Digital Workspace

3 Tech Lessons Smart Businesses Learned in 2020

It’s been a difficult year. But resilient organizations adapted quickly to change and learned how to manage mass remote work and decentralized teams.

Ryan Petersen

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Ryan has been a magazine and newspaper editor for 21 years, with the last 15 covering a variety of bases for CDW’s family of tech magazines. As Editor in Chief, he works on developing editorial strategy and is always on the lookout for new writing talent and sharing great stories with the IT world. In his spare time, Ryan enjoys spending time with his family, biking and obsessively following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

We tend to learn a lot about ourselves during our most challenging periods. While nobody can blame business and IT leaders for being happy to see this most trying of years end, it is also worth considering what we’ve learned in 2020 — because the most successful organizations will apply those lessons for years to come.

First, we learned that not only is mass remote work possible, it has its advantages. Contrary to fears that workers would accomplish less at home, most employers say their teams have been more productive, and more than happy to skip their commutes. Corporate cohesion didn’t seem to suffer either. The collaboration tech that businesses deployed, or were already using, handled the increased scale without a glitch, according to businesses we spoke to.

Second, we learned that businesses that embrace decentralized structures are simply better prepared — not just for once-in-a-lifetime events like a global pandemic but, really, for the modern world. This issue is thick with examples of businesses using technology to do just that.

How Tech Delivers Resiliency for Businesses

Good mobile device management tools, like those Edward Rose & Sons uses, make it easier to administer hundreds or even thousands of endpoints. FinancialForce is keeping its networks safe, without overly burdening workers around the world, with the right identity and access management solution. At Atlas Disposal, employees didn’t miss a beat when they were sent home in the spring because its all-cloud approach simplified remote access to corporate resources.

These businesses were not caught flat-footed by sudden change. They were built to adapt quickly. That brings me to the third and most important lesson of 2020: Resiliency isn’t just a corporate buzzword. It’s a fact that resilient businesses succeed no matter what life throws at them because they’re designed with uncertainty in mind.

Even as we identify emerging issues that leaders should take note of, we recognize that the only safe prediction is to expect surprises. Here’s hoping the next year’s are happier.

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