As organisations continue their journey from Covid-19 recovery to reinvention, the most successful will be those who can outmanoeuvre uncertainty again, and again, and again.
By accelerating their digital transformations, establishing variable cost structures and implementing agile operations, businesses set to excel, will ultimately have made lemonade out of a particularly brutal basket of lemons.
But without understanding the extent of the business and human impact of Covid-19, many will struggle to develop agile methods for continuous course correction, so let’s look at the topline consequences of the pandemic.
The Shift in Customer Habits
How people buy products and services has been completely reshaped and will likely stay this way long after the virus threat has passed.
Health concerns mean organisations are now bracing for a future focused not just on digital transactions, but on developing entire digital customer relationships.
In a recent report, Accenture points out that companies will need to consider the impact of these changes on the way they design, communicate, build and run the experiences that people need and want.
Cloud architecture will allow organisations to meet these new customer demands and provide an environment for them to test new strategies, respond to new marketplace opportunities and digital customer segments.
The Shift in How Staff Work with Organisations
The abrupt need for staff to work from home during the Covid-19 crisis means companies must understand the evolving requirements of their people, who are grappling with ongoing health concerns, disrupted home lives, as well as challenges with work.
To support the widespread changes, organisations are thinking more holistically about how staff can work flexibly across customer engagement touchpoints and maintain continuity for customers.
Accenture predicts human-centered, systems-minded approaches will promote resilience across all departments and agile work practices will help people and their families survive financially now, and in the future.
The Shift in Operations and Supply Chains
For a time there, the world ground to a halt, and for businesses and governments alike, the fragility of their supply chains came into sharp focus along with the need to change entire operating models to cope with lockdowns, staff safety and a myriad of other hurdles which arose almost instantly. Many organisations globally were forced to implement massive people, process and technology changes in a matter of days and weeks rather than months and years.
In order to maintain this kind of innovation speed and operating flexibility, organisations need to move away from top-down decision-making, and empower their teams to be purpose-led, powered by technology, driven by data, and enabled by cloud, for faster adaptations and responses to change.
At SXiQ we believe the very best organisations now recognise the need for a permanent shift to this level of innovation-velocity and organisational change-adoption-flexibility. To do that, organisations must permanently dismantle rigid structures and utilise their IT teams to employ a much more powerful combination of human/machine models to drive greater efficiency and effectiveness. Using technology, machine-learning, intelligent automation and AI, they will succeed to push their organisations to shift towards becoming a more intelligent enterprise.
The Way Finances Are Allocated
Many leaders are facing plummeting sales, falling revenue and a sharp uptick in costs. In response, executives have had to act quickly to rebalance for risk and liquidity. At the same time, they are scouring for growth opportunities to sustain the organisation’s future viability.
cutting costs is a critical move to address short-term challenges, optimising existing processes and unlocking trapped working-capital by moving from fixed costs to variable costs will help stretch expenditure further and offer more profound ways to deliver permanent cost efficiencies, ultimately ensuring greater competitiveness as economies rebound.
SXiQ has long seen too many businesses not make full use of their cloud platform’s capabilities. Most organisations see cloud as a technology platform. We see cloud platforms as an economic and business weapon.
Studies have shown organisations utilising cloud technologies are able to pivot their operating models or entire business models far more rapidly than their peers, this flexibility helps those organisations cope better during a recession and importantly they can respond faster than their rivals post-recession as demand rises.
Studies have shown, organisations utilising cloud achieve:
- 27% savings in their total IT spend
- 57% decrease in downtime & 37% decrease in critical incidents – having a profound impact on support labour costs and efficiency
- 343% increase in code deployment frequency
- 37% decrease in time to market
Seize the Moment – It’s Time to Permanently Optimise
With Covid-19 forcing such a drastic recalibration across the entire global economy, it has never been a better time to exploit the full capabilities of cloud technologies to permanently optimise your organisation’s innovation-velocity, organisational flexibility and to position it for an unprecedented advantage in the race to not only recovery but growth.
SXiQ is deeply experienced in cloud architecture, design & cost management strategies, along with rapid, enterprise-grade implementation, migration & operational service across multiple-cloud platforms, allowing us to support any organisation wishing to maximise & optimise their technology operations to help drive significantly greater business resilience, flexibility, efficiency and innovation
Speak to us if your organisation is ready to take advantage of the current upheaval and prepare to lead with insight and agility.
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