Digital Transformation in the Age of COVID-19 and Beyond

For the last few years, both the IT and business worlds seem to have been preoccupied with digital transformation, with it hard to read or listen to anything that didn’t make at least one reference to the need for organizations to digitally transform. Now, unfortunately, the last couple of months have been preoccupied with the COVID-19 crisis.

The crisis has been hard for everyone. No matter their working role. Plus, it’s still likely to be hard for a good while to come. However, there’s a potential “silver lining to the cloud” for digital transformation advancement. With the COVID-19 crisis an opportunity for organizations to push forward their digital transformation initiative(s) – to help them cope with the impact of the crisis on their customers, employees, and operations.

The #COVID19 crisis offers an opportunity for orgs to push forward their digital transformation initiative(s), says @SarahLahav. Here she explains more. #digitaltransformation Share on X

Digital transformation explained

In better understanding the link between COVID-19 and the opportunity for digital transformation, it’s important to appreciate the three different elements of the latter. That digital transformation is all of:

1. The delivery of new products and services, and revenue streams, that exploit technology and data.
2. Improved customer engagement mechanisms across the customer lifecycle, again exploiting technology and data.
3. Improved back-office operations that leverage automation and remove unnecessary manual labor, plus the unwanted consequences of human error.

There’s a lot that needs to be done with digital transformation, and for some organizations it has been – and continues to be – a long journey.

Digital transformation initiatives have been around longer than you think

I was being generous when I said that “The last few years in both the IT and business worlds seem to have been preoccupied with digital transformation…” – digital transformation has been around a lot longer. Although it’s difficult to pin down when the digital-transformation trend first appeared. For example, Wikipedia states that:

“In November 2011, a three-year study conducted by the MIT Center for Digital Business and Capgemini Consulting concluded that only one-third of companies globally have an effective digital transformation program in place.”

Plus, in addition to digital transformation being an IT and business trend for longer than we realize, making digital transformation happen within organizations is often taking longer than expected.

COVID-19 and digital transformation

There are two schools of thought on how the COVID-19 crisis will impact corporate digital transformation initiatives.

On the one hand, the impact of COVID-19 might call for strict cost-cutting and the removal of the budgets allocated for digital-related improvements. After all, most organizations understand that times will be hard throughout 2020 because their customers – whether business or consumer – are also feeling the adverse impact of the crisis. McKinsey & Company’s March 2020 Executive Briefing outlined these hard times in the statement that: “Consumers stay home, businesses lose revenue and lay off workers, and unemployment levels rise sharply. Business investment contracts, and corporate bankruptcies soar…”

So, the tightening of purse strings is likely, if not already happening, in some organizations. With digital transformation efforts potentially a victim.

However, this view of digital transformation expenditure is short-sighted because it’s not really an operational cost, it’s a business investment. One with a positive return on investment (ROI) that was likely ratified via a business case.

On the other hand, some organizations are seeing maintained or even increased IT budgets. For example, a recent Pulse survey of IT leaders found that 72% of them see their budgets increasing or remaining unchanged in the current crisis. It offers hope for the continuation and even acceleration of digital transformation strategies which, if done right, with the right focus on what’s needed right now, will help to validate your organization’s future digital transformation investments. Or at least some of them.

Done right, & with the right focus on what’s needed during the crisis, surely there’s a case for continuing & perhaps accelerating your org’s digital transformation investments? – @SarahLahav #COVID19 Share on X

Accelerating digital transformation to help with COVID-19

One could argue that all three of new products and services, improved customer engagement mechanisms, and improved back-office operations would be beneficial to organizations right now.

First in creating new revenue streams, especially when the new products and services are tailored to the world of social distancing and potentially lock-down scenarios. For example, Universal decided to release new movies simultaneously in movie theaters and online in the middle of March. Something that foresaw the closure of movie theaters and benefited from the lockdown policies in certain countries and the regions within them.

Second, in making sure that customers can both procure and access your organization’s products and services in these difficult times. Plus, that they can receive support as and when needed. For example, supermarkets – while still open for business – have grown their home delivery services. Or travel providers are trying to deflect customers away from the telephone channel – to self-service –to deal with the dramatically increased level of customer inquiries.

Third, and this is the one that’s most likely to be overlooked as a great opportunity for digital transformation in your organization’s COVID-19 response, in making your organization more efficient and effective. And not just in increasing the speed of back-office work or the removal of unnecessary costs, but also in enabling remote working and delivering superior employee experiences that result in better business outcomes.

Take control of the way your work flows

We’re helping our customers to improve their back-office operations. Thanks to SysAid Workflow Designer which gives their process managers the ability to easily design, create, and modify digital workflows themselves.

In doing so, they’re recognizing the changes to ways of working caused by factors such as homeworking, enabling previously disparate teams to work better together in driving up end-user productivity as well as their own. Both of which positively impact business performance. Workflow Designer can also add in service orchestration capabilities with Automate Joe, enabling parts of the digital workflows to be automated to:

• Eliminate unwanted delays and human errors.
• Reduce costs.
• Deliver amazing service to your end users.

It’s the digital transformation of back-office operations in action.

Digital transformation beyond 2020 and COVID-19

While COVID-19 is a catalyst for digital transformation that will hopefully soon be behind us, the changes that organizations make will likely stay. For example, Universal will likely continue to stream its new movies. A proportion of customers that are currently getting home deliveries from supermarkets will likely continue to do so. And many of the back-office and other operational changes that your organization makes as a response to COVID-19 will stay if they allow your organization to better serve its stakeholders.

While COVID19 is a catalyst for digital transformation that will hopefully soon be behind us, the changes that organizations make will likely stay, says @SarahLahav #digitaltransformation Share on X

So, with the right approach, COVID-19 will accelerate your organization’s digital transformation initiative(s). Not only for the life of the crisis but beyond it too.

If your organization has slowed down or sped up its digital transformation initiative(s) in light of COVID-19, I’d love to hear about it. Please let me know in the comments.