Six Areas of Focus During Adversity

In April, ADAPT surveyed over 200 of Australia’s leading organisations to see how they were responding and coping amidst the pandemic.

This was followed up with a joint research effort and deliverable between ADAPT and VMware culminating in the 2020 CIO Report: Continuity, Resilience and Beyond.

This report was underpinned with in-depth interviews conducted by ADAPT with 21 of Australia and New Zealand’s leading CIOs.

Illustrated and discussed below are the six areas of focus that enabled organisations to rise to the challenge presented by the pandemic and forced work-from-home, while at the same time setting them up for business success and resilience, post-COVID.

1       IT proved its mettle: it was at the centre of every organisations ability to transform rapidly at the workplace, customer, and service-delivery level.

2        Traditional thinking around business continuity went out the window as organisations responded to unprecedented and unpredictable disruption, with mindsets and planning shifting more towards the longer term, and how to ensure a style of thinking and working which focused on business resilience.

3        Organisations redefined just what the digital workplace meant. Pre-COVID, for many this meant how they provide tools and capabilities within the traditional work environment.  Organisations had to shift this view to how they can maintain productivity and employee wellbeing through new tools, with a major focus on collaboration in remote, disparate, insecure and often unstable environments.

4        The level of engagement across organisational business units and leadership teams rose to new levels of collaboration as we finally had a single and unifying business challenge to overcome together. This left no room for the silo mentality of a pre-COVID world: silos have finally been dismantled.

5        Many businesses have paid lip service to “people-first” cultures but recent months have seen most organisations drive greater levels of awareness, empowerment, trust and care for their workforces, customers and partners. Corporate wellness programs have taken on increased impetus as employees dealt with isolation, uncertainty and fear.

6        If the current situation has led to a renaissance of the CIO and their importance to the business, technology is more than ever seen as the critical enabler to ensure resilience.

As we shape the path ahead, old ways of planning, financing and deploying technology have gone forever. Organisations have a once-in-a-career opportunity to dispel legacy to the annals of IT history, focusing on technologies and technology approaches that empower ongoing transformation and ensure the investments we make today do not form the legacy headache of tomorrow.