The Commission for Social Development resumed its general discussion in the virtual format today, with representatives of Member States emphasizing the growing importance of digital technology in the global quest to overcome poverty, achieve sustainable development, and build better lives for all.
Many speakers noted how digital technology has made it possible to overcome some of the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, but several also stressed the importance of doing more to close the digital divide — particularly in remote and rural areas, and among women, youth, the elderly and disabled persons — in this Decade of Action to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals. Let’s examine this closer…
A surge of video and audio conferencing tools
As the use of video and audio-conferencing tools increases significantly, organizations will ramp up their technology infrastructure to account for the surge. This will lead to increased investment in bandwidth expansion, network equipment, and software that leverages cloud services. With employees becoming acclimatized to the idea of work-from-home (WFH), meeting, and transacting online, firms will shift to WFH as a norm rather than as an exception. This is being adopted by many firms, which have the digital infrastructure in place to handle the required load and bandwidth.
Education is another domain in which there a dramatic shift to the online mode of transacting. Since the beginning of the lockdown, schools, colleges, and universities around the world have shifted their classes to video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Google Meet. Along with these synchronous modes of teaching, asynchronous platforms like edX and Coursera have also increased enrollment. Some institutions are now shifting entirely to the online mode for the forthcoming academic year, except for sessions that require a physical presence, such as the University of Cambridge in the UK and the California State system in the US.
Increasing Digitalization
Digital transformation technologies such as Cloud, Internet-of-Things (IoT), Blockchain (BC), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML), constitute a bulk of what is being adopted by organizations as part of their transformation effort.
Blockchain (BC) technology presents an opportunity to create secure and trusted information control mechanisms. As education and healthcare services witnesses a shift to the digital domain, BCs enable a way to secure and authenticate certificates, health records, medical records, and prescriptions. Research on the design of such systems, along with maintaining their ease-of-use and usefulness will gain importance. Another issue is that of designing systems that work with smart contracts – how the contracts are authenticated, how these contracts will be designed in a complex chain of processes with many agents involved, and how arbitration related to contracts will be handled. Further, IS research may point to regulatory aspects of BCs with regard to what must be encrypted and shared (such as for authenticating news and information sources), and how security will be managed.
Work-from-home and gig workers
The gig economy is driven by online platforms that hire workers on an ad hoc, short-contract, and mostly informal basis. Well-known examples of these include Uber and Airbnb globally and Ola and Swiggy in India. These platforms have grown immensely since the wide availability of smartphones from 2010 onwards. During the lockdown, workers employed by these platforms have suffered heavily, as the demand for their services, taxi rides, rentals, or skill work, has disappeared. Further, since these workers had no guaranteed salaries, their incomes dropped dramatically.
In the post-pandemic scenario, there is likely to be, in the short term, a slow return of gig economy workers, as manufacturing and service firms return to their old activities. However, we anticipate that in the longer term as the threat of infection and spread recedes, the gig economy will thrive. This will also be driven by the WFH culture.
Work-from-home and gig work has received attention in IS research through telecommuting, digital nomads, and virtual teams. One key issue is that of work allocation and collaboration, across and inside teams, and across projects. This issue will face a rise in scale and importance in the post-pandemic world, as the numbers of WFH and gig workers increase. Research may focus on aspects of the design of work norms, work contracts, trust-building, and team-building, amongst others.
Research on telecommuting and virtual teams has a long history in IS literature. Issues include the nature of “distance” whether temporal, spatial, or cultural, and the psychological needs of workers, the technological support and design for this kind of work, and many others. This research is important for the post-pandemic period.
We anticipate that the “dark side” of virtual teams and dispersed work also assumes importance in the post-pandemic world. Substantive issues related to technostress – particularly work overload and presenteeism arise in these situations. The research will have to address issues of design of collaborative work, evaluation, team performance and motivation, stress, and the issue of continuous learning.