Dana Gardner: Hi, this
is Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions,
and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.
 |
| Gardner |
Out-of-the-blue workplace
disruptions -- whether natural
disasters, political
unrest, or the current coronavirus pandemic
-- have shown how true business
continuity means enabling all
employees to continue to work in a safe and secure manner.
Stay with us now as we explore
how companies and communities alike are adjusting to a variety of workplace
threats using new ways of enabling enterprise-class access and distribution
of vital data resources and applications.
And in doing so, these public
and private sector innovators are setting themselves up to be more agile, intelligent,
and responsive to their workers, customers, and citizens once the disaster
inevitably passes.
Here to share stories on making IT systems and people evolve together to overcome workplace disruptions is Chris McMasters, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the City of Corona, California. Welcome, Chris.
Chris McMasters: Thank
you, Dana.
Gardner: We’re
also here with Jordan
Catling, Associate Director of Client Technology at The University of Sydney in Australia. Welcome,
Jordan.
Jordan Catling: Thank
you very much, Dana. I appreciate the invite.
Gardner: And
we’re here with Tim Minahan,
Executive Vice President of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. Welcome, Tim.
Tim Minahan: Thank
you for including me, Dana.
Gardner: Tim,
how has business
readiness changed over the past few years? It seems to be a moving target.
Stay prepared for everything
Minahan: The
very nature
of business readiness is not about preparing for what’s happening today -- or
responding to a specific incident. It’s a signal for having a plan to ensure
that your work environment is ready for any situation.
 |
| Minahan |
You need to ensure that your
employees can continue to work safely and remotely while giving your company
the confidence that they’re doing that all in a very secure way, so the company’s
information and infrastructure remains secure.
Gardner: Chris
McMasters, as a CIO, you surely remember the days when IT systems were brittle,
not easily adjusted, and hard to change. Has the nature of work and these
business continuity challenges forced IT to be more agile?
McMasters: Yes,
absolutely. There’s no better example than in government. Government IT is
known for being on-premises and very resistant to change. In the current environment
everything has been flipped on its head. We’re having to be flexible, more
dynamic in how we deploy services, and in how users get those services.
Gardner:
Jordan, higher education hasn’t necessarily been the place where we’d expect
business continuity challenges to be overcome. But you’ve been dealing with an aggressive
outbreak of the coronavirus in China.
The really interesting thing
about this situation is we’re having to enable teaching from places that we
wouldn’t ordinarily. We’re having to make better use of the tools that we have
available to come up with innovative solutions to keep delivering a distinctive
education that The University of Sydney is known for.
Gardner: And when
you’re trying to anticipate challenges, something like COVID-19, the
disease that emanates from the coronavirus, did you ever think that you’d have
to virtually overnight provide students stuck in one location with the
opportunity to continue to learn from a distance?
 |
| Catling |
Gardner: Tim,
the idea of business continuity including workers not only working at home but
perhaps in far-flung countries where they’ve been stuck because of a
quarantine, for example -- these haven’t always been what we consider IT
business continuity. Why is worker continuity more important than ever?
Minahan: Globally
we’re recognizing the importance of the overall employee experience and how it’s
becoming a key differentiator for companies and organizations. We have a global
shortage of medium- to high-skilled talent. We’re short about 85 million
workers.
Companies are battling for the high ground on providing preferred ways to work. One way they do that is ensuring that they can provide flexible work environments that rely on effective workplace technologies that enable employees to do their very best work.
So companies are battling for the high ground on providing preferred ways to work. One way they do that is ensuring that they can provide flexible work environments, ones that rely on effective workplace technologies that enable employees to do their very best work wherever that might be. That might be in an office building. It might be in a remote location, or in certain situations they may need to turn on a dime and move from their office to the home force to keep operations going. Companies are planning to be flexible not just for business readiness but also for competitive advantage.
Gardner:
Making this happen with enterprise-caliber, mission-critical reliability isn’t just
a matter of renting some new end-devices and throwing up a few hotspots. Why is
this about an end-to-end solution, and not just point solutions?
