What challenges have you faced that are unique to remote working?

One of the biggest challenges when you’re working remotely is building those relationships with the senior team. And digital transformation is more about change management than anything else: How do you build that guiding coalition of senior leadership that needs to run this? Because IT can drive it to a certain extent, but you need that senior leadership to be driving. Trying to build that when you're remote is far more difficult.

Folks really underestimated the productivity of being inside of a conference room. We lost the ability to quickly get feedback or see a bug and immediately ask someone, "Can you look at my screen really quick?" versus the time it takes to write it up and put the screenshots together to send it, etc. There was a lot of focus on the commute time we’d get back, especially here in the Bay Area. But what happened is that it completely slowed down our productivity and our ability to work and deliver at the same pace we were before. I don't think that there has been a large-scale realization of that until now.

I think some of our throughputs suffered because people are used to sitting next to each other at workstations, and if they needed help with something, they could just go, "Hey, can you come look at my screen?" Now you've got to find time with somebody, set up the share, etc.

When I visit Cincinnati, where my security operations center is, I get so much more done in my workday because I can just walk around to the people that I need to talk to. While I continued to have pretty good metrics in my service level expectations (SLEs), I think my pace of resolving tickets may have gone up a little bit. I know that the volume of tickets has gone up 40% though and my staff stayed pretty flat.

Having worked in physical offices, people get so used to processes and practices that are very specific to physical locations, and trying to get that digital twin is challenging. How do you get automatic learning when you have to hop from one Zoom to the other? Co-location and automatic learning are the foundations of agile teams and suddenly you just have one static video conferencing session that runs through the day, and team members can jump in and out, but it's not the same thing.