By IIC Thought Leadership Task Group Co-Chairs: Edy Liongosari, Chief Research Scientist, Accenture Labs, and Mark Crawford, Director, Standards Strategy, SAP
As of this publication date, there have been more than 50.5 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide and more than 1.2 million deaths[1]. The virus has been detected in nearly every country. The impact on global business has been unprecedented as millions of workers have moved their office to their homes.
According to Kate Lister at Global Workplace Analytics, one of the leading authorities on how integrated work-at-home strategies can maximize employer, employee, and environmental outcomes, the longer people are required to work at home, the greater the adoption we will see when the dust settles.
“Based on historical trends, that those who were working remotely before the pandemic, will increase their frequency after they are allowed to return to their offices,” explains Lister. “For those who were new to remote work until the pandemic, we believe there will be a significant upswing in their adoption.”
According to the company’s projections, 56% of the U.S. workforce holds a job that is compatible (at least partially) with remote work and 25-30% of the workforce will be working-from-home multiple days a week by the end of 2021.[2]
Working at home is just one of many significant ways that our lives will be impacted in the post-pandemic aftermath. The Internet of Things will play a crucial role in helping IT organizations adjust to the new normal. In this 15th edition of The IIC Journal of Innovation, authors from our IoT community give us access to crucial ongoing research that falls under the umbrella of “IoT Enabling Rapid Response to COVID and Future Pandemics.”
The result is the following informative, enlightening, and thought-provoking articles that we hope you will find beneficial to your own IoT initiatives:
- Physical Distancing and Crowd Density Monitoring Using Computer Vision, by several authors from the SAS Institute, which provides an analysis of physical distance compliance in everyday spaces using video, deep learning and streaming analytics.
- Safety Back to Work – How IoT is Enabling Redesign of Spaces in Response to COVID, by several authors from PwC Advisory, which looks at how IoT and AI are helping to define safe workplaces for the new normal.
- IoT-Enabled Global Process Validation System with Advanced Process Control (APC) Capabilities for Global Production Rollout of COVID-19 Vaccines, by Ramya Mopidevi of SAS Institute, which describes IoT processes for ensuring high manufacturing quality and accelerating production at the same time.
- Advances in Connected Worker Technology in the Aftermath of the Pandemic, by Vijay Ujjain and Paul-Marc Schweitzer of PwC Advisory, which highlights IoT technologies and use cases that reimagine the future of work.
- COVID-19 Can Create Opportunity for IoT in the Caribbean: A Necessary Digital Transformation, by Jason Robert Rameshwar, The University of the West Indies, which presents results of a survey the explores the potential of smart devices during the pandemic.
To download the JoI, click here.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html
[2] https://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/work-at-home-after-covid-19-our-forecast