Finding the silver lining

From a business perspective, 2020 has been fascinating. COVID-19 literally changed the landscape overnight and – for better or worse – altered the playing field forever in many industries. At an organisational level, it exposed vulnerabilities and created new ways of working, making this a great time for business leaders to stop and take stock.

Pandemics and natural disasters aren’t necessarily ‘unpredictable’, but they do demand rapid response and transformation that, let’s face it, we don’t generally attribute to either government or big business.

Size and scale can make it difficult to turn the ship around quickly…and yet, time and again throughout the pandemic – particularly the early stages – we saw government and enterprise rise to the occasion, fast-tracking relief programs and instituting massive change with the speed and alacrity normally associated with smaller, more agile entities.

That’s what crises tend to do – they highlight strengths and weaknesses in your business strategy. Sure, it’s hard to see the positive while catastrophe unfolds, but times of disaster, emergency or otherwise unexpected events are often when the best business lessons are learned.

I vividly recall a ‘black swan’ incident from not so long ago. The devastating Queensland floods across 2010–2011 were a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. I remember it well because we had just relocated to a new cutting-edge office in the inner-city Brisbane suburb of Fortitude Valley. As the name implies, it’s a low-lying area that just happens to be adjacent to the Brisbane River.

The river started to rise one January morning and by early afternoon the banks had broken. As the floodwater lapped at our front door, homes and businesses across the CBD, Fortitude Valley and West End were evacuated, including ours.

When the water level peaked, it was lower than anticipated – but still high enough that one in ten Brisbane businesses were inundated. Two in every five lost significant office furniture and equipment. It left many organisations unable to operate for days, weeks and months after the water subsided.

Amid the chaos and the clean-up, something became really clear to us – we knew we had to accelerate evolution of our offering from on-premise IT services to a then-emerging technology; cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS).

It wasn’t a new idea…we’d been planning this transition since about 2008, but it was a pretty bold vision and many people really questioned our thinking. Would our customer base of higher education and local government clients really entrust their data to the ether? The naysayers didn’t think so.

It was early days for the cloud, but we already knew that the on-premise methodology was on its way out – and were now experiencing first-hand the huge impact an unexpected event like a natural disaster could have on business. The downtime and catastrophic data loss caused by the floods could have been avoided by utilising a SaaS model – allowing people to work from anywhere, at any time, on any device. We knew then that moving to the cloud was the logical path forward for our business.

Of course, now we have the benefit of hindsight and the veracity of that decision has been confirmed many times over. We successfully transitioned where many other tech companies failed. As part of the Australian technology landscape for more than thirty years, we’ve had to continually evolve…and to bring our customers with us on that journey.

Are they glad they came with us? Well, a recent report commissioned by AppDynamics found that 81% of technologists believe COVID-19 has created the biggest technology pressure their organisation has ever experienced – it’s no doubt been particularly testing for companies that previously put digital transformation plans on the back-burner.

When COVID-19 changed things overnight, our SaaS customers literally moved from office to home, logged on and kept going. If they needed to scale up, it happened in a heartbeat. So yes, we think they’re probably happy they came along for the ride.

In a post-COVID-19 world, digital acceleration will enable many organisations, like those in Australia’s higher education sector, to take advantage of technology and effectively compete on a global scale as markets inevitably become more aggressive.

The same sense of urgency that allowed Australians to move mountains in March 2020 needs to be maintained as we move out of crisis-mode and begin to navigate the new. Now, more than ever, we should all be reflecting on our existing business strategies and seriously measuring performance – how well did your business and team weather the storm in 2020? If innovation and a focus on digital acceleration are not at the heart of your plans for 2021 onwards, how well can you expect to weather the next one?