A Dickens of a Plan: Planning for Business Development Success in Times of Coronavirus
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The well-known opening lines of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is a good description of my pandemic experience this year. Having settled in the UK over 20 years ago, I’ve spent the dotcom/ post-dotcom era almost equally between airport lounges, corporate offices and, (it feels very occasionally) at home.
My biorhythms are set to a life of business travel. Early up at the hotel, into the gym, breakfast, meetings, late dinners. In between trips, domestic bliss seems like an intrusion. It disrupts my normal work karma and probably makes me difficult to have around the house. I get the impression that when my family packs me back off to the airport, there’s been a sense of relief!
The last 130-odd days have put paid to all that as I’ve settled into a new normal. No dawn taxis, no airline food. No late nights out, no last-minute presentations. I’m not even sure where my passport is. Instead, Zoom. Family life. Work. Zoom. Chores. More Zoom. One day starting to look like any other, to the point when you forget it even is the weekend!
Data Centres and Critical Infrastructure in the Covid-19 interlude
As madness seems to be breaking out everywhere – in the shops and on the beaches, from county to county, country to country and even continent to continent – the industry in which we move has provided a settling sense of continuity (sorry). As businesses rushed to digitise their face-to-face operations, we saw success story after success story about Microsoft, Zoom and their peers.
Quietly, in the background, data centres did their job. And continue to do so, provisioning meeting after meeting with assured uptime that so far has avoided any adverse headlines. The social media outrage provoked by the BBC’s “Dirty Streaming” story has dissolved as #WFH became a thing for those that could work from home using internet connectivity. For those furloughed and sadly unemployed, online entertainment provided a vital distraction.
How DatacentreSpeak is Helping Business Development Now
The pandemic has very publicly cemented the centrality of the internet to public and commercial life. Throughout this strange period of time, data centre development has continued to grow at an unabated rate. There is no doubt that infrastructure will need some re-architecting to meet this sudden forced change to work-life routines, but in any event the promise of new services and emerging applications will continue to drive market growth.
At DatacentreSpeak, our newly expanded team is working with a range of customers to explore their growth potential and their routes to market. These are moot challenges for companies which have neither feet on the ground nor commercial flights to get them into the corner office meetings that are their traditional method.
Together, we’re putting in place a structure and a method to help them deliver successful business development campaigns and meet their growth potential. Planning, plus keeping the main thing the main thing will be critical, as will accountability and effort. Sometimes success looks easy, but in my experience, it is always the result of hard work and team spirit. And for that, it means a disciplined approach. It is a far, far better thing…
