NITECH ››› INTRODUCTION
DATA, DATA, DATA Adelina Campos de Carvalho, Simon Michell, Editors, NITECH
Adelina So, we are still not back in the office, and working from home seems normal now. How have you coped?
Simon Better than expected.
Simon I have been forced to really up my IT skills. I am in the process of moving all my data to the cloud and I am now pretty good at online meetings – Teams, Skype, Webex….. I am using all of them.
Adelina I can imagine! It’s the same on our side, with the added complexity of holding virtual meetings at different classification levels... What has been your biggest challenge with remote working?
Simon Well, as an early 60s Baby Boomer, I am far from being a digital native, and some things are not at all intuitive to me. Sometimes, I really have to do a lot of Googling to find out how to use new apps. People 30 years younger seem to instinctively know how to get started on new platforms and apps. I can share all of my data between my laptop, phone and tablet using the cloud. The phone is easier to use than my laptop for most things, but not everything – emails for one, and of course writing and editing. Plus moving data around and sharing it externally with the team is still sometimes a bit of a mystery. There are annoying silos between the different types of data, text, image files, design documents, PDFs...
Adelina
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This is the biggest challenge that everyone is facing, and NATO in particular. It’s why we have focused on data as a strategic resource in this issue. That’s what the NCI Agency is all about. Data has become a precious commodity – you need to be able to share it, quickly. The NCI Agency is vital in making this happen.
