Press restart! This is the New Normal.

For those of you still waiting for the lockdown to fully end, the Covid-19 vaccine to come or things to return to just the way they were in 2019 (which seems light years away right now), you can stop waiting. This is the New Normal. Simply press the restart button and resume working in the new reality that is already around you. Make sure your business, your employees and your own skill sets are in alignment with the new paradigm.

The Coronavirus was discovered in the 1930s. From that, SARS came in the early 2000s and MERS in the early 2010s. Covid-19 is in fact SARS-2. It is already being referred to as SARS-CoV-2. What happens if SARS-3 or MERS-2 or Something-Else-1 comes? While you can be sure that we will be better prepared at that time, lockdowns and Covid-19 type situations could well arise from time to time.

Here’s what you have to do to stay ahead…



Drive WFH to the maximum: In the past a lot of Work From Homes couldn’t take place because the company was unwilling or the boss wanted to have a physical team to manage or tech issues. All these issues have gone now. WFH has proved to be a huge success and in the future only two things should be considered: 1. Can the role be WFHed? 2. Can you get a resource to WFH that role? There should be no upper limit on the WFH head count.

Replace transportation with collaboration: It was sci-fi writer Arthur C Clarke who said that the better personal communication got, the lesser there was a need for personal transportation. Well, with the Covid Collaboration revolution of 2020, it can safely be said that most of the routine meetings can be done from anywhere with any device. Of course business/official travel isn’t going anywhere, but it should be the last resort.



Unleash the mobile workforce: The mobile device is becoming the device of choice and almost an extension of one’s personality. That never happened with the desktop and laptop. The mobile is getting more and more compute power, more and more bandwidth and more and more apps. It is inevitable that it will be the biggest workforce in the future. Don’t fight it.



Embrace the cloud: To do all of the above, you have to fully embrace the cloud, because there is no other way. We have millions of data centres and even 500+ hyperscale ones. Public, private, hybrid, multi… it’s all there. If the world is flat and one, then at the enterprise level, it’s the cloud that’s enabling it.

Push IoT devices: Today there are more IoT (Internet of Things) devices than there are human beings. One estimate says we could have 500 billion by 2030. In an era of a scattered workforce and focus on human-less no touch technologies, IoT is right up there. They can be in homes, factories, roadsides, cars, appliances… you name it. The entire world can be powered by IoTs. The Internet… The cloud… A global IoT network… Nobody could ever have imagined an interconnectedness of this magnitude.



Open up to drones and driverless cars: This will be the other side of no-touch human-less technology. Connected and driverless cars can become mobile rooms where whatever you imagine will be done. Drones can do almost anything: From delivery (routine and hazardous) to surveillance to mapping to racing to surveying… They have an application in almost every industry and are only being held back by legislation currently.



Realize the full potential of AI: Artificial Intelligence will become inevitable in running everything and becoming the backbone of the technological network that can run the world. In one of science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke’s books, an AI system becomes a virtual President of the world and takes all the decisions. Well that may feel like taking thigs too far, an AI system that could detect and warn against a future pandemic and suggest a timetable to counter it might be handy. But that’s for the future. Today, it will come in handy for many current tasks.