2021 Recovery: Where Should Digital and Tech Leaders Focus
Image by Fabio Ballasina. Santa Monica Pier Lights.
As economies and businesses move slowly towards the next phase of the pandemic recovery, what are the actions Technology and Digital Leaders should be considering?
With every vaccination administered, the world cautiously inches towards a more optimistic post-pandemic future. But what are the actions the c-suite and those responsible for digital and technology should be considering as they prepare for the recovery phase? Here we will detail a number of those actions.
However, before we get to these actions, we should set the wider backdrop and recognise this is not going to be a linear or big bang economic recovery for every industry sector or country. There are sectors and economies which are forecast to recover at different rates. On top of this there are still big global variables to vaccine access and roll-out. Plus, there is the spectre of possible virus mutations which may create setbacks in the vaccination programs. All of these factors are significant, and enterprises should consider them in their planning, especially those with international operations.
Think Strategy, Strategy, Strategy
At the outset of the pandemic, organisations had to make many overnight pivots or tactical manoeuvres to maintain business operations. Some of these actions were accelerations of existing long-term trends (cloud adoption, remote working, hybrid-events, e-commerce etc.), others were simply tactical actions to meet regulatory or pandemic induced conditions.
As companies prepare for the next phase of recovery, they should conduct a detailed review of their strategy. Enterprises should look at the impact the pandemic has had on their business and importantly, their customers and competition. This review should evaluate the impact not only on the short-term but also the long-term. Assessing the impact of these external and internal factors will enable enterprises to make effective plans.
With budgets being tight in many organisations, these plans should be viewed through a long-term lens and prioritised accordingly. Where possible, businesses should look to unlock value early and generate quick wins which build momentum. The digital and technology strategies should be adjusted to enable the business strategy.
Develop a Tech Reboot Plan.
To varying degrees, each industry sector and country has been impacted differently by the pandemic. Some businesses have been able to minimise the impact, whilst others have suffered major business interruptions, including the complete suspension of operations.
As economies and industry sectors begin to reopen, digital & IT leaders should develop in conjunction with their C-suite peers, a detailed plan for how they are going to reboot their operations to support the resumption of business. This is particularly important for complex organisations and / or those with international operations.
This reboot plan should also include any key digital & IT suppliers. For example, if an enterprise outsources its IT support operations, will the outsource partner be ready to resume supporting your business when required. Or will your supplier’s staff have been furloughed or made redundant, which means the supplier will need time to ramp up.
These reboot plans are tactical, if they can align to the revised strategy that is great, but if not, that is OK too. The critical focus is about getting the business operational again.
Secure your Business - Cyber Defence
The pandemic has caused a massive tech-celeration with enterprise-wide pivots to remote working, mass migration to the cloud, increased use of mobile and IoT devices. For cyber criminals, these changes have also been a boon, by increasing the surface area of the enterprise they can attack. This coupled with the increasing sophistication of their attacks, has led the World Economic forum to describe the current cybercriminal threat, as a potential “Cyber-Pandemic”.
As enterprises move to the next phase of recovery, the last thing needed is a costly cyber incident which undermines their growth. Enterprises should ensure their cyber strategy, is best in class for today, with a route map to support their strategy for tomorrow.
Technology Debt – Develop a Plan for it
Like financial debt, having some tech debt is OK when managed effectively. Technology debt is an unavoidable cost of doing business. However, when left to accumulate or inappropriately managed, technology debt can seriously hamper a businesses’ ability to prosper and grow.
In 2020 many organisations had to act quickly to enable home working, reengineer business operations or even their go to market strategy. In the need for speed, these digital fixes will often have added significant new technology debt to the organisation’s existing technology debt.
Going forward, digital and IT leaders should honestly and transparently quantify and qualify their technology debt across the whole tech stack. This includes infrastructure, architecture, data, applications, processes, and importantly contractual obligations.
Given that budgets are expected to be tight, having a transparent view of your technology debt will enable enterprises to effectively plan their digital and technology strategy, prioritising initiatives which enable the business strategy.
Digital leaders should plan for how they are either going to pay down the debt or manage it. The objective is not to achieve zero technology debt, as that is unrealistic. Instead, it is about focusing on what needs to be done to achieve the business strategy and being transparent about it.
Processes - Review & Bed Down
Given the pace of pandemic induced change, enterprises should review their new and old processes to ensure they are still applicable and fit for purpose.
Often, several of the recent changes to processes were designed as short-term stopgaps. However, as the pandemic progressed these stopgaps have become more permanent.
The review of processes should validate if the processes are required and achieving the desired outcome. After that, they should then review if the architecture of the process is optimised for the way the business operates today and tomorrow.
For example, processes for onboarding new starters in a centralised office-based world may not be suitable for an environment in which a significant proportion of new starters will be remotely based. Getting IT equipment & training to remote new starters is imperative, but if that involves working a broken process behind the scenes, this adds a complexity tax to the enterprise.
Likewise, if new systems have been implemented by one department, are they optimising the entire process or is it “work displacement”, i.e., where a workload is simply shifted along the process line from one group to another.
Digital and business leaders should review their processes to ensure they have a platform which sets their teams and organisation up for success.
Digital and IT Organisational Alignment
As part of the strategy review, IT and digital leaders should assess if their organisations align to the future business strategy.
The digital and IT organisations need to ensure they are pulling in the same direction as the business. If they are diverging, this gap needs to be closed. This is more than just focusing on what the business needs to grow but also what the future operational support needs of the business will be. I.e. if the IT support model was previously based upon on-site genius bars or local tech support, this is not going to work for home workers.
Realigning departments to a revised strategy is a multifaceted process, which takes time and is more than simply hiring new talent or publishing a new org chart. Leaders should give themselves the necessary time to allow the realignment to occur and take hold. Digital and IT leaders should also be cognisant that they are part of a complex organisation, with interdependencies across departments, and any changes will have repercussions across the business.
2020 was a year of phenomenal effort for most enterprise digital and tech teams. The start of the economic recovery in 2021 looks to be no different. Business recovery from the pandemic will be lumpy and multi-speed for countless organisations. Just as digital has been critical for the survival of many enterprises, so too will digital be critical for their growth as they emerge from the pandemic. The role of the CIOs and CTOs has changed, today they are now protectors and drivers of the business. Those who develop a joined-up strategy for the future, will be better positioned to ride the waves of recovery.
