WFH and 24/7/365 Work

It has been a couple of years since the global lockdown and since then the world of work has changed forever. Working from home (WFH) is no longer confined to just freelancers and is now a fact of life for 13% of full-time employees and another 28% who now work under a hybrid model. This trend is welcome in terms of reducing fuel consumption and giving employees more free time and disposable income, but what are the implications of this ‘new normal’ for the world of online information services? First, it is now essential that B-to-B information services are accessible outside of the office network. The once ambitious quest to ‘embed services within the workflow’ has ended in a resounding victory for application developers. Thankfully, VPN technology is robust enough to handle this, but the never-ending proliferation of cyber threats also means that additional levels of security are becoming very commonplace now that WFH is a fact of life. Secondly, WFH workforces are a natural fit with the globally distributed workforces that have evolved from being the exception, only relevant to mega-corporations, to becoming the default structure for mid-sized data-intensive firms. This trend will continue, and it opens up a third opportunity — data supply chains that work 24/7/365. Specifically, when there are specialty teams working in multiple time zones worldwide a multi-stage process can be designed that routes work from inception to completion over the course of a single day. For instance, research can start in India to prepare telephone researchers located in Eastern Europe, the Americas, and/or Africa to make calls during local working hours in those regions. QA work can then be performed on telephone research in The Philippines, thus completing an entire research process in the time it takes the sun to complete one rotation around the Earth. Expectations for the functionality and performance of online b-to-b information services are only getting higher with each passing day so the depth and accuracy of the underlying information has to keep pace with this evolution as well. One day soon, the once fantastical promise of real-time data accuracy will be a commonplace reality, but only after all of us in the business have collectively built that foundation brick by digital brick.