Datacom’s Chief Information Officer and CISO Karl Wright says that for the technology team, a big focus of the past two years has been assisting with the organisational design challenges brought about by the pandemic with appropriate use of technology. 

“The main challenge for Datacom, our customers, and society has been the change in how and where people work,” says Wright. “Change is driven by people rather than technology; technological changes these days tend to be the easier part of the equation. It’s the socio-construct of change that is much harder to achieve. The technology group has been an integral part of influencing, designing, and shaping the business in its response to one of the biggest societal shifts in modern history—the very nature of where and how people work.”

They have been focused on using technology to support change and getting the cultural context for change right.

“We went from being an organisation of 7000 people with about 30 to 40 points of presence on the internet to become an organisation of 7000 people and 7000 points of presence on the internet, almost overnight,” adds Wright.

The same was happening for Datacom’s customers.

“As CIO and CISO, responsible for the safety and security of customers, a large part of my role is customer facing. With the pandemic, customers were faced with the overnight challenge of how to continue operating while having to send everyone home for six weeks.”

Wright and the team managed the crisis from a customer-first perspective and brought that back into the organisation. 

“We asked what do our customers need right away to keep functioning? It was a different way of thinking about crisis management, and we were able to get people, including ourselves, operational within days.”

The complexities of supporting hybrid workforces

Post pandemic, the CIO and CISO agenda has become more complex and complicated, adds Wright. 

The team has been supporting the cultural change required for remote and hybrid working success; addressing how to do things in new ways that meet customer expectations of experience and business expectations on productivity. 

“Operating and managing remotely is something our entire business has worked through. We’ve reconfigured our properties and run innovative digital programmes, for example Flex by our People team, to understand people’s working styles, needs for space and the changing nature of those needs. Datacom, led by Tracey Cotter Martin, has been doing a lot of work and research on what is the meaning of work, and we are starting to take a thought leadership role, beginning with the discussion around what that looks like in our business.”

Datacom has been reconfiguring its offices into spaces where people come in to do meaningful and purposeful work as opposed to sitting on Teams or in front of screens all day. 

“Hybrid working is rapidly becoming the new normal and these sorts of innovations are happening across the business. Even down to obvious examples such as how meeting rooms are configured, which is usually with a camera and screen at the short end of the room so that everyone looks like specks. If you think about it, meeting rooms should have the camera at the long side of the room where everyone is facing. That’s a simple thing but an innovation we are putting into our business,” says Wright.