Action is being taken worldwide to ‘flatten the curve’ and reduce the rate at which the COVID-19 virus is spreading through population. Link Digital has taken a look at two general areas where changes in community health and economic market conditions have the potential to disrupt our regular business operations.
At this stage we are confident that the change in risk factors are appropriately mitigated, or otherwise remaining steadily low. Our existing clients can rest assured that our niche CKAN hosting, support and maintenance services are not likely to be disrupted. Nor are our traditional cloud hosting and digital agency services likely to be disrupted.
Risk to business operations: Due to social distancing measures and/or disruption to staff availability
In response to the presence of COVID-19 in Australia and other parts of the world where our team members are located, Link Digital is taking practical steps to ensure our distributed and virtual teams remain available to work without disruption to normal day-to-day operations.
With a remote workforce, all of our systems and processes are already designed for decentralised teams, so changes are minimal.
There will be no changes made to business hours, support response times or resource allocation.
The precautionary steps are largely being made to ensure the following:
- Key staff processes are accurately documented and up-to-date;
- Knowledge relating to active client contracts is captured within our internal knowledge base, as per existing operating procedures;
- Staff are being paired between different geographic locations and undertaking project reviews to ensure further redundancy among those who are familiar with the support characteristics of each client environment.
During this time we will continue to monitor the situation and follow advice from Local and Federal Governments as well as the World Health Organisation to ensure our team and clients are minimally impacted by the global pandemic.
Risk to business operations: Due to reduced revenue opportunities
Link Digital has noticed a large increase in the publishing of data related to the pandemic, both in the Open Government and Open Research sectors. While some disruption is expected for procurement processes that were based on pre-pandemic market activity, the demand for our niche services surrounding enterprise data ecosystems appears to be growing strongly. There is a rapidly emerging, global recognition that openness and collaboration are needed at this time.
A small selection of COVID-19 Dataset Activity and Open Data related articles is provided below.
COVID-19 Datasets Activity
| Topic | URL |
| Situation update worldwide | https://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/data/dataset/covid-19-coronavirus-data/resource/4abdfc17-6225-41d1-b969-9ebbc01dc523 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/geographical-distribution-2019-ncov-cases |
| Tackles the availability, openness, uptake useage and dissemination of data in this pandemic | https://opendatawatch.com/what-is-being-said/data-in-the-time-of-covid-19/ |
| Open access epidemiological data from the COVID-19 outbreak. | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32087115 |
| Full-text and metadata dataset of COVID-19 and coronavirus-related research articles optimized for machine readability. | https://registry.opendata.aws/cord-19/ |
| COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) dataset of articles to help with the fight against COVID-19 | https://pages.semanticscholar.org/coronavirus-research |
| Realtime COVID-19 monitoring | https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ |
| Country-by-country coronavirus testing | https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing-source-data |
| Country-by-country confirmed cases and deaths. | https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus |
| Developed to provide continual, free, and updated access to COVID-19 data to create visualizations and analyses | https://covidtracking.com/api/ https://thevirustracker.com/ |
| Provides daily updates on cases in the US. | https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html |
