What we talk about when we talk about (flexible) work
I am writing this in Singapore, as we wrapped up Solutions and Services Group’s first ever leadership team meeting. It is good to meet my colleagues, many for the first time since the group was formed in April last year.
But not all of us were here. Many dialled in from across the globe. Seamless participation. This kind of blended meetings has since become the norm, taken for granted. Yet three years ago, this wouldn’t have been the default mode. Flexible work has made collaboration and creation possible across time and space.?
Early last year when the world was still in the throes of the pandemic, Lenovo surveyed more than 8,000 employees from over 4,000 companies and found that two in five supported a permanent shift to flexible work.
Fast forward to today when the world is gaining back a sense of normalcy and learning to contain and live with COVID, flexible work remains the order of the day. However, flexi-work arrangements can stretch an organization’s IT resources to the maximum.
That is why businesses need flexible IT solutions. The simplicity of flexible IT solutions or rather, consuming IT as-a-service, belies its power. This approach optimizes everything, from procurement, deployment and management of infrastructures, hardware, and licensing. Ultimately, it enables the hybrid workforce to work and collaborate easily and at scale, without incremental capital investments. Happy employees – and businesses can purchase the tech that they want, as little or as much according to need.
The key to deploying as-a-service or flexi-IT is – companies must determine how much control, and what type of control, they are willing to decentralize.
This can get quite complex, because it’s not a matter of simply deciding which workloads to outsource, but re-envisioning IT functions within the company.
IT leaders are already wrestling with this issue. When we spoke to over 500 CIOs recently, more than 80% felt that their role is more challenging compared to two years ago, citing the following priorities:
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It’s a balancing act
Each of these concerns will need to be tackled by different approaches. For example, we can argue that security and data privacy should remain centralized to prevent criminal actors from taking advantage of backdoors. The exact approach, though, is much more nuanced and complex than simply ceding autonomy of everything to a third-party.
Another example: hybrid cloud. It enables businesses to get the best of both public and private offerings by providing the agility to provision applications, scale fast, avoid downtime, but also retain security over sensitive data. While resources can be spun up swiftly to grow or tapered off when needed, a private cloud solution that sits within a centralized IT authority provides a higher layer of security.
The path forward
Moving to an everything-as-a-service model will stand my CIO friends in good stead as they look to find the right balance between centralized solutions and make a strong push toward decentralization. This sentiment is echoed by IT leaders – our global study of CIOs found that nearly all (92%) would definitely or probably consider adding new as-a-Service offerings over the next two years.
Everything-as-a-service – such as Lenovo’s TruScale – offers an easy and cost-effective way to leverage IT assets: the subscription model is something all consumers are familiar with, and the flexible pay-per-use single contract cover hardware, software, services and data storage, security, configuration, deployment, and others, allowing it to address different operational needs.
The model also gives companies access to experts to solve complicated IT issues, handles equipment ownership and management, and avoids over-provisioning of resources that lead to significant capital outlays. This gives IT teams more time to focus on innovation and higher-ROI initiatives.
Not long ago, we were selected by a professional services firm to manage more than 10,000 IT devices across 12 office locations. Helping the team manage a remote workforce via our Digital Workplace Solutions, the customer gained the flexibility to increase or decrease the number of devices and services – most importantly, the employee satisfaction improved significantly in the annual survey.
When we set up the Solutions and Services Group, we wanted to help our customers in their journey toward finding the right IT set-up that delivers flexibility in the working environment and a high level of security. The demand for integrated and scalable IT infrastructure with a flexible consumption model is here to stay. With our broad portfolio of offerings and expertise from across Lenovo, we hope to unlock value for our customers – whatever their industries and wherever they operate.