Three months of remote work revealed the data gaps
Moving to remote work showed where data in companies lives in people's heads rather than in systems. How to read these signals and what to do with them.
There is a good way to find the weak spots in how a company works with data: remove physical co-location. Not because remote work is worse - but because when people cannot turn to the person at the next desk, a lot becomes visible.
Since spring 2020 I have been watching several companies that moved to remote work. In all of them, in one form or another, the same pattern emerged: it turned out that a significant part of what looked like a "process" was actually held together by informal communication between people who sat near each other.
Where this shows up
Approvals and decisions. In the office, a manager walking past could nod and that counted as approval. Remotely, that does not exist - you need something written, a task tracker, a formal step. Where that did not exist, things stalled.
Context around numbers. Analytics reports often contain figures whose meaning is clear only to the person who calculated them. "Here we subtract last quarter's returns" - that was not always written down anywhere. When the analyst goes on leave or moves to remote work without proper handover, that knowledge disappears.
Operational data in Excel. Files maintained "for personal use" that were actually operational systems - warehouse scheduling, request tracking, vendor registries. In remote mode, their synchronisation became a visible problem.
Knowing where things live. "Ask Maria, she knows where that contract is" - that is not documentation. When Maria moved to remote work and became less reachable, that became noticeable.
Why this matters now
Everything above existed before the pandemic. It just did not cause problems when people were in the same room.
Now it is visible. And that is good news - because invisible problems cannot be fixed.
If you notice that certain operations became harder with the shift to remote work, it is probably not a remote work problem. It is a data problem that was always there and is now showing itself.
What to do with these signals
I would not recommend starting a large-scale digitalisation project immediately. That is expensive, slow, and often misses the actual pain points.
Better to start with an inventory: where specifically did problems arise in the last six months? Concrete cases: "could not find the contract", "did not know who was responsible", "report was calculated differently by two people".
Each such case is a diagnostic. Out of ten cases, three or four usually point to the same root cause.
Three diagnostic questions
- Which operational decisions in your company took longer than usual over the last six months - and why?
- Are there processes that are formally described but actually work differently - and is that now visible?
- Which data that was "always available" now requires effort to obtain?
These questions do not require immediate action. But they are worth asking your team - the answers will point to what is actually worth fixing.