Kurt Frary says the ‘new normal’ for Norfolk County Council will be very different to its traditional way of working, with home working becoming the norm for many of its staff.
“I won’t go back to the office unless I have to, five days a week,” he says. “When we’ve surveyed staff most of them are quite happy at home – there are exceptions of course – but the new normal looks like open collaboration spaces rather than desks in the office.”
The deputy director of ICT for the county council says the Covid-19 pandemic has triggered a massive cultural change supported by cloud services. It responded with a quickfire roll out of Microsoft Teams, an accelerated training effort and a support service for staff to ensure they had the connectivity and set-up to work effectively from home.
This enabled to handle the shock without excessive disruption and it now sees itself in a strong position for embracing other cloud technologies and pursuing further digital innovation.
“I think the cloud technologies running now have enabled us to move very quickly,” Frary says.
“Norfolk was in a good position because we had started on the journey. It took a significant effort to accelerate, which was a credit to all the staff to work all the hours to make it happen, and we did it very quickly.”
You can learn more about the experience of Norfolk in responding the pandemic and how it sees the future from the interview with Frary below.
Kurt recently participated in an episode to UKA Live: Managing digital complexity in a pandemic. You can view the episode here
UKAuthority and Rackspace Technology have collaborated on a series of reports and papers in 2020 investigating key issues for public sector technology, digital and data. You can read more about how Covid has necessitated a switch in focus from recovery to continuity in the briefing note, 'Covid, a new dimension for business continuity'. Complete the form to the left to download
