Remote work - A better pulse on organization and culture

By: Merita Vilen (MBA, M.Sc.), Culture and Change Management Consultant, Hofstede Insights

Sep 23, 2020 | 2 minutes read | Aplomb Cloud in partnership with Hofstede Insights | Read Part-1 here

How to make sure people work when you cannot see them working? It is an interesting question a lot of managers are thinking even if they may not say so. Setting the right company culture is key to answering that question. Adopting a modern IT infrastructure such as Office 365 with functionality like workplace analytics enables more efficient working and better productivity whilst still getting insights about the remote workforce.

Delivering customer projects and get things done in a timely manner in remote work mode also depends on organisation culture. Every company has a culture; however small or new it might be. It is typically the founders who have had the biggest impact how things are done. They set the example by their own behaviour when setting up the company. But there is a lot more to culture.

It is not about being good or bad. Culture is about being functional or dysfunctional. The difference being that a functional culture enables change, the other not so. Change capability of a company is one those of those critical factors that cannot be emphasised enough. Have you ever measured what your current culture is like? There are tools that can measure and define culture. When you know the baseline then you are able to plan your change roadmap more to fit the new work environment and enabling better technology adoption.

Remote Access Strategy

By: Sunil Kumar, Founder-Director, Aplomb Cloud

Sep 15, 2020 | 2 minutes read

What is Remote Access Strategy (RAS)? Do you have a companywide Remote Access Strategy? What should your company’s Remote Access Strategy look like? How do you ensure that you’ve future-proofed the remote working solutions that you are investing in? What about return-on-investment (ROI)?

Some technology considerations to make when it comes to Remote Access Strategy, should you go with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) or should you choose Desktop-as-a-Services (DaaS)? And then what about security, are VPNs good enough and will it impact your broadband speed (It most likely will)? Remember any and every choice you make comes with opportunity costs.

The need for people to work remotely has been brought into sharp focus due to the on-going pandemic, however the remote working solutions itself have been around for quite some time. If you’ve restricted yourself and your team’s productivity to Zoom calls (or other apps such as Skype, Google Meet, etc) then have you considered its implications?

Remote Working - Deploying New IT Solutions For Success

By: Merita Vilen (MBA, M.Sc.), Culture and Change Management Consultant, Hofstede Insights

Sep 15, 2020 | With inputs from: Sunil Kumar, Founder-Director, Aplomb Cloud | 2 minutes read | Part-1

Companies of all sizes are changing the way they work. Remote work has become the norm for many. New technologies and IT solutions have been embraced to enable efficient and productive remote working styles. However, these new practices should do more than switching up your IT. Companies should look at how their organisational design supports this new way of operating and how new IT solutions could add even more value to both internal and external customers.

For a company to stay in business, it’s people, whether in the office or remotely, must work together to collaborate, produce, and deliver what needs to be done to meet customer's needs. Whilst this is one side of the coin the other side is all about customer experience. Customer experience is something which has been redefined in a lot of industries as customer expectations are getting ever more demanding, and now they are changing radically. How are you approaching this in your own organization? What processes and roles are critical to deliver value to customers? Should these be re-designed to suit the digital workplace? What changes are needed to provide amazing customer support? What new expectations do employees have?

IT Budget And Spending In The 'New Normal' World.

Curated by: Sunil Kumar, Founder-Director, Aplomb Cloud.

Sep 02, 2020 | 2 minutes read

As businesses shrink their operating budgets, IT spending gets reprioritised. So, what’s happening with it? Here’s our list of 10 bite-sized info-nuggets for you to snack on:

1. Overall IT spending will decline by 8% this year. (Source: Gartner)

2. Spending on traditional non-cloud infrastructure plunged 16.3% year-over-year. (Source: IDC)

3. Public cloud services are predicted to grow 19% this year. (Source: Gartner)

4. 54% of CFOs plan to make remote work a permanent option. (Source: PWC)

5. Cloud-based telephony and messaging and cloud-based conferencing are also predicted to grow 8.9% and 24.3% respectively. (Source: Gartner)

6. Top 3 industries with maximum Impact of COVID-19 on IT operational budgets in 2020:

The 6C Framework - Culture

By: James Rock - Managing Partner, DesignThinkers (UK)

Aug 24, 2020 | 2 minutes read | Aplomb Cloud in partnership with DesignThinkers (UK) | Part-2 here

This article is part 3 in a series of articles on The 6C Framework - Pivot to The New Normal.

Last week I shared with you the ‘6C’ framework we developed to deliver sustainable transformation that meets the emergent needs of customers and employees as we move to ‘The New Normal’ (see: Pivot to The New Normal ). I described how designing, developing and implementing new business strategy requires vision, analysis, and design skills that integrate with IT strategy, implementation and management abilities to implement them. (see Aplomb Cloud’s Services here).

Organisational culture is the way people relate to their work, colleagues and external environment. It provides the context of transactions and has a lot more powerful impact than typically acknowledged, especially if culture has fallen into a dysfunctional side. In that case, achieving any type of transformation or technology deployment successfully is in doubt if not addressed. Existing company culture should preferably be measured at the outset to fully comprehend whether it is an enabler or not. This analysis would inform quite different types of leadership and change management strategy.

The 6C Framework - Pivot to The New Normal

By: James Rock - Managing Partner, DesignThinkers (UK)

Aug 17, 2020 | 2 minutes read | Aplomb Cloud in partnership with DesignThinkers (UK) | Part-1 here

This article is part 2 in a series of articles on The 6C Framework - Pivot to The New Normal.

CULTURE – Culture and leadership are intertwined. One cannot and should not talk about one without considering the other. Leaders provide vision, and leadership behaviours create the organisational culture every day at every interaction;

CO-CREATION - Multiple stakeholders bring together their diverse, professional perspectives, skill-sets and needs, whilst each has different constraints, and bringing these diverse groups together helps to create system-wide empathy and solidarity in developing and delivering sustainable solutions;

CREATIVITY - Innovation is often grouped into three key types - Breakthrough; Sustaining; and Efficiency.

Cyber Security: Ransomware Attacks

How safe is WFH? Top 5 cyber security risks that come with remote working. Part-2.

July 28, 2020

Here’s our list of the top five cyber security risks to be aware of when working from home:

3. A lack of End-to-end cyber security measures
4. Delays in adopting zero-trust network architectures
5. Relying on pre-pandemic information security policies and processes

Pivot To The New Normal

By: James Rock - Managing Partner, DesignThinkers (UK)

July 21, 2020

This is the first of a series of articles in partnership with Aplomb Cloud. We will cover trends in Business Design that link with IT infrastructure, IT consultancy, and IT support for small business. These are IT solutions and services that Aplomb Cloud can provide, and where DesignThinkers can work with them to help clients develop and implement future business and change management strategies.

Work From Home: What Lies Ahead?

How safe is WFH? Top 5 cyber security risks that come with remote working. Part-1.

July 7, 2020

Here’s our list of the top five cyber security risks to be aware of when working from home:

1. Not having a unified VPN and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) solution
2. A Rise in the frequency and intensity of Ransomware and Phishing attacks

As the battle against COVID-19 rages on, digital-criminals have been operating under the cover of the pandemic to launch a variety of cyber-attacks. Their favourites range from phishing attacks, fake apps and maps to trojans, backdoors, crypto miners, botnets and ransomware attacks.