Oracle strategic business solution engineer Rob Bothma says the world of work has changed forever.
The world as we know has changed both in our lives at home and our lives at work. Organisations were literally given days’ notice in which to review their employee base, their job roles and how they could transform as many employees as possible from being traditional office-based employees to home-based employees. Fortunately, South Africa has robust mobile networks and an ever-growing fibre network enabling many employees to remain connected.
It’s quite amazing how fast mobile computing has taken over our lives, resulting in our mobile devices becoming fully fledged business tools. Who would have thought that our mobile devices would become the predominant platform for organisations to not only conduct their business online, but also the preferred platform for employees and managers to interact directly with the organisation’s internal systems?It’s not surprising to find that there are now four times as many mobile devices out there as there are personal computers.
But as many organisations soon discovered being connected was not sufficient.
The primary reason for this startling discovery surfaced when, in a very short period of time, users were expected to start using the systems from their homes. Because legacy systems were not developed natively for the cloud and remote working, there was a requirement to have specific software loaded on each PC in order to avoid technical and security issues while accessing the corporate network - a daunting task to try and achieve in less than the 72 hours’ notice we were all given by our President.
Lucky for organisations, the software industry has been preparing for the true mobile worker for several years now, which all culminated in the advent of Cloud (SaaS) based solutions. Cloud solutions only require a connection to the internet and the relevant security credentials, thus making the transition to a mobile and flexible workforce far easier to attain.
In the end the future of work is all about people, your employees, the way they work, where they work and how they can work, factors which are all being influenced through the latest technology, which is both driving and enabling these changes.
And one thing is certain, organisations will now be pressured by their stakeholders to review their traditional way of work, and how it needs to be changed, which will bring about a multitude of changes, as the role of every employee will have to be drastically reviewed to see how it can be changed to minimise the negative impact a reoccurrence of such a pandemic can bring.
To effectively achieve this, organisations will need to ensure they have access to the latest cloud-based software which incorporates emerging technologies such as Chatbots, Machine Learning and Analytics, all tools that can help in drastically reducing the administrative load, while providing insights for data driven decision making, to ensure the sustainability of the organisation in these uncertain times.
In conclusion, in a future that seems more uncertain today than ever before, we should just remember that the new way of work has already been made a reality, organisations just need to ask themselves – “Are we ready to adopt the latest technology to enable it?”
