C&F Special Report - How companies are dealing with COVID-19

There’s tons of advice about how companies should respond to Covid, but not much information about what companies are actually doing.

So we asked 100 C level and senior business leaders about how they're dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, and created a report. Here's a summary which I hope you find enlightening. Use the link at the bottom of the article to download the full report (and don't worry, there's no registration wall).

What are your overall business priorities?

Business leaders told us their biggest priority is to achieve and maintain profitability, followed by re-aligning sales and customer service to function well in this new environment.

What risks concern you most?

We asked company leaders to rank the greatest perceived risks both in terms of likelihood and impact. They are:

• Absence of key personnel
• Shortage of IT equipment
• Insufficient IT infrastructure

What are your business challenges?

We asked leaders what business challenges they face in order of severity. Here's what they said:

• Offline sales severely hamstrung
• Operational difficulties resulting from COVID issues
• Effectively circulating documents
• Disruption to logistics and supply chains

What is IT doing?

IT departments have taken the following steps (in descending order):

• Implement more IT tools and solutions to digitise more of the business
• Automate more work
• Implement mobile and web apps to sustain business continuity in particular for sales, logistics and customer support.

The drive for digitisation.

COVID hasn't significantly altered companies' digitisation plans. E-learning, training, marketing and customer support remain top digitisation priorities, but there's an overriding hunger to accelerate existing digitisation plans.

"Despite, or because of the pandemic, digitisation initiatives are well funded"

Overall, companies have slightly lowered IT budgets, but increased budgets and accelerated timescales for digital transformation. .

The future of digitisation will be low-code. Low code is now mature and the best low-code platforms such as Outsystems offer rapid, secure, omni-channel deployment alongside customisation and security.

"The future of digitisation will be low-code"

Accelerating digitisation must be done carefully for some - in particular:

• Highly regulated sectors such as Pharma and Financial Services must be careful to avoid oversights for the sake of speed.
• Digitisation and post M&A IT integrations: As a consequence of economic shakeup, we’re likely to see a wave of M&A activity - which means IT integrations. EY's Confidence Barometer sees 34% of respondents say the greatest problem in a company merger process is underestimating how challenging IT integration is. Rapid digitisation may make these problems worse.

Security issues

50% of info-security specialists say their organisations had been unprepared for the current situation.

And 86% have seen more frequent cyber attacks.

GRC

With accelerated digitisation and changes in customer habits, analytics, control and compliance must keep up with robust frameworks.

Conclusion

We’ve learned that companies are racing to digitise, particularly to improve customer and supplier interactions. While this drive will accelerate innovation, companies must be vigilant about the risks and compliance issues.

The report was carried out by C&F, technology experts that help companies to transform into modern data-driven organisations. C&F’s specialisms include:

- GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance Management) technology

- Process design and data analytics

- Rebate and loyalty programme management technology

You can access the full report here. There is no registration wall.