Thinking ahead will get you everywhere. That’s what many of today’s forward-leaning IT leaders will tell you - that early moves to the cloud put them ahead of the game when a whole new playing field was created for businesses in 2020.

Pre-pandemic, only about 7% of U.S. office workers had flexible workplaces or the ability to work remote, according to Pew Research. Now, Gartner predicts that remote work in 2021 will increase by 41% and that the future holds a hybrid workplace where 30% of employees will work permanently from home, 30% will work from home one day a week, and 40% will be remote up to four days a week.

Ready or Not

Some organizations are more ready for this new distributed workforce than others. Forrester estimates that globally, during the first three months of COVID-19, organizations spent $15 billion a week to adapt to remote work. While a fast move to the cloud solved for then, the selection of quick-fix point solutions has now resulted in fragmented customer and employee experiences that many companies are still adjusting to - or thinking about replacing today.

Some companies, however, either before the pandemic or because of it, invested in a platform approach and are now successfully operating from anywhere. The Kansas City Royals are one of these organizations. In a recent Enterprise Connect Virtual session, the Royals’ Sr. Director of Technology, Brian Himstedt, recalls how they quickly moved their employees including IT and office staff, sales teams, and a 30-person call center into the cloud in 2020 and haven’t looked back.

“It's been an interesting time,” says Himstedt. “We've actually found that our organization is adopting and taking quicker, stronger ownership of technologies that are made available to them than ever before. They're better leveraging organizational chat and other collaboration tools at a more rapid pace of adoption than I've seen in my entire time here. We've been pretty proud of where we've come in the last 12 months.”

Hear more from Brian about how capabilities such as quality management and speech analytics have changed the game for the organization, both in an employee-facing and customer-facing aspect. >>

The Only Constant is Change

Want to hear more from Brian and other senior IT leaders on how their roles have grown and become more important over the past year, as well as what they’re focusing on in 2021? Watch the Enterprise Connect Virtual session now or check out Chapter 7 of 8x8's Essentials series.