COVID-19 IMPACT - DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

The integration of digital technology into all areas of a business resulting in fundamental changes to how businesses operate and how they deliver value to customers. Beyond that, it's a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment often, and get comfortable with failure. This sometimes means walking away from long-standing business processes that companies were built upon in favor of relatively new practices that are still being defined.

The pandemic has demonstrated the value of IT and digital transformation across industries and businesses must utilize this time to speed up the transition. The inability to visit customers, a tremendous decline in sales performance, and the inability to resume production as the top negative impacts on enterprise-level. On the other hand, the enhanced corporate ability of long-distance collaborative work, wide recognition of the value of digital transformation and information technology among all employees, and the ability to market online and business development were the top positive impact.

The digital transformation market has witnessed substantial growth, owing to digitalizing organizational business functions to serve changing customer preferences and enhance operational efficiency, the rapid proliferation of mobile devices and apps, and increasing penetration of IoT and adoption of cloud services, and need to improve operational performance to gain competitive benefits in the market.

Organizations need to identify, evaluate, and have the right mix of online collaboration tools for both employees and partners to be able to work remotely. Social distancing has already altered the consumer buying patterns and might further impact it in the longer run, so revamping Sales channels strategy will be the need of the hour. Most organizations have a BCP manual that runs into over a hundred pages, which proved ineffective during the COVID-19 crisis situation. Hence, there’s a need to have an Agile BCP that should be triggered with minimal fuss, and in no time. Instead of half-yearly and yearly BCP drills, there should be a provision to put the same to real test on a monthly basis by mandating the ‘Work from home’. In fact, some companies have already started thinking about leveraging ‘Work from home’ permanently as part of their company policy. The organizations that are still mulling over the idea of migrating onto the Cloud needs to expedite the action in this area post this crisis. The logical starting point could be setting up the BCP/DR site on the cloud that should be regularly tested as part of the routine drills.

Most manufacturing organizations had to either close their production completely or operated on the reduced capacity; especially in the case of essential goods. The entire global supply chain is under tremendous pressure to meet the demands. Hence, the role of technology leaders in this area to run a fully automated factory with minimal or no humans on-site needs to become a reality to ensure better preparedness in the future. Securing the data pertaining to the organization, customer, and other sensitive information. There’s a surge in security breaches during the COVID-19 period mainly due to a substantial increase in usage by working remotely. The organization’s focus should be on making the ‘Information Security’ a part of the overall design rather than a post facto check.

The majority of us are quite optimistic that once this crisis gets over, the global trade dynamics will change, and the economies will bounce back stronger. Hence, we need to stay prepared and course correct our Digital Strategies by plugging the gaps, wherever needed.