Be proactive not reactive
Minahan: One
of the most important things to recognize is companies often first react to a
crisis environment. Currently, you’re hearing a lot of, “Hey, we just,” like the
school system in Miami, for example, “purchased 250,000 laptops to distribute
to students and teachers to maintain their education.”
However, that may enable and
empower students and employees, but it may be less associated with proper
security measures and put both the companies’, workers’, and customers’ personal
information at risk.
You need to plan from the get-go
for having a very flexible, remote workplace infrastructure -- one that embeds security.
That way -- no matter where the work needs to get done, no matter on what
device, or even on whatever unfamiliar network -- you can be assured that the
appropriate security policies are in place to protect the private information of
your employees. The critical information of your business, and certainly any
kinds of customer or constituent information, is at stake.
Gardner: Let’s
hear what you get when you do this right. Jordan at The University of Sydney,
you had more than 14,000 students unexpectedly
quarantined in China, yet they still needed to somehow do their coursework.
Tell us how this came about, and what you’ve done to accommodate them.
Quality IT during quarantine
So we looked at various
platforms that we were already using -- and some that we hadn’t -- to work out
what do. Within the academic community, we needed the best set of tools for our
staff to use in different and innovative ways. We quickly had to develop
solutions and had to lean on our partners to help us out with developing those.
Gardner: Did
you know where your students were going to be housed? Was this a case where you
knew that they were going to be in a certain type of facility with certain
types of resources or are they scattered around? How did you deal with that
last mile issue, so to speak?
Catling: The
last mile issue is a real tricky one. We knew that people were going to be in
various locations throughout mainland China, and elsewhere. We needed to
quickly build a solution capable of supporting our students -- no matter where
they were, no matter what device that they were using, and no matter what their
local Internet connection was like.
We have had variability in the
quality of our connections even within Australia. But now we needed a solution
that would cater to as many people as possible and be considerate of quite a
number of different scenarios that our students and staff would be facing.
Gardner: How were
you are able to provide that quality of service across so many applications
given that level of variability?
Catling: The
biggest focus for us, of course, is the safety and security of our staff and
students. It’s paramount. We very quickly tried to work out where our people
would be connecting from and tried to make sure that the resources we were
providing, the connection to the resources, would be as close to them as
possible to minimize the impact of that last mile.
We worked with Citrix to put together a set of application delivery controllers into Hong Kong to make sure that the access to the solutons was nice and fast. We then worked to optimize the connection from Hong Kong to Sydney to maximize the user experience.
We worked with Citrix to put together a set of application delivery controllers into Hong Kong to make sure that the access to the solution was nice and fast. Then we worked to optimize the connection back from Hong Kong to Sydney to maximize the user experience for our staff and students.
Gardner: So
this has very much been a cloud-enabled solution. You couldn’t have really done
this eight or 10 years ago.
Catling: Certainly
not this quickly. Literally from putting a call into Citrix, we worked from
design to a production environment within seven days. For me, that’s unheard of,
really. Regardless of whether it’s 10 years ago or 10 weeks ago, it was quite a
monumental effort. It’s highlighted the importance of having partners that both
seek to understand the business problems you’re facing and coming up with
innovative solutions rapidly and are able to deploy those at scale. And cloud
is obviously a really important part of that.
Obviously, the solution needs
to remain flexible to the evolving needs. The situation is changing frequently
and we are discovering new needs and new requirements. As our academics start
to use the technology in different ways, we’re evolving the solution based on
their feedback to try and maximize the experience for both our staff and
students.
Gardner: Tim,
when you hear Jordan describe this solution, does it strike you as a harbinger
of more business
continuity things to come? How has the coronavirus issue -- and not just
China but in Europe and in North America -- reinforced your idea of what a
workplace-enhanced business continuity solution should be?
Business continuity in crisis
Minahan: We
continue to field a rising a number of inquiries from customers and other
companies. They are trying to assess
the best ways to ensure continuity of their business operations and switch
to a remote workforce in a very short period of time.
