“After the transition to remote operations, we asked people how we did, and all they remembered was that we handed out laptops. It was so underwhelming.”
CIO, Private University
As IT leaders continue to navigate operations amidst COVID-19, they must regularly reflect purposefully on the efficacy of their immediate response - what did we do well? Where could we have reacted more quickly or more efficiently? Answering these questions requires objectively reflecting as an organization and documenting key lessons learned.
IT leaders must also then make the case for continued investment by explaining how the IT organization enabled the institution to quickly move online and has continued to support remote or hybrid operations—how many faculty and staff trainings did IT facilitate? How many security incidents did IT prevent? This means highlighting both the work completed during the pandemic (e.g., laptops loaned) and the less glamorous pre-COVID-19 work implemented across the past several years that set the institution up for success (e.g., MFA implementation).
Institutions are still trying to fully grasp how COVID-19 has and will continue to impact business operations. In this context, we advise IT leaders revisit this assessment toolkit with their leadership team on a bi-monthly basis. This approach promotes an agile and iterative mindset needed to sustain and optimize operations amidst continued disruption.
Use the worksheets in this section to review the IT organization’s response to the challenges of remote and hybrid operations amidst a pandemic. The worksheets divide IT’s response into nine categories, each containing between three and 10 items. Items are rated both from…