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Changes To Business Operations ‘Will Be Long-Term’

By 3rd June 2020Blog3 min read

As the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the world and country after country locked down, asking people to work from home as far as possible, many businesses suddenly had to adapt the way they operated.

Writing for the Chartered Institute for IT, Max Burrage, senior manager of business transformation, and Tony Adams, senior director, both at Hackett Group have explored what companies did right with their IT strategies and how they’ll need to evolve to cope with this post-Covid world.

They explained that when the lockdown was initially announced, many firms implemented their business continuity plans. However, they pointed out that these are designed to cope with short-term shocks, not fundamental long-term shifts to how a business operates.

There are plenty of positives to be taken from the situation from an IT perspective, namely that many teams have been able to work remotely and to do so safely with minimal disruption.

Companies that have invested in “digital, agile infrastructure – modernised platforms and applications” certainly saw that investment returned in recent months when it became imperative for people across the business to access systems remotely, they noted.

Another benefit to come out of the swift need to shift to remote working is that IT has gained prominence in many organisations and its importance won’t diminish any time soon. This is expected to increase the speed with which digital transformation initiatives are rolled out.

Now that people have settled into this new way of working and the initial challenges to changing operations quickly have subsided, Mr Burrage and Mr Adams suggested that firms should start to consider their IT and business digital transformation plans in greater detail.

It will be important to “commit to accelerating areas that will improve remote working, agility, responsiveness and efficiency”, they asserted.

In the longer term, businesses will be more open to exploring new technology, they predicted.

Mr Burrage and Mr Adams pointed out that the Covid-19 pandemic has “emphasised the importance of prioritising digital deployments, particularly around key post-virus capabilities such as cloud for agility and security; AI/analytics for performance, liquidity and supply-chain visibility; and zero-trust cybersecurity to support more remote access”.

The past few months have marked a rapid and significant shift in how we work and conduct business and that’s something that both employees and employers are having to grapple with. To what extent some of these changes become permanent has yet to be seen, but few are expecting life to simply return to how it was before Covid-19.

Cloud computing has been named by other experts as one of the crucial factors in allowing businesses to successfully cope with the sudden change in working patterns.

We recently shared the experiences of various businesses in the UK, all of which revealed that cloud computing was one of the key factors that allowed them to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic and, in some cases, rapidly scale their businesses to allow for increased demand.

If you feel your business would benefit from the input of IT experts in Doncaster as you begin to explore your digital transformation options and future technology needs, contact us today.