Colombia. Like all humanity, I have had to live the hard experience of what a pandemic is. Despite never having achieved so many advances in science and technology, this virus took us by surprise and brought the world to its knees in the twenty-first century.
Governments are dictating temporary policies to encourage teleworking: If we are seeing the streets without traffic and the blue skies... Why not think about continuing to digitize online services to the citizen? Why not encourage and permanently regulate teleworking?
In some countries such as Norway, the Internet is a constitutional right of the people, it is the window to the world, the source of multiple benefits, a great generator of knowledge and wealth and provides the opportunity for governments to substantially improve their services to the citizen by receiving them mostly online.
In many Latin American countries we have talent that would have greater opportunities to insert themselves into the formal economy in a more inclusive way with the promotion of teleworking. An example is disabled people, whose movement is more complicated; and another, is the population we have in the provinces that could join the local and global economy, thus breaking the geographical, social, educational, cultural and economic gaps; at the same time that we encourage entrepreneurship and the creation of Startups that can be a source of greater work to reactivate our countries, particularly among the younger generations: millennials and centennials.
This forced isolation, seeing ourselves working and communicating more digitally has led me to reflect on many aspects, but above all to ask myself: What have we learned from this crisis? When all this happens... What new behaviors, policies and worldview will we have? Will the learnings be forgotten and will the status quo be taken back as if nothing had happened?
The Role of Technology
I can say that today I am more convinced than ever about the critical role that technology plays in improving the way we live. When this pandemic threatened to paralyze or isolate us, technology has allowed us to break the isolation, communicate and, above all, continue working; which has prevented individuals, families, businesses and countries and their economies from being destroyed by the pandemic.
Teleworking, an issue in which Cisco has been promoting for many years around the world, is demonstrating that it brings multiple benefits to humanity, and in these weeks, we have been accompanying, hand in hand with our partners, many organizations that want to implement it to continue with their operations remotely, because, despite the pandemic, our countries need to keep moving forward, we moved face-to-face events to virtual ones. Students need to keep learning, government institutions need to keep providing services to their citizens, and we all need to stay connected.
In order for our partners to help maintain their operational continuity and that of their customers, we are working closer than ever across the region enabling our collaboration solutions, especially important for sectors such as healthcare and education, to name just two key verticals for the region.
But these collaboration tools require taking into account a number of aspects, one of the most important being security: All the information that is shared, the data of the users, the access to the virtual rooms, have to comply with the highest global security standards.
We can see that a cultural and attitudinal change is brewing with respect to remote work in favor of achieving even more productivity, flexibility, inclusion and environmental benefits. But most importantly... a more productive and secure dynamic will have been achieved as individuals, citizens, members of an organization.
Now more than ever we must continue to work together. Without a doubt we will come out of this situation much stronger, as people and as professionals. We are here for you, our channels and your customers.
Text written by Alba San Martín, Director of Channels for Latin America at Cisco.
