The new normal will be almost identical to the old normal. The question is only how long it takes to get there.
This ^
I disagree, at least when it comes to working from home. Now that people have started working from home on a large scale, there's no going back. Employees are going to expect/demand to be able to work from home more frequently, or as part of their normal schedule.
Here's the over / under on that and pardon while I repeat: worked for the OEM that invented it.
For it to be normal it needs to be the companies idea and it needs to make economic sense. IF the current work at home workforce did what many of them I know did - ordered a truck load of groceries, cobbled a work space (nice job at networks w/ green screen) and took advantage of the benefits to improve productivity - then the company can easily say the cost of the technology is less than the cost of the real estate and the time.
On the under side if productivity and quality declined after VPN deployed because of bottom dwellers and pointless middle management, then no you've just made IT's argument for them - you can't trust the user. If the work at home force was a large enough percentage of the company then you've got access to data on all of it plus business continuation planning points which was a boom market post 911.
I mean let's try this: let's say the twin towers are still there but they're empty. Everybody that should be hunkered in to a cubical is now hunkered under the stairs in a green screen suit and business is continuing. It's the answer that the post 911 world never arrived at. One of the great failures of the attack was the belief that a building mattered. In the economic sense it absolutely didn't because the data of the enterprise was already distributed. There is no such thing has attacking the ONE thing. A lot of commerce was done and a lot more was done consciously and dove tailed with natural disaster but asked the wrong question: when this office closes for plague, meteor, blizzard, what office is our rally point?
The answer should have been we don't need an office, meet me under the stairs. I bet the delivery drivers that aren't dealing with 4 wheelers are loving these times. The 911 world didn't have a fiber back bone. It got installed for xbox. We can do better things with it. I was much more useful to several companies when WAH vs not in the dark days and it worked. Oh, btw, this was my wall paper cus my boss said winsheild time:
