CIOs bear the brunt of IT responsibilities in enterprise. It’s a high-stress job with high-turnover rates, but 2020 has been a year like none other for these IT leaders.

Unexpected challenges, the pivot to remote work, the lasting impact of the pandemic, and the fight against racism are just some of the issues confronting CIOs today. All of these topics were addressed by the CIOs at Cisco, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and Lone Star College, during a Cisco Live virtual panel Tuesday.

Many moments stand out amid the COVID-19 crisis, but the most impactful for Link Alander, vice chancellor and CIO at Lone Star College in Houston, was “when we finally realized that this is a long-term lockdown,” he said. “The biggest one was when everything started to click, when everybody started to realize this is the transition. … This is the mode to operate now. What can we do to get everything firing on the same cylinder and get moving fast?”

As the CIO at one of the world’s largest mental health and addiction hospitals in the world, “you have no choice, everything’s got to work, there’s no excuses, things have to work, the life of patients is literally on the line,” said Dr. Damian Jankowicz, VP and CIO at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.

“We’ve had clinicians and physicians on isolation units dealing with COVID patients who have not seen their own kids in three months. Three months. That’s real sacrifice,” he said. “That’s the thing that really will stay with me, I think, forever.” 

Equity and accessibility to virtual care has been one of the biggest and unexpected challenges for Jankowicz and his team. “Some people, frankly, might not have even had a private place to have a virtual care visit,” he said. Moreover, “there’s a segment of the population that does not respond to virtual care and we’ve been trying to address that right now.”

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health did very little virtual care prior to the pandemic. That type of care has since grown by about 750% and more than 3,500 staff and clinicians have been trained to deliver that care, Jankowicz explained. “IT only works when it works hand-in-hand with the business. We are not a tech company. We are a hospital and everything we do has to be in lockstep with the clinicians.”

Keeping a team together during work challenges that are pushing everyone to their limits, while respecting boundaries and understanding that everyone has personal challenges, has been an unexpected challenge for Alander. “How do you create some kind of sense of normalcy? How can they function every day when we don’t see each other. We may be IT but we still are social people and we still need to have team peace,” he said. 

While the college had an IT disaster recovery plan and has suffered through challenges before, most notably when Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, it wasn’t fully prepared to shift to a completely remote workforce, Alander said. “The speed wasn’t the issue as much it was as getting everybody else in sync. So IT moved quick, other areas it was IT helping them to get moving. … Getting hardware to people, that was an ultimate challenge — just trying to get computers in the hands of staff that had desktops in the office,” he said. 

That shift, unfortunately, opened a whole new set of security challenges. “We were like sitting ducks out there,” Alander said. “When everybody started shutting down, everybody that’s out there on the other side of the cyber world, on the darker side, saw us as an opportunity. And everybody in every industry had to be ready, be vigilant when it comes to those threats. We saw a lot of threats come through.”

The health care industry has been under assault as well, Jankowicz said. “It’s sad that people are trying to take advantage of the situation, but that’s certainly the case.” 

Jankowicz and Alander were also asked to share their thoughts on the lasting impact of the pandemic.

“I think this will be a giant step towards home care. We’ve seen that shift taking place over the last few years, and we’re taking care out of hospitals and moving to home settings for very valid reasons,” Jankowicz said. “I think this will be the defining feature of the pandemic, that care will take a giant step to moving home and the environment is ripe. It’s the right time.”

Alander believes the aftermath of the pandemic will give way to an improvement in the delivery of courses. “I think you’re going to see a stronger push toward every class having an online component, additional resources available for students,” he said. “All these pieces that have been there are getting stitched together in a way that will really help students.”

The CIOs also discussed how they want to use technology to fight racism, promote inclusivity, and increase diversity at their respective organizations. “I think that there’s two parts to that. You can go back to the digital divide issue, but that’s not always race related as much as it is more economic related. But, how do you look at your data, how do you look at your instruction, are you equitable across all? That’s really what we can do at this point,” Alander said. 

The situation has also been weighing heavily on Jankowicz' mind. "I know it has affected my team very much,” he said, adding that the hospital is collecting data to determine if patients and staff are being treated equitably.

“I can totally relate to feeling it personally. I have seen and ... unfortunately been a victim of racism and discrimination since I was a very young girl at two years old,” said Cisco CIO Jacqui Guichelaar.