Have you ever noticed how travelling and meditation provide tranquillity to our minds? How substantial is the influence of our surroundings on our brains? The reality is that our surroundings shape our thoughts, motivation, and ability to focus on a certain subject. It doesn't matter if it's for recreational activities or essential duties. Similarly, our workplace has a significant impact on our productivity.

Over the last two years, across the world has gone through an unprecedented shift brought on by a virus. When such circumstances are beyond one's control, the only alternative is to employ competent change management. The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most serious crises to hit businesses and employees in recent memory. Compared to previous years, 2020 represented an extraordinary transformation in the way IT and other industries used to function. In fact, the ability to adopt tech tools to facilitate business became a key survival factor. 

The urgent need to swiftly migrate to a Work From Home (WFH) situation to maintain business continuity, posed several challenges. After all, it was the hardest thing to overnight change decades of established corporate practices and habits. The top 3 critical issues to solve for that emerged globally were:

• IT infrastructure upkeep: Creating and maintaining a decentralized IT infrastructure so that employees can work from home instead of depending on on-premise office facilities.
• Productivity maintenance: Enabling and tracking of workers' productive use of time without the traditional command and control measures required radical rethinking.
• Data Security: Online connectivity is the bedrock of WFH productivity, which inherently poses data security issues, especially in light of increasing incidences of cybercrime that need to be mitigated. Data security is particularly critical, as data loss is a sensitive subject that can result in a loss of reputation in addition to revenues.

eClerx optimized and repurposed its current models to address these challenges through efficient change management. A specialist Knowledge and Business Process Outsourcing (KPO/BPO) company founded in 2000, eClerx, provides operational support, data management, and innovative technology and analytics solutions to 60+ Global Fortune 1000 clients, including many of the world's leading high tech and industrial manufacturing, financial services, online retail and distributors, interactive media & entertainment companies.

So far, they have catered to the technology, media, and telecommunications verticals, by enabling efficient WFH models using technology and AI, which is at the heart of their end-to-end "Technology-Driven Efficient Work From Home solution." The 3 most vital AI components of their solution stack are: 

1. Veriato Cerebral: an AI-powered security platform that combines User & Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA) with User Activity Monitoring (UAM) to provide fast Data Breach Response (DBR). Unlike network monitoring or document tracking, Cerebral quickly alerts us to who is exhibiting signs of risk, as well as providing screenshots to help us understand the real nature of the incident.

2. Theia: Theia, eClerx's AI-powered computer vision platform for picture and video analysis, collects data from the Veriato evaluation tool to track personnel with a high-risk score. It majorly considers 3 aspects for monitoring:

• Facial recognition for detecting / identifying people
• Mobile and camera detection to prevent a data breach 
• Pen/Paper detection in front of the camera to prevent data from being copied from the computer screen

3. EZ App: This is an eClerx application that assists in remote troubleshooting of any IT-related issues that employees are experiencing. It employs augmented reality to automatically detect devices and possible issues, allowing the support engineer to troubleshoot remotely.

Apart from the critical components listed above, their system also depends on auto recognition of devices and ports, and remote video conferences between the user and the IT support staff, to allow for faster issue resolution. Desk booking is a handy way to reserve an office desk for a specific day and time while adhering to the Covid 19 procedure to facilitate return to office strategies. They also keep an eye on user workstations that register attendance remotely.

This set of solutions come with a formidable list of challenges as well to be effective, viz compliance paperwork, clearing the model acceptance criteria checklist, remediation, change management, audit and review, and risk tolerance. Image analysis required a lot of data, which was the most difficult part. It was a difficult task to collect data according to the specified use cases, combine multiple datasets to enhance the volume, and label/annotate the data appropriately. Identifying items such as a camera, a phone, a piece of paper, or a pen, in particular, needed a large amount of data for training and accuracy. They used data from a variety of free sources to train the model, 

Although AI and technology played a big role in the solution, there were multiple reasons why an analytics-based solution wouldn't have been enough to tackle the companies' problems:

• The cases needed to be dealt with human behaviour and were not static in nature. A pattern learnt from history, may or may not occur in future and hence the solution could not be standardized
• The problem they were trying to solve was highly non-linear, and the features they needed to extract to solve it using traditional methods were extremely complex. For example, extracting pixel values, shapes, textures, position, and orientation from an image on a case-by-case basis is nearly impossible. 
• They had to deal with a massive amount of data. The use of standard analytics-based approaches is immediately eliminated when operating at such a scale.

The solution offered by eClerx provided a unique solution set to cover end to end aspects of the Work From Home challenge, providing a 360-degree answer to the new normal situation. This includes integration with third-party tools as well to deliver a unified platform to upgrade the new normal to a better normal. After all, managing the environment in which the employee functions is just as important as managing employees themselves.