Situations like this remind us
that we need to be planning today for any kind of business-ready situation. Using
these technologies ensures that you can quickly adapt your work models,
moving entire employee groups from an office to a remote environment, if
needed, whether it’s because of virus, flood, or any other unplanned event.
What’s exciting for me is
being able to use such agile work
models and digital
workspace technology to arm companies with new sources for growth and
competitive advantage.
One good example is we recently partnered with the Center for Economics and Business Research to examine the impact remote work models and technologies have on business and economic growth. We found that 69 percent of people who are currently unemployed or economically inactive would be willing to start working if given the opportunity to work flexibly by having the right technology.
They further estimate that activating
these, if you will, untapped pools of talent by enabling these flexible work-from-home
models -- especially for parents, workers in rural areas, retirees, part-time, and
gig workers, folks that are normally outside of the traditional work pool and
reactivating them through digital workspace technologies -- could drive upward
of an initial $2 trillion in economic gains across the US economy. So, the
investment in readiness that folks are making is now being applied to drive
ongoing business results even in non-crisis times.
Gardner: The coronavirus
has certainly been leading the headlines recently, but it wasn’t that long ago
that we had other striking headlines.
In California
last fall, Chris McMasters, the wildfires proved a recurring problem. Tell
us about Corona
and why adjusting to a very dangerous environment -- but requiring your key
employees to continue to work – allowed you to adjust to a major business
continuity challenge.
Fighting fire with cloud
McMasters:
Corona is like a lot of local governments within the United States. I came from
the private sector and have been in the city IT for about four years now. When
I first got there, everything was on-premises. Our back-up with literally three
miles away on the other side of the freeway.
If there was a disaster and something totaled the city, literally all of our technology assets would be down, which concerned me. I used to work for a national company and we had offices all over and we backed up across the country. So this was a much different environment. Yet we were dealing with public safety, which with police and fire service, 911 service, and they can never go down. Citizens depend on all of that.
That was a wake-up call for me.
At that time, we didn’t really have any virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI) going on. We did have server virtualization, but nothing
in the cloud. In the government sector, we have a lot of regulation that
revolves around the cloud and its security, especially when we are dealing with
police and fire types of information. We have to be very careful. There are
requirements both from the State of California and the federal government that
we have to comply with.
At first, we used a government
cloud, which was a little bit slower in terms of innovation because of all the
regulations. But that was a first step to understanding what was ahead for us. We
started this process about two years ago. At the time, we felt like we needed to
push more of our assets to the cloud to give us more continuity.
At the end of the day, we realized we also needed to get the desktops up there, too: Using VDI and the cloud. And at the time, no one was doing that. We went and talked to Citrix on how that would extend to support our environment for public safety. Citrix has been there since day-one.
At the end of the day, we realized we also needed to get the desktops up there, too: Using VDI and the cloud. And at the time, no one was doing that. But we went and talked to Citrix. We flew out to their headquarters, sat with their people, and discussed our initiative, what we are trying to accomplish, and how that would extend out to support our environment for public safety. And that means all of the people out at the edge who actually touch citizens and provide emergency support services.
That was the beginning of the journey
and Citrix has been there since day-one. They develop the products around that
particular idea for us right up to today.
In the last two years, we’ve
had quite a few fires in the State of California. Corona butts right up against
the forest line and so we have had a lot of damage done by fires, both in our
city and in the surrounding county. And there have been the impacts that occur
after fires, too, which include mudslides. We get the whole gamut of that stuff.
But now we find that those
first responders have the data to take action. We get the data into their hands
quickly, make sure it’s secure on the way there, and we make that continuative so
that it never fails. Those are the last people that we want to have fail.
 |
| McMasters |
We are operating on a software-defined network
so we can look at security from a completely different perspective. The old way
was, “Let’s build a moat around it and a big wall, and hopefully no one gets in.”
Now, instead we look at it quite differently. Our assets are protected outside
of our facilities.
Those personnel riding in fire
engines, in police cars, right up at the edge -- they have to be secure right
up to that edge. We have to maintain and understand the identity of that person.
