By Chris Chirwa
In most organizations digital transformation was perceived to be years away until Covid-19 hit and the business strategies became obsolete and were due for immediate reviews.
I should start by saying that my thoughts and prayers go to the families who have been affected in one way or the other by the Covid-19 pandemic. A lot of people have been infected and gotten sick. A lot of people have lost their lives. Further to this, a lot more people have been affected by their friends and relatives who have been sick.
In many ways, each of us has been affected adversely in one way or the other, in ways I cannot start to fathom or put ‘pen to paper.’
3 months after Covid-19 hit so hard, when the count of confirmed infections was 2.6 million and the number of deaths had reached over 185,000, I received a WhatsApp message from a colleague who is a director in one of the banks. The picture depicted something like “Who led the digital transformation for your company?”, the question had multiple-choice answers: a) CEO, b) CIO and c) Covid-19. Sad as this may sound, there are things we never thought we were capable of adapting prior to Covid-19. To make it worse, there were initiatives that a lot of organizations have been compromising in exchange for short-term gains and in the name of cost cutting. However, in the midst of Covid-19, we have all come to realize how slow we all were to adapt to modern ways of working and doing business. We have all been exposed somehow on how the term “digital transformation” is a household name and yet our digital strategies do not show our readiness.
A week prior to writing this column, I received a forward from one of the WhatsApp ‘subscriptions,’ which I have from a gentleman called Imran. The topic was “What will not be the same after Covid-19?” It dawned on me that technologically, the world will never be the same again.
Let me start with the most common platform, which has seen an exponential growth in usage and in subscriptions. Video conference platforms have seen a surge. Due to the global travel restrictions and social distance guidelines that accompany the Covid-19 pandemic, most organizations have quickly adopted video conference platforms. Thanks to easy-to-use solutions such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Most organizations are carrying out internal meetings, external meetings, and board meetings on video conference platforms. The experience that has come out of video conference meetings has also made us realize how some of the physical meetings can be unnecessary and protracted. For this reason, I can foresee a permanent adoption of video meetings, even after the eradication of Covid-19. We will see less and less travel for meetings unless it is very necessary. The upside is that less travel releases a lot of time for productivity, and the cost savings cannot be overlooked as well. In short, business travel will be subdued, and businesses will have to rely on platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom unless it is necessary.
Online training, whether it be a virtual class or in other forms, has been around for years. However, there has been a slow uptake or resistance to taking it up. Suffice to say that there are some trainings which, by their nature, need physical engagement. The pressure that has been on the corporate world to ensure that skills development does not stop during the crisis has forced participants to enroll for online courses. To the surprise of many, most participants have expressed satisfaction with the arrangement. These are the same trainings that participants used to travel long distances and at times connecting flights just to attend a 2-day training, which now can be offered online. I can see the trend of online training going on, especially now that the executives have an added cost optimization and productivity motivation.
The most disruptive concept during this pandemic period is the working from home policy. Most organizations do not have any work-from-home policy mainly because we never anticipated a day when there would be no option but to work from home. The processes in most organizations are designed for workers who are in physical clusters. This has brought with it a lot of challenges. Maintaining the same levels of productivity has proved very difficult. The challenges range from different age groups for the workers to the fact that most homes are not set up for ‘working from home’.
Working from home is associated with potential security risks. When workers and devices are operating from an enterprise physical location, it is easier for the IT departments to manage them. It is difficult if the same devices and workers are spread over a wider radius, not to mention the physical access risk for the enterprise devices.
Most organizations have made new investments in mobile devices and at the same time have seen a surge in connectivity costs. Substantive system configurations had to follow to ensure the synergy of all these new disjointed devices.
Banks have for years been trying to drive queues away from their banking halls. For years banks have wanted customers to visit banking halls only for transactions that cannot be done online, considering that most banks have automated a lot of their transactions. The bank’s agenda has been to drive queues away from banking halls. With the Covid-19 crisis, most users have been left with no choice but to adopt electronic banking. When these customers realize and experience the convenience of electronic banking, they will never move back even after the end of the pandemic.
By now you must have figured out that the telcos are at the heart of the success of digital transformation, more so the current one influenced by the pandemic.
Organizations are working in reverse to ensure that there are policies to support working from home. Organizations are also working hard to catch up on automation of processes and workflows which relied of physical and manual approvals for decisions to take effect. Electronic document management systems have never been appreciated and sought after than now.
For years, the global supply chain for most technology products has largely depended on China. Major tech companies have their factories out of China. The situation could have been better if organizations had other geographical options for supply when China closed, since it was where the pandemic originated from and hence the first to be on ‘lockdown’. Going forward I can predict that, at the global economy level, there will be interventions to mitigate the risk of overdependence on the China supply chain.
In the grand scheme of things, the success of digital disruption during the pandemic will, to a larger extent, depend on the quality of the organizations’ leadership and their corresponding revised strategies. Leaders will have to be progressive and concentrate on productivity and output than presence.
At the end of the day, when the time comes to go back to what was initially perceived to be normal, there will be some parts of normal which we will never go back to.
History usually repeats itself and there will always be innovations which will be disruptive. Organizations need to be innovative in order to still be relevant in these difficult times where at the global level we are faced with this pandemic. There are some technologies which have already emerged which will disrupt the market.
Leaders should have the sobering reminder that even the strongest of companies can fall. The smaller and innovative companies come in and outwit the larger and slower rivals. If organizations are to survive the Covid-19 impact, this is the time that its leaders should bet the business by going into areas that, traditionally, have not been their strengths.