Back in April, IDG Connect ran a survey which asked IT professionals how they were coping with emergency lockdown measures. It consisted of four simple questions and aimed to get a quick ‘temperature gauge' of how the individuals tasked with ensuring all this remote working was - well, working - were getting along.
The results of this - based on 476 global responses - have been serialised over the last few weeks. And have now been compiled into a single digestible report. The main takeaways are listed below but the full PDF also contains charts, comments from the individuals polled, along with deep dive sections into North America, Asia, and Europe. These are the key findings:
A remarkable global consensus - regional differences were nowhere near as marked as we expected. The strongest regional differences came from the question around which internal factors made lockdown challenges hardest to deal with.
IT departments everywhere feel the strain - more than half of the individuals we polled said their departments felt a strain from lockdown measures. This rose slightly in North America and Asia.
Security is the biggest concern - respondents around the world all highlighted security as the hardest problem to deal with.
Internal hindrances are localised - the global findings suggest a fairly equal weighting of internal factors making the lockdown difficult to deal with for IT. The local findings, however, tell a different story with budgets emerging as more of an issue in North America, management a bigger problem in Europe and infrastructure as a greater concern in Asia and Africa.
IT departments need recognition - the most striking feature of the open-ended question we asked about their experiences of lockdown was how work-based happiness hinged on recognition. The individuals who were putting in the extra hours and were recognised for these efforts were happy. Those who were hurling their effort into a stony silence were not.