We need to know what applications they are accessing, or should not be
accessing, and be secure all along that path.
This has all changed our
outlook on how we deal with things and what a modern-day work environment looks
like. The money we use comes from taxes, the people pay, and we provide services
for our citizens. The interesting thing about that is we’re now driving toward
the idea of government on-demand.
Before, when you would come
home, right after a hard day’s work, city hall would be closed. Government was open
8 to 5, when people are normally working. So, when you want to conduct business
at city hall, you have to take some time off of work. You try to find one day
of the week, or a time when you might sneak in there to get your permits for
something and proceed with your business.
But our new idea is different.
Most of our services can be provided online for people. If we can do that,
that’s fantastic, right? So, you can come home and say, “Hey, you know what? I
was thinking about building an addition to my house.” So you go online, file
your permits, and submit all of your documents electronically to us.
The difference that VDI provides for our employees is that I can now tap into a workforce of let’s say, a single mother who has a special needs child who can’t work normal hours, but she can work at night. So that person can take that permit, look at that permit at 6 or 7 pm, process the permit, and then at 5 am the next day, that process is done. You wake up in the morning, your permit has been processed by the city and completed. That type of flexibility is integral for us to make government more effective for people.
It’s not the necessarily the
public safety support, which we are concerned about. But it’s about also generally
providing flexible services for people and making sure government continues to
operate.
Gardner: Tim,
it’s interesting that by addressing business continuity issues and disasters we
are able to move very rapidly to a government on-demand or higher education on-demand.
So, what are some of the larger goals when it comes to workforce agility?
Flexibility extends the business
Minahan: The
examples that Chris and Jordan just gave are what excites me about flexible
work models, empowered by digital workplace technologies, and the ability to
embrace entirely new business models.
I used the example from the
Center of Economic Business Research and how to tap into untapped talent pools.
Another example of a company using similar technology is eBay. So eBay, like many of their competitors,
would build a big call center and hire a bunch of people, train them up, and
then one of the competitors will build a call center down the street and steal
them away. They would have rapid turnover. They finally said, “Enough is
enough, we have to think of a different model.”
eBay used the same approach of providing a secure digital workspace to reach into new talent pools outside of big cities. They could now hire gig workers and re-engage them in the workforce by using a workplace platform to arm them at the edge.
Well, they used the same approach of providing a secure digital workspace to reach into new talent pools outside of big cities. They could now hire gig workers, stay-at-home parents, etc., and re-engage them in the workforce by using the workplace platform to arm them at the edge and provide a service that was formally only provided in a big work hub, a big call center.
They went from having zero home
force workers to 600 by the end of last year, and they are on a path to 4,000
by the end of this year. eBay
solved a big problem, which is providing support for customers. How do I
have a call center in a very competitive market? Well, I turn the tables and
create new pools of talent, using technology in an entirely different way.
Gardner: Jordan,
now that you’ve had help from organizations like Citrix to deal with your tough
issue of students stuck in China, or other areas where there’s a quarantine,
are you going to take that innovation and use it in other ways? Is this a gift
that keeps giving?
Catling: It’s
a really interesting question. What it’s demonstrated to me is that, as
technologists, we need to be working with all of our people across the
organization to understand their needs and to provide the right tools, but not
necessarily to be prescriptive in how they are used. This current coronavirus situation
has demonstrated to us that a combination of just a few tools -- for example,
the Citrix platform, Zoom, Echo, and Canvas -- means a very different thing to
one person than to another person.
There’s such large variability
in the way that education is delivered across the university, across so many
disciplines, that it becomes about providing a flexible set of tools that all
of our people can use in different and exciting ways. That extends not only to
the current situation but to more normal times.
If we can provide the right
toolset that’s flexible and meets the users where they are, and also make sure
that the solutions provide a natural experience, that’s when you are really
geared up well for success. The technology kind of fades into the background
and becomes a true enabler of the bright minds across the institution.
Gardner: Chris,
now that you’re able to do more with virtual desktops and delivering data
regardless of the circumstances to your critical workers as well as to your
citizens, what’s the next step?
