your employees.
IBM is now offering a no-cost 90-day subscription to the Automation Workstream Services on the Digital Business Automation Cloud platform to help automate operational processes, facilitate remote work and maintain business continuity in remote work environments. To sign up for the 90-day fee subscription, click here. Offer is valid until 10 May 2020 only.
To find more IBM solutions that can help you adapt to changing conditions, visit our website.