Welcome … or welcome back !
This article is the next in an on-going series, where I take a look at what I see as being your areas of focus right now.
This article covers October, 2020.
Brexit preparation
In amongst everything else which has been (and continues to be) going on this year, if you do any business with countries within the European Union, then you will need to be reviewing your preparedness for Britain leaving the European Union. By this time – October, 2020 – I would expect that you would be pretty confident that you are done, but if not, this probably ought to be one of your top priorities.
There is lots of ground that you should be covering here, but I would look to be able to identify every component of your products, as the single most important item.
Consolidation projects
Like last month (September) consolidation is always a good area to be working on.
Documentation … write it down !
Ditto for documentation.
Business Continuity, or Disaster Recovery
This is a perennial favourite, and has special resonance in 2020. Disaster Recovery (DR) or Business Continuity planning always used to mean having other office space in (some sort of) readiness should the worst happen. I suggest that that no longer makes sense for a great many businesses.
When Covid hit hard in March this year, a great many businesses discovered that a remote staff using laptops connected to a corporate network could run a business pretty much as well as before the lockdown. This was a surprise to many, and caused a lot of thinking about what on office closure (the disaster from which you are recovering) might look like. A faster adoption of the cloud for end-user-compute and for all business applications seems like the obvious answer.
I want to talk about this whole area of working from home (or at least away from the office) in another article – I find it fascinating. There are pros and cons for both the business as well as for the employee.
So, what does all of this mean for you and your focus now. I recommend that you look at your business and figure out what – if anything – is reliant on a specific physical space. If you do manufacture, then you may well have some reliance on physical space, but even there, you may have options. If you are in the supply chain, and distribution in some way, then you probably have some reliance on a specific physical location.
But if your reliance is on having a server room, or something similar, then you really need to be working on how to move away from that. There are plenty of options here, and you really need to be exploring those options.
As ever, if you want to discuss these or any other issues, do get in touch – Rathlin – [email protected] – www.rathlin.net – 01604 805 912 .
That’s all for this month; I’ll be back in November with more to focus on.