Can you add a layer of intelligence
rather than just being about better feeds and speeds? What comes next, and how
would Citrix help you with that?
Intelligence improves government
McMasters: We’re
neck
deep in data analytics and in trying to understand how we can make impacts
correctly by analyzing data. So adding artificial intelligence
(AI) on top of those layers, understanding utilization of our resources, is
the amazing part of where we’re going.
There’s so much unused
hardware and processing power tied up in our normal desktop machines. Being
able to disrupt that and flip it up on its end is a fundamental change in how
government operates. This is literally turning it on-end. I mean, AI can impact
all the way down to how we do helpdesk, how it minimizes our response times and
turnaround times, to increased productivity, and in how we service 160,000
people in my city. All of that changes.
Already I’m saving hundreds of
thousands of dollars by using the cloud and VDI models and at the same time increasing
all my service levels across the board. And now we can add this layer of business
continuity to it, and that’s before we start benefitting from predictive AI and
using data to determine asset utilization.
Gardner: Tim,
organizations, both public and private sector, get involved with these
intelligent workspaces in a variety of ways. Sometimes it might be a critical
issue such as business continuity or a pandemic.
But ultimately, as Chris just
mentioned, this is about digital business transformation. How are you able to
take whatever on-ramp organizations are getting into an intelligent workspace
and then give them more reasons to see ongoing productivity? How is this
something that has a snowball effect on productivity?
AI, ML works with you
Minahan: Chris
hit the nail on the head. Certainly, the initial on-ramps to digital workspace
provides employees with unified and secure access to everything they need to be
productive and in one experience. That means all of their apps, all of their
content, regardless of where that’s stored, regardless of what device they’re
accessing it from and regardless of where they’re accessing it from.
However, it gets really
exciting when you go beyond that foundation of unified experience in a secure
environment toward infusing things like machine learning (ML),
digital assistants, and bots to change the way that people work. They can newly
extract out some of the key insights and tasks that they need to do and offer
them up to employees in real-time in a very personalized way. Then they can
quickly take care of those tasks and the things they need to remove that noise
from their day, and even guide them toward the right next steps to take to be even
more productive, more engaged, and do much more innovative and creative work.
So, absolutely, AI and ML and
the rise of bots are the next phase of all of this, where it’s not just a place
you go to launch apps and work securely, but a place where you go to get your very
best work done.
Gardner: Jordan,
you were very impressively able to get more than 14,000 students to continue
their education regardless of what Mother Nature threw at them. And you were
able to do it in seven days. For those organizations that don’t want to be
caught under such circumstances, that want to become proactive and prepared,
what lessons have you have learned in your most recent journey that you can
share with them? How can they be better positioned to combat any unfortunate
circumstances they might face?
Prioritize when and how you work
Catling: It’s
almost becoming cliché to say, but work is something that you do -- it’s not a
place anymore. So when we’re looking at and assessing tools for how we support
the university, we’re focusing on taking a cloud-first approach where it
doesn’t matter where a student or staff member is. They have access to all the
resources they need on-demand. That’s one of the real guiding principles we
should be using in our decision-making process.
Scalability is also a very
important thing to us. The nature of the way that education is delivered today
with an on-campus model is that demand is very peaky. We need to be mindful of
how scalable and rapidly scalable a solution can be. That’s important to
consider, particularly in the higher education context. How quickly can you
scale up and down your environments to meet varying demands?
We can use the Citrix platform in many different ways. It's not only for us to provide applications out to students to complete coursework. It can also be used for providing secure access to data and workspaces.
Also, it’s important to consider the number of flexible ways that each of the technology products you choose can be used. For example, with the Citrix platform we can use it in many different ways. It’s not only for us to provide applications out to students to complete their coursework. It can also be used for providing secure access to data and to workspaces. There are so many different ways it can be extended, and that’s a real important thing when deciding which platform to use.
The final really important
takeaway for us has been the establishment of true partnerships. We’ve had
extremely good support from our partners, such as Citrix and Zoom, where they very rapidly sought to understand
and work with us to solve the unique business problems that we’re facing. The real,
true partnership is not one of just providing products, but of really sitting
down shoulder-to-shoulder, trying to understand, but also suggesting ways to
use a technology we may not be thinking of -- or maybe it’s never been done
before.
As Chris mentioned earlier,
virtual desktops in the cloud weren’t a big thing that many years ago. About a
decade ago, we began working with Citrix to
provide streams of desktops to physical devices across campus.
That was something -- that was
a very unusual use of technology. So I think that the partnership is very important
and something that organizations should develop and be ready to use. It goes in
both directions at all times.
Gardner:
Chris, now that you have, unfortunately, dealt with these last few harsh
wildfire seasons in Southern California, what lessons have you learned? How do
you make yourselves more like local government on demand?
Public-private partnerships
McMasters:
That’s a big question. For us, we looked at breaking some of the paradigms that
exist in government. They don’t have the same impetus to change as in the
private sector. They are less willing to take risks. However, there are ways to
work with vendors and partners to mitigate a lot of that risk, ways to pilot
and test cutting-edge technologies that don’t put you at risk as you push these
things out.
There are very few vendors
that I would consider such partners. I probably can count them on one hand in
total, and the interesting thing is that when we were selecting a vendor for
this particular project, we were looking for a true partner. In our case, it
was Citrix and Microsoft who
came to the table. And when I look back at what’s happened in our relationship
with those two in particular, I couldn’t ask for anything better.
That’s where things have to
change. This kind of public-private partnership is what the public sector needs
to start maturing. It’s bidirectional; it goes both ways. There is a lot of
information that we offer to them; there is a lot of things they do for us. And
so it goes back and forth as we develop this through this product cycle. It’s
advantageous for both of us to be in it.
That’s where sometimes,
especially in the public sector, we lose focus. They don’t understand what the
private sector wants and what they are moving toward. It’s about being aligned
on both sides of that equation -- and it benefits both parties.
Technology is going to change,
and it just keeps driving faster. There’s always another thing around the
corner, but building these types of partnerships with vendors and understanding
what they want helps them understand what you want, and then be able to deliver.
Gardner: Tim,
how should businesses better work with vendor organizations to prepare
themselves and their workers for a flexible future?
Minahan: First
off, I would echo Chris’s comments. We all want government on-demand. You need a
solution like that. But how they should work together? There are two great
examples here in The
University of Sydney and the City of Corona.
It really starts by listening.
What are the problems we are trying to solve in planning for the future? How do
we create a digitally agile organization and infrastructure that allows us to
pursue new business opportunities, and just as easily ensure business
continuity? So start by listening, map out a joint roadmap together and innovate
toward that.
We are collectively as an
industry constantly looking to innovate, constantly looking to leverage new
technologies to drive business outcomes -- whether those are for our citizens, students,
or clientele. Start by listening, doing joint and co-development work, and
constantly sharing that innovation with the rest of the market. It raises all
boats.
Gardner: I’m
afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussion on how business continuity measures have evolved on
a dime to meet serious new challenges. And we have learned how true business
continuity means enabling all employees to always work in a safe secure manner
no matter where they find themselves or why. When you do this right, it is the
gift that keeps giving and allows for many more digital transformation benefits
to unfold.
So a big thank you to our
guests, Chris McMasters, CIO at City of Corona, California. Thank you so much,
Chris.
McMasters: Thank
you.
Gardner: We
have also been here with Jordan Catling, Associate Director of Client
Technology at The University of Sydney in Australia. Thank you so much, Jordan.
Catling: Thank
you.
Gardner: And thank you so much, Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix.
Minahan:
Thanks, Dana! Always a pleasure.
Gardner: And a
big thank you lastly to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect Business
Continuity Innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host throughout this series of Citrix-sponsored BriefingsDirect
discussions.
Thanks again for listening, please
pass this along to your business associates, and do come back next time.
Transcript
of a discussion on how companies and communities alike
are adjusting to a variety of workplace threats using new
ways of enabling enterprise-class access and distribution of vital data resources
and applications.
Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.
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