Jennifer Biggin
Head of IT
Black Dog Institute

My personal experience of COVID living in Sydney was working home from mid March. It’s now August and I’ve been back to the office twice. Meanwhile I’ve been working in my role as Head of IT and enabling 200+ employees to work remotely.

I have wondered how my counterparts in other Research Institutes are managing during the COVID crisis so I decided to ask them. The following is a summary of their interviews which I thought would be helpful to the wider IT community.

Interview participants:

• Elaine Neeson, CIO Children’s Cancer Institute
• Esteve Maylos, Head of IT, Garvin Institute
• Andrew Cartwright, Head of IT, Neura
• Todd Ryman, IT Director, Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute
• John Sukkar, Director Engineering and Design, Data 61

How did COVID19 affected your organisation?

For most organisations interviewed the impact of COVID19 had been huge. Many Medical institutes have ongoing physical experiments such as the Garvin with its Genonic work and physical data collection such as Neura’s studies of medical patients in neural studies. There has also been a big impact on fundraising which is a major source of income.

How did the situation play out?

Research institutes because of nature of their work were aware of the impending threat of COVID. These institutes were alert earlier than many other industries and began planning. Most institutes began creating a task force and dusting off their Business Continuity Planning (BCP). The issues of risk and cybersecurity were top of mind.

IT departments found themselves managing people’s home internet as well as hunting down laptops, headphones and portable modems which had all become as scarce as toilet paper. Moving from a carefully planned purchasing process to scouring JBHifi for equipment quickly became the new normal.

Some researchers changed to writing papers or statistical analysis though others were not familiar with working from home and found it very difficult initially. IT departments needed to support staff who where in the office – often on rotation as well as support people remotely. Social distancing and hygiene requirements were top of mind.

COVID 19 became a catalyst for Digital transformation. Organisations quickly ramped up their adoption of collaboration platforms such as MS Teams and Slack. Processes that were paper based processes quickly moved to online processes; physical meetings became video conferences.

What piece of tech worked well?

Office 365 was generally cited as making the move to working remotely so much easier. Also institutions who used external data centres found the process much easier than their previous onsite hosting.

Video conferencing has been the big hero in this era of working remotely: particularly MS Teams, Zoom and WebEx. Collaboration tools such as Slack, MS Teams have also been hugely impactful during this time.

What are your IT learnings?

Organisations and staff now understand home is actually just an extension of the office now.

The importance of having a ready made BCP plan that could be easily followed was highlighted.

Work life balance has become a topic for all work places. “The work life balance is probably the most difficult part of the situation, right? Because you know we’re at home with little or no separation between your work, day, evening or family life. The weekends don’t feel like weekends We tend to do some work from home anyway. And therefore you just feel like you’re constantly at work 24/7.” John Sukkar

If you could go back in time to March 1^st what advice would you give yourself

A common recommendation was “get some sleep” and tell your IT team to be prepared, especially to become home internet experts.

“Sometimes we are so focused on the big picture of what’s happening and the strategy …. you tend to forget about the small stuff. And it’s the small stuff that’s counted the most    do I have a headset?” Elaine Neeson

“What I would do is what I’m starting to do now that I would have done from the start, create blocks in my day where I do take mental breaks, physical brakes to get up, take a walk, get some fresh air.” John Sukkar

“Don’t panic, it’s OK, will get there because initially when it all started happening it got really stressful at the beginning.” Andrew Cartwright

A final and less exciting piece of advice is write more documents. This can be an area that falls behind due to other demands but documents save so much time and stress in these COVID times.

How you can help?

I would suggest to the wider community to not forget about the importance of Medical Research Institutes. COVID19 has demonstrated the need to fund long term research. Medical Research Institutes need your financial support, especially now.