Looking Back and Looking Forward: Expect Rapid Change

As we close out 2021, it is only natural to look back and contemplate. It was certainly another year of immense change affecting all industries: changes in the business environment, including supply chain interruptions; skills and worker shortages and dislocations; changing consumer behaviors; and activist investors and employees seeking new business policies. The rising importance of sustainability, which is now front and center of every C-Suite’s focus, cannot be understated.?

In addition to sustainability concerns changing the business environment, convergence and blurred industry lines have contributed to competition for incumbents. Consider how?companies such as Philips and Spain’s Telefónica have entered the medtech market. Furthermore, technology advancements accelerate competitor innovation. Cloud, data, applied intelligence, agile platforms and ecosystems, plus more productive and human-friendly automation and employee enablement tools are creating new advantages that threaten incumbent businesses.?

What does this mean for 2022?

Businesses need to adapt to the disruption faster. This past year has compelled companies to modernize and accelerate their digital initiatives. This is an intense commitment, and the role of technology is significant. In the last twelve months, we have helped retailers respond to new online demands and we continue to help them respond to supply chain crunches. We’ve also worked with myriad organizations — from pharmaceutical companies to government agencies to healthcare providers — to adopt remote interaction capabilities with co-workers, customers, clients and patients. But not all the asks for rapid transformation have been pandemic related — increasingly, our clients are seeking our assistance with their digital transformations to improve their focus on data and become more data-driven.?

Transformation involves profoundly changing core processes — and business models. Our transformation work with clients ranges from helping them migrate enterprise resources planning to the cloud, to helping companies digitally transform supply chain and manufacturing functions.?To be successful, they need to invest in digital fluency, which not only means providing employees access to digital tools and training — but also leadership and cultural support — to unlock their full potential and ingenuity. For example, when an established consumer products company decided it needed to create a digital workforce to stay ahead of the competition, it embraced educating its workforce. We worked with them to assess skills needed for new roles and their workers logged 272,000 training registrations and recorded 215,000 completions in just 18 weeks — demonstrating a corporate-wide commitment to rapid learning.

Adapting to the ever-changing environment requires an all-hands-on-deck buy-in to transformation and a willingness to embrace continuous learning. But for those who commit to it, it’s an opportunity to stand apart from the competition.

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