Information Services – Sustaining, Rebuilding, and Thriving in a Post-pandemic World

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has created a business climate where the survival instincts of Information Services businesses will be tested. The companies who can navigate the pandemic effectively by rebuilding and focusing on their core competency adapting to the new business models, behaviors of consumers and employees and changing business dynamics will thrive in the post-pandemic world. 

The impact to Information Services businesses will be short term, but the pandemic will leave a lasting effect on how these companies adjust to the changing social and economic scenarios and demands thereof. 

A few themes have emerged in the last few months that will impact Information Services businesses:

• The pandemic has caused an acceleration of digital transformation across IS businesses with a move to a new world of work - fast paced by transferring the workloads to cloud, collaboration and driving extreme automation in the enterprise. There are businesses who were on a multi-year transformation journeys who are now rethinking and adjusting the roadmap bringing the completion date of such transformations to 18 months or less. 
• The whole automation and digitization of the value chain with AI right from Data à Intelligence à Insights àAction – with APIfication and service co-creation at all levels would be the bedrock of transformation within Information Service companies. This transformation would be expedited because of this pandemic to drive scale, agility and resilience.
• COVID-19, while reshaping the socio-economic norms, has provided an opportunity for new product investments with a focus on tailoring and incorporating pandemic information, considerations for COVID-19. This will also shape the information and data for resulting situations, such as global economic growth, global trade and monetary and fiscal policies and even a potential recession. 
• While we transition out of the crisis phase of COVID-19 to the recovery phase, we will see an increased focus on cybersecurity. At the height of the COVID-19 crisis, we have seen a multi-fold increase in criminals engaged in COVID-19 related scams and phishing emails to target individuals, small and medium enterprises and large companies. In the past, many Information Services companies have been at the receiving end of such cyberattacks. With many employees working from homes, we will see a strengthening of Virtual Private Network (VPN) services, hardening of firewalls and use of cloud-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions. There will also be a renewed focus in scaling the infrastructure of these enterprises for remote use and an increase in securing the organizations using cloud-based Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions. 
• There is evidence of Information Services businesses rapidly implementing COVID-19 response Chatbot-based solutions which provided the first level of response during the crisis. We see this trend accelerating. On the back of maturity of Conversational AI, customer experience will be the first place in the enterprise to undergo transformation. In the post-COVID phase, we see this leading to the emergence of Invisible CRM led by Conversation AI as the bedrock for B2B engagements of the future. 
• Many Information Services providers are in the business of verifying consumers by providing services like Know Your Customer, Background Checks, License/Registration Renewals, etc. Some of these services enable organizations and governments to provide solutions like Digital Onboarding, Digital Identity and Digital Payments. We see an increasing trend of Digitization of interactions to enable contactless operations. In some ways, this trend will evolve via ecosystem extensions driven by APIfication and Digital channel enablement (self-servicing channels at a product level) that would drastically alter the way the services are consumed and more importantly enhance the customer behaviors. 
• While responding to the COVID-19 crisis, Information Services businesses are taking a step back and are making a conscious attempt to rethink the very purpose of the business of information – trustworthy, reliable and validated information – value added by machine and experts. Transitioning out of the crisis, the world will need more information, insights and expertise from the Information Services providers. There will be an accelerated shift of providers moving away from a product-led approach to a purpose-led, trust-based approach of selling information. Understanding of end customers status and needs post-COVID-19 will determine the success of these providers. These providers will further need to play a larger role in ensuring trustworthy and reliable information is made available to support the return of the economy to normal. 
• Finally, we are seeing Information Services providers coming together and collaborating more. Some of this was an immediate reaction to the crisis and showed the humanitarian aspect of these businesses. In the long run transitioning out of this pandemic, we will see an increasing building of resilient information ecosystems. Every information services provider today has multiple information environments where they create, exchange or use information and data to improve the outcomes for their consumers. We will see a trend of these ecosystems being developed at the fringes and gradually moving to the core of Information Services businesses. Businesses who have mature digital frameworks will be vanguards of this movement and accelerated digital transformation will provide them with an edge over others. 

Information Services businesses who approach this crisis with a strong purpose and are able to adapt to the new socio-economic realities by building resilience will be able to glide over this turbulence and emerge winners in the post-pandemic world.