Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week we explore how the pandemic and the rise of the remote work culture have enabled digital transformation.
Ever since the pandemic outbreak confined employees to their homes, organizations across the globe have strived to build a synchronized virtual workplace, and remote work is transitioning from being an option to being a new, widely accepted work culture. A senior research director at Gartner, called the coronavirus a “wake-up call” for organizations that have been focusing only on mundane operational requirements at the expense of long-term digital resilience. Although companies pushed the technological aspect of remote work—employing make-do remote access solutions and tools to resume business operations after the lockdowns were put into place—today, the focus has changed to transforming the organization as a whole to fit the new normal.
A major realization resulting from these challenges is that the workforce drives digital transformation, but the workforce is often inadequately equipped to do so. Also, large-scale structural changes require sustainable efforts across all business verticals with the needs of the workforce being most important.