Remember back to the good old days before 2020? The days when we actually set foot inside grocery stores, when we planned family vacations to crowded places and maybe even to foreign lands? Those heady days when the only people wearing masks were operating room doctors and nurses, firefighters, or children on Halloween?
Maybe three years from now, children will dress up at Halloween with an N95 mask and a T-shirt with a picture of a dumpster fire on it, and people will know they are “dressing up like 2020”.
Alas, time marches on.
The Effects of COVID-19 Disruption
Even though 2020 might seem like a dumpster fire, and we could see “disruption” of this type and in this context as a dirty word, the disruption we’re facing is altering the very fabric of industry. When looking at all of the existing disruptions out there, and then the onslaught of COVID-19, we see that we are racing headlong into new ground, complete with new risks, and hopefully, with new opportunities.
As a perfect example of the massive change due to the current disruption, many companies are not only allowing, but requiring many of their employees to work remotely. Ford Motor Company, for example, has asked all of its employees working in certain offices to retrieve all of their belongings, and it isn’t because of impending layoffs. “Rather, the No. 2 U.S. automaker is trying to prep for a future in which many, if not most, employees won’t come into the office every day, said Jackie Shuk, a global director at Ford’s real-estate arm,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Ford is rethinking its commercial footprint entirely because the workplace of the future may not be a “workplace” at all, but simply a collection of locations where employees have a laptop and broadband. Some Caribbean islands have even offered temporary work visas and tax exemption to attract these untethered workers for a month or months, or even a year.
Even in the first moments of the COVID-19 lockdowns in China, the effect on the way people worked was immediate. The following chart shows the massive movement in China toward new ways of performing tasks and communicating at the beginning of the pandemic, as referenced by the United Nations.
This incredible, sweeping change in work tools took just days to scale after a massive disruption – the widespread, government-mandated lockdown because of COVID-19. So it wasn’t just that the tools were what people needed; the speed of the delivery and adoption of the tools were also required. The quick ramping up, intuitive usage, and interconnective ability was required. So companies now see something else – according to Forbes, “…one unexpected outcome of COVID-19 is that companies realize the benefits of fast-tracking digital transformation.”
For example, there is massive potential for savings if companies can deliver toolsets nearly overnight that increase remote collaboration and enhance productivity, and the employees that use them don’t need to be colocated. And if the business culture has also become such that marketing, sales, and commercial transactions can occur at higher penetration into the virtual world, then even top-line growth can be expanded. With remote working and remote projects, companies can reduce travel spending, event spending, and real estate investment and save tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. And if companies can now work as well or better in the digital realm, they can extend their reach and scale.
For those things to work, companies need to implement easily collaborative, cloud-based technology tools, as well as increased automation. But this transition is already separating those countries and organizations that are willing to take on the challenge from the ones who are adopting a wait-and-see approach, or no approach at all.
The chasm is growing.
How is Disruption Affecting Digital Transformation?
According to the United Nations, “…the coronavirus crisis has accelerated the uptake of digital solutions, tools, and services, speeding up the global transition towards a digital economy. However, it has also exposed the wide chasm between the connected and the unconnected, revealing just how far behind many are on digital uptake.”
And for companies, it is no different. The Harvard Business Review spells it out: “The stakes for digital transformation have increased dramatically. Now, digitizing the operating architecture of the firm is not simply a recipe for higher performance, but much more fundamental for worker employment and public health. This is creating a new digital divide that will deepen fractures in our society. The firms that cannot change overnight will be left way behind, exposing their employees to increasing risk of financial and physical distress.”
So what are these tools, exactly? What is this march toward digitalization that everyone is talking about? The tools include anything that makes communication, transactional creation and storage, data visibility, and process automation easier, and allows a speedy transition to said technology. Highly adaptive, intuitive, and easy-to-implement tools are winning the day.
Finding the Path to Getting Ahead of Industry Disruption
I have an example that shows the dissonance between architectures, and how it affects everything surrounding a process and organization. I reference two articles, posted within days of each other. The first article, posted on April 3, 2020 by CNBC, talks about the City of New York, at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, designing a coronavirus crisis-management application created in a growing ‘no code’ platform. They created the application in 72 hours.
The other article offers a counterpoint to that story. That article, posted in New York Magazine on April 6, 2020, has this headline, which pretty much says it all: “New Jersey Governor Requests Expertise of 6 People Who Still Know COBOL.”
The article goes on to state, “Over the weekend, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy put out an open call for tech experts to help balance the load placed on the state’s unemployment system, which runs on a legacy programming language called COBOL.”
The point made by the juxtaposition of those two stories, and this entire activity, is clear. There are two paths that an organization can take regarding their digital transformation.
The first is to deceive oneself into thinking that there are simply a number of areas to make an elective investment, and that moving to a flexible, adaptive IT architecture is simply one in a catalog of those many investments that companies may pick or choose. Those leaders drive their companies, in the interest of cost-cutting, into a position where they “cut into bone” and try to push on with whatever systems they have and then wait for catastrophic failure before they do anything. These companies have always looked at IT and innovation, in general, as a cost to be controlled, and when moving in this manner, they should never ask for whom the bell tolls, because it is tolling for those companies.
The second path is to implement a specific strategy and responsible investment plan to deploy systems that are adaptable, flexible, secure, and commercially viable. Any organization, large or small, needs flexibility and adaptability in its IT systems. It must keep evolving or it will fall behind. Just like in the examples above, there will be some companies that have intense resistance to change and to adapting new technologies, and that will result in painful and expensive remediation, the lack of available functionality for those who need it, and sometimes some embarrassing press coverage behind it. The organization that does advance their cause by adapting their strategy to include and be based on new technologies that can be deployed quickly will be in a much better position to flourish.
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