Planning for post-Covid 19 (PCP) must: Vijay Sethi, Hero Motocorp.

We need to start planning right now to post-Covid planning (PCP) . We don't know what will happen next? For example, what happens three weeks from now? These were remarks made by Vijay Sethi, CIO, CHRO and Head, CSR, Hero Moto Corp., at a webinar titled Business Continuity Planning (BCP) in times of Covid-19, organized by Dataquest.

The world has changed. The thought process of all employees has also changed. We need to work on the new perspective. To fight the unthinkable, you have to be willing to do the unthinkable. We are all in BCP today. It is to ensure that our business continues, he said.

Work from home (WFH) has become the new normal. We need to learn to manage and work around situations. The expectations from the IT has also changed significantly. Remote support is becoming a norm. Cloud migration is also becoming different. We are using cloud-based apps. Similarly, we are talking about mobile-first. We are looking at AR/VR, RPA as well.

You need to show agility and quickly learn from experiences. You also need to now move to the post-Covid-planning or PCP.

We planned for all these things, but the reality can be very different, We look at various steps. We identify risk assessment. We do the business impact analysis. We also do strategy and create a development plan. We measure, by testing, training and maintaining.

Customers want their data center to continue during disasters. Once you put up a plan, you do mock runs. We get an output document. The question that arises: does it cover all of the scenarios? Is it practical, or is it theory? Did we think of a WFH scenario? Who covers it? Who would have imagined a lockdown across the country?

All of our vendors, IT support stuff, etc. should be working at all the time. We need to ensure this. How can we help tech support from home? We need to learn from our experiences.  We need to be innovative in these times and also meet all of our objectives. We need to relook at our IT budgets and make cuts, where necessary

There are powerful learnings to be had from the lockdown. Be ready for the unexpected, and the unthinkable! We have to be ready for all eventualities. We also have to move from theory to practice. Eg., your server goes down, vendor backs out, system goes down, etc. Each one of us can assume our situations, and ensure that we are able to meet them. There may be partial restrictions later.