Covid and the Technology Expense Management Industry

Over the last few months I have spoken to dozens of business leaders and IT leaders and asked them the following questions about how COVID has impacted their business and their technology expense management (TEM) environment.

 Here are the three questions I asked:

•  What impacts have you seen personally 
• How has your team been affected? 
• What changes have you seen in your business? 

From all of them, we ended up with three major topics that were the most pressing on their minds.

1. What are the ways we can use technology to help keep our workforce safe, happy, and productive? 
2. How can technology expense management play a role in future hybrid office/work-from-home model? 
3. How can we immediately reduce our technology expenses? 

An overlying theme that I saw was that businesses very quickly changed from having aggressive, growth strategies to playing a game of safety and protection. Just like cities would board up windows and stock up for supplies when a hurricane come, business leaders were preparing for the storm.

What are the ways we can use technology to help keep our workforce safe, happy, and productive?

An immediate result of the lockdown obviously was empty office spaces. People were sent to work from home or laid off.

One contact told me about putting a new lease contract initially on hold, then rethinking the position of more space, up to, we may need less office space and instead more collaboration space in the future.

This was a topic of all conversations. What is the future of work and how will we adjust the workplaces to meet this need?

Almost everyone I spoke to, agreed on a hybrid model being the way forward. Reducing individual offices and moving towards a collaboration model.

From this preface the chats quickly turned to: How do we as IT help enable this change?

Here are the most commonly named solutions:

• Technology becomes the glue that can hold companies together during these times and in the future, relying more heavily on endpoint assets than ever before 
• Self-service becomes crucial to enable employees to get the assets and services they need to be productive 
• IT software such as ServiceNow becomes critical to enable teams to collaborate and efficiently perform cross-departmental work 

To me this makes perfect sense. From an IT, but also an organizational perspective. 

One very interesting interview on German television with Herbert Diess (CEO of Volkswagen) highlights this.

Mr. Diess pointed out that Volkswagen had started preparing for the impact very early due to the fact that they got very early feedback from their connections in China and their factories there, highlighting what this virus potentially could do to the world. And even with this advanced knowledge, VW suffered a loss of 2 Billion per week.

Most others took note as well and instructed their teams to prepare for impact.

Teams were instructed to prepare for a world, where work could no longer be done in factories and office buildings. Enable our workforce to work from home, was the clear message heard across the globe.

At this point in the pandemic the people I spoke to were in hero mode. Instransparencies, additional costs, future strategy were all set aside, to ensure survival. 

Once the first shock had been dealt with and the workforce had been enabled to work remotely, companies realized that a different kind of infrastructure was now needed.

Digitization quickly became the buzz word. Zoom meetings, video coffee breaks. Water cooler talk via FaceTime. The world adapted.

So in my conversations, of course we quickly broached on the topic of: 

How can we help?

How can technology expense management play a role in future hybrid office/work-from-home model?

Let me maybe illuminate how we got to the above question by delving a bit further into the situation at hand:

Quickly those that previous were the heroes that enabled the transition were caught between a rock and hard place. 

As the world economy took a dramatic downturn, CEOs quickly moved their focus from IT enablement towards financial control. Again things went into survival mode. The focus turned from the CIO to the CFO.

With dwindling income, costs now need the highest degree of scrutiny. Non critical projects were placed on hold. Cost transparency. Cost control. Cost avoidance were the terms du jour.

Yet, interestingly, the focus on digitization remained. Digitization many realized is the way to more resilience. In one particular conversation I was informed, with a little sigh, of the following: 

We need to keep pushing hard on the way to digitization, without spending more money.

Business cases on all projects are a given. And the Numbers on these business case are checked and cross checked like never before.

These business cases now need to show a positive or at least cost neutral path to the future.

The following assumptions quickly turned to ?known“ facts in my conversations:

• Employees need to be enabled to work from anywhere. This includes using a combination of technology resources to make it happen. (Mobile, Fixed, Cloud) 
• Businesses must thoroughly understand the technology infrastructure that’s already in place to make changes 
• TEM becomes essential to audit expenses when changes do happen to physical locations 

How can we immediately reduce our technology expenses?

And now we need to find ways to do all this with full cost control. 

This is where the right TEM solution will be able to really help. Make your lives easier. Make your users happier and get your CFOs to nod in approval.

I will keep this short, as this is not a marketing article. Let me just say that we are happy to deliver for you!

We will:

• Find and eliminate unused assets and services 
• Review provider contracts 
• Closely monitor and react to new usage patterns cause by the new remote work force 

Closing Summary

• TEM has become critical in the COVID environment 
• ServiceNow has become more important than ever 
• You should consider TEM on ServiceNow with MobiChord
• Super-fast time to value

Thank you for reading until the end!

I greatly appreciate any and all feedback :-)