Responses to the pandemic lockdown are likely to lead to a big increase in home working in the public sector, a UKAuthority event has been told.
Andrew Puddephatt, director UK public services of enterprise cloud service provider Nutanix, highlighted the prospect at the recent online conference on Powering Digital Public Services.
He said the company’s public sector customers had reacted quickly to the coronavirus lockdown by stepping up the use of remote working with cloud based systems to enable their employees to work from home. This has generally been successful and they are now looking at adopting the approach in long term strategies.
“Necessity has driven some very prompt action to get people out of hospitals and working from home,” Puddephatt said. “What we’re seeing now is that was great but what is needed is a longer strategic plan for the way we work. There’s a realisation that there are a lot of benefits in changing the way we are doing things.
“We’re engaged in a lot of conversations with trusts and local authorities about longer term strategy based on what’s already has been done. The sense I get is that things are going to change.”
Cultural change
He acknowledged that, while in the short term the big challenge has been around harnessing the technology, for the longer term public authorities will have to deal with cultural attitudes around the way people work. This will be accompanied by organisations thinking about how it relates to their office estates and other facilities.
“Most of the organisations we’re talking to have managed to quite rapidly move things in that direction,” he said. “The interesting thing is what is the cultural impact of that and how do we change people’s minds when lockdown eases?
“As a company we were using Zoom anyway and were used to working from home, and we are now looking at whether we close one of our offices.
“This is something that probably applies across the public and private sectors.”
Supplier collaboration
Puddephatt added that suppliers should be playing their part in creating the right market conditions for a long term change.
“As a lesson, I see a huge need for greater collaboration across all of us,” he said. “We should be offering far more interoperability and openness so that our customers in the public sector can be more agile. It’s really incumbent on suppliers to make it far easier to switch platforms and create better value for money and competition in the market.”
He said part of this should be making it possible to run applications seamlessly across public and private clouds, adjusting to different applications and workloads, and reiterated the Nutanix position that cloud should be seen as an operating model – with arrangements changing according to demands – rather than a final location.
