COVID-19 Is a Stress Test of Your Digital Transformation Strategy

COVID-19 is a seismic wave reverberating across every aspect of society, and our thoughts first and foremost lie with those individuals, families and communities most directly experiencing the impact and providing the ongoing response.

Along with the human cost, the COVID-19 pandemic represents the greatest disruption to business anyone alive today has ever seen – a worldwide event with implications for every organization, of every size, on the planet.

“Disruption” means different things to different companies; in the case of COVID-19, the physical distancing required to stem the rate of infection transmission has given rise to previously unforeseen challenges. Here are several examples my agency is currently remediating on behalf of clients:

• A mid-market insurance and retirement services firm that prides itself on its face-to-face sales consultations and customer service is suddenly, as a result of quarantines, unable to engage clients effectively – or develop new business.
• An enterprise housing finance firm with a marketing strategy built around industry conferences and events suddenly has neither on the calendar – and no clear understanding of when or how those might resume.
• A diversified investment firm with a rigid top-down operational model suddenly finds itself in need of a solution to train and enable business units and work groups to function semi-autonomously.

For executives charged by their companies with leading digital strategy, COVID-19 is an opportunity – unintended and unwelcome, but an opening nonetheless – to evaluate the real-world viability of the digital initiatives those organizations have implemented. And, as a corollary, to identify and prioritize additional areas that will need to be addressed – particularly if the disruption turns out to last for months, or a year or more, as opposed to weeks. Or in the likely event that this disruption turns out not to be the last.

Digital transformation isn’t a single occurrence but an iterative process that leads to digitalization, which Gartner defines as “the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities.” Given its broad range of potential impacts, we find it useful to look at digital transformation through a number of lenses:

Employee protection As the saying goes, your most valuable assets are the ones that go home every evening (or, for the time being, work from home every day). Do you know where your employees are and that they are safe? Is your employee information accurate, up-to-date and useful?

Employee communications Effective communication – inbound and outbound, real-time or asynchronous, one-to-one and many-to-many – has never been more essential. Are you able to reach your people via the channels including mobile, secure email, instant messaging, videoconference? Can you verify delivery of mission-critical communications? Do you have an auditable record including timestamps and read receipts? And are you able to customize those communications easily and effectively?

Skill set availability Finding the right skill set at the right time in a distributed workforce can be a challenge even under normal circumstances. Do you have an up-to-date database of your people’s skills and experience, enabling you to acquire the right skill sets as needed for emergency as well as routine work?

Operating model Some operational models are more conducive to distributed teams and remote work. Does your organization enable an appropriate level of autonomy, permitting working groups to self-organize and operate as self-sustaining entities? Does your training prepare group and division leaders to assume the necessary operational responsibility for a sustained period of time?

Adaptability and self-learning The companies that have normalized new working models most easily are those that already saw learning and adaptation as core strengths, and were already pushing the business further along the digital maturity curve. While this way of working comes more naturally to some industries than others – most tech companies consider “disruption” to be part of their DNA – COVID-19 has made clear that even highly-regulated, risk-averse industries need to stretch their imagination and reverse-engineer adaptability into their core business processes.

Digital playbook Every organization has its visible processes as well as its “institutional knowledge” – both of which are necessary for work to be accomplished. Digital transformation by its nature upends some of those processes. A digital playbook acts as an operating manual to guide business units in both the implementation of and philosophy behind essential business processes, enabling them to operate with a greater degree of autonomy.  

Vendor relationships All around the world, organizations are realizing that the businesses they work with and depend upon are literally essential to their survivability. Now is the time to do an inventory of every mission-critical system and vendor and ask yourself whether this is the company whose services you want to rely on going forward. Don’t be surprised if your critical partner list twelve months out looks substantially different from your list today.

Knowledge sharing and management Communications and connectivity are only as useful as the applications they enable – and right now, no application may be more valuable than knowledge sharing. The companies most easily finding their way through the disruption all have the ability for employees to locate, comprehend and apply information relevant to specific tasks and workflows, enabling personnel to take on new roles as needed to ensure core business functions survive.

Disaster preparation means everyone Chances are your IT and operations groups have engaged in business continuity planning – but what about marketing, sales, finance? If any good comes from the COVID-19 disruption, for business it will be the wake-up call that no organization is immune to disruption, or so well prepared as to not have to worry. Just as the disruption is already spurring even greater interest in digital transformation, so too must it prompt greater focus in operationalizing transformations through repeated practice and preparation.

So, how does your organization fare against the above criteria? A crisis of the sort we are now in – and will continue to be in, at some level, for longer than any of us wishes to acknowledge – favors companies that are nimble and bold. Those with confidence in their people, and the systems and processes that serve them – have an advantage.

The good news is, all organizations have the opportunity – some would say the mandate – to mold themselves into the kind of organization designed to survive a disruption like COVID-19, perhaps even to emerge stronger on the other side. Businesses that have already invested in digital transformation will see clearly where their investments delivered the greatest value, and where they will need to consider investing further. And businesses that haven’t truly taken transformative steps can now make better-informed decisions as to where to place their future bets.

COVID-19 has made abundantly clear that digital transformation is more than just a panel topic or a buzzword – it’s a business imperative. And it’s not just about digital point solutions; it’s ensuring the business itself is digitalized, that is, taking advantage of all the opportunities to use digital to solve business problems – including the starkly real challenge of ensuring the survival of the business itself.