Digital Transformation. Are you ready?
You can’t afford to wait for this pandemic to be over, so what are you doing to future proof now.
People have an amazing capacity to forget. To revert to their old behaviours. And that might have been the case if COVID had come and gone quickly. But it’s not going anywhere, and we all know by now - this time it’s going to be different.
The question on everyone’s minds is not ‘when will this be over?’, it’s ‘what will the new normal look like?’
As business leaders, however, we don’t have the luxury of being able to sit on the sidelines and watch. We need to anticipate the market. Analyse data and look into the future. Of course nobody knows for sure what the ‘new normal’ will look like, but it doesn’t mean we can’t prepare nonetheless.
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
What’s apparent all around us, however, is that the already-fast digital transformation of organisations, has accelerated to a furious pace.
B2B
In the B2B space adoption of zoom, teams, slack, trello, webex and other digital tools has gone through the roof. And in the background of all that, there are projects frantically going on to protect the security of a dispersed workforce, and to move instantly redundant legacy systems to the cloud.
B2C
In the B2C space the changes are even more obvious, and they happened immediately. If you didn’t have an effective online presence before, you’ve either been playing catch-up, or you’re already out of business. What people have been buying has changed too.
McKinsey surveyed consumer sentiment and behaviour across 45 countries, and on 8th July published their results*. One of the consistent themes, worldwide, was a shift to more mindful shopping. In the US, for example, 31% of people surveyed are changing to less expensive products to save money, and 21% are researching the brand, and product before making a purchase.
And they’re not researching those brands standing in aisle 7 with a mask on. They’re at home, searching online and then getting their groceries delivered to the door.
And that kind of capability doesn’t just happen overnight. So the businesses that were prepared, and ready for the world to go digital have not only survived, they’ve thrived.
To gain a little insight into Australian organisations’ digital preparedness for COVID, we spoke to Rube Sayed, General Manager of a Sydney-based Managed IT Services company, Datcom Cloud.
“For some of our clients it was a seamless transition. They were already 100% in the cloud. Phone, apps, security all in place – and they just got on with it. For many, however, they had to rush through projects that would normally take a year or so, into months. We’ve had to expand our workforce by about 20% to deal with it all.”
So while you might need a crystal ball to know what’s going to happen in the future (in 2020 – who can tell) you certainly don’t need one to be prepared.
If there’s a digital transformation project you still haven’t gotten around to yet.
Don’t wait. Give me call, or reach out on LinkedIn. And I can help.
As the saying goes, you don’t just stumble across luck, it’s what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
So ask yourself, are you just ready? Or are you COVID-Ready…..
