COVID 19: The Commercial Impact

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve by exacting a terrible human toll and is significantly impacting businesses and the economy. Companies across all industries should act now to protect their employees and customers. We also should be prepared for a world beyond the corona virus. For a political and economic recovery from COVID 19, you need to determine ‘what’s next’ for your business.

Both the human race and the business world are learning how to adapt to a global pandemic. The COVID 19 impacts has already stimulated an era of changes - from agile working to automation and digitalization to investment in renewals. Companies are embracing their future far quicker than they had anticipated. The actions utilized to respond to the crisis today can set you up for the years ahead.

Impact on people

One of the biggest factors organizations need to deal with is the strategic people issues. A medium-term re-appraisal and rethinking is necessary to address organized work. In order to start the thinking and implementation process, some of the keypoints needed to be considered in relation to each organization and varying people needs will be

• Core – Is your organization capable of remote working to fulfill the processes and protocols?
• Cost – Have you accounted for changes in productivity?. Have you reviewed reimbursement policies for remote workers, policies on paid and unpaid leaves, project releases, capacity ramp downs, and idle employees?
• Connection – Can your IT Infrastructure support the full adoption of remote working?

Setting priorities and making trade-offs to ensure the quality of solutions by keeping in mind the effects on people, process, and technology.

IT in the new reality

Organizations are making adjustments in response to the Covid-19 paving way to IT transformation. Process, technology, governance, people, service delivery, performance insights, and data are the multiple dimensions that require scaling in the new reality. The future of the IT operations is suddenly now with the physical, virtual and digital worlds being converged overnight. To create a transformative event to embed the changes you anticipate are:

• The nature of work
  The new reality redefines ‘work’ completely. It’s not only just the technology and digital solutions that require renovation but the full span of impact on architectures, platforms, and tooling. Finding solutions to questions like who will do the work and where and how should the work be performed is critical to ensure that the IT sector is fully functional.
• Determining the levers to pull
  Determining what is sustainable for the business and the suppliers by prioritizing levers to strengthen and advance the strategy in the new reality is a challenge faced by companies. The factors such as resiliency, agile ways of working, market speed and cost competitiveness should be the keys to develop an IT operations model. Any major changes done to any one layer of operation will cause ripple effects across other layers which have to be taken care of.
• Identify what to stop
  The same rigor and energy have to be applied in determining what to stop or is no longer relevant while considering all the new things your IT operations model requires. To emerge from a situation as now, changes should be made to include shedding historical baggage and not to add another layer on top of the operations model yet.
• Design the future
  All organizations around the world are experiencing short and long term economic conditions due to the COVID pandemic. The reaction, resilience, and recovery operations will be different for each organization and the new reality for each will be in varying ways.

That said, it is clear that the priorities, pathways, and beliefs of every organization will change based on the sector, company, region, and maturity of the IT operations. Tolerance for risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity has to be included in an enterprise’s strategy to face a new reality.

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