Blog / Leadership & Transformation

Digital Transformation in Tough Times: Post-Pandemic Recovery

The recent months of lockdown and remote work have put innovation priorities in order for many companies. In today's post, we will discuss digital transformation after pandemic and what the take-home message for all business leaders here could be. Culture change is the hardest part of digital transformation. But what if the circumstances changed and all of a sudden the organizations and all naysayers within them had no other options than to take decisive actions and accept digital as our new reality. The pandemic and the lockdown measures have made a strong case for digital transformation and the argument has never been more relevant.If something has become clear in the past few months, it’s how quickly digital transformation can happen when it’s not optional. Many companies have made progress that otherwise might have taken years to accomplish. How do we keep up the good work and avoid falling back into old routines and habits? We must go over everything that has been accomplished and bear in mind that most probably the expectations of our clients have also shifted and returning to the way the business was done before is simply not an option. In what follows, we’re gonna trace the main ways digital transformation has changed in the times of COVID19:If other long-term projects, like investing in multi-year software implementations, are currently on hold, everything related to better reaching your clients must remain the top priority. Businesses that had already invested in digital transformation were better equipped to handle the impact of pandemic and leveraged the centralized operations and communications systems for better control and accessibility.During the pandemic, automation moved from the innovation agenda to the resilience agenda. A direct outcome of the need to have fewer humans in many workspaces and reduce the costs of the workforce, organizations were forced to move up roadmaps for hyperautomation and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). With the back-office automation processes in work, the next step would be to overview which processes in the front office could be streamlined by automation.  Customer-facing automation is also one of those digital projects that could add value and become a competitive differentiation for the company.We can call the last few months a large-scale audit of the current state of the digital transformation. Even the naysayers had to give an opportunity to systems that they hadn’t used before and, in the process, gaps, redundancies and conflicts were identified. The actual utility of the platforms became evident through an hands-on experience. It’s in that context that we hear about the cases where a global bank had been struggling to rollout the Microsoft Teams for over 24 months already and, finally in times of pandemic it took 16 days, to get it out to several hundred thousand desktops.It hasn’t been an easy time for decision-makers who faced hard choices to make sure the company will survive in the short term without sacrificing too much of the potential for the medium and long term. All in all the experience of the past few months will be something that a well-managed organization will be better for. The organizations that come out victorious on the other end of the pandemic have built an adaptive ability and aptitude, a skill that will make them a force to be reckoned with.All in all, Growth Hacking is a proven strategy to attract qualified leads and retain them. Pirate Funnel is just one of the best-known frameworks at our disposal to grow the business by identifying its weakest point and certainly a point where you could start your Growth Hacking journey.

Digital-led business is a well-led business! Get on board with Digital Tranformation!

Z
Author

Zigurat Global Institute of Technology