Transforming to build Trust

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft said "We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” And this is a very powerful statement. COVID-19 has had immense effects but not all have been negative. All businesses including government had to adopt to the new environment to bring some normality for their staff and customers.

There are some interesting statistics published by McKinsey:

·     Remote working/ collaboration that could have taken 454 days took 10.5 days to happen

·     Increasing use of advanced technologies in operations happens in about 585 days but took 21.9 days during COVID

·     Responding to changing Customer needs can take up-to 635 days but it happened in 25.4 days

·     Increasing migration of assets to cloud can take up-to 547 days and in reality took 23.2 days

Digital and transformative priorities that were not a priority earlier became critical to business continuity. Local government was under similar pressures like everyone else and not necessarily well prepared for remote working and online service delivery. There is no doubt that we have witnessed 5 years’ worth of tech driven transformation within a matter of months.

LG plays a crucial leadership role to recover – stabilize and succeed. So, what are the top five things to keep on your to-do list?

1.     Strategy leads to successful action (in normal times). During COVID we had to implement several high impact changes to keep supporting our staff and Customers. Now is the time to strategically review the changes, make holistic implementations, find the glue to make changes stick and strengthen the organisations capability ad capacity.

2.    Corporate strategy to be driven by technology – There has never been a greater need for sophisticated enterprise technology architecture and we will have to continue to invest in modernizing core technology capabilities. We will have to be creative in how we provide our staff an engaging and flexible environment to be able to deliver successful outcomes.

3.    Customer needs – Customer are more used to conducting transactions online and we will have to continue to make digital a channel of ‘choice’ and take a quantum leap by focusing on improving the experience.

4.    Economic prosperity and activation has taken a different form and shape, especially for suburban Councils with more residents working from home and using public infrastructure. We will have to think differently about smart cities with space activation, free Wi-Fi, more equipment charging stations, collaboration spaces, charges & fees for small businesses and supporting new entrepreneurs

5.    Well-being – with more and more residents working from home, there will have to be greater emphasis on well-being, health and safety. Perfect time to do more bike & walking paths, think about parking differently, making local spaces vibrant, social support, use of technology for safety and curating more events to encourage well-being

Several changes are here to stay and some need more shaping. You strategies, planning and actions will define if in next 12 to 18 months, you take your organisation backwards or forwards alongside your staff and Customers.

What are the challenges facing your business or organisation that you would like to tackle differently to what you would have done two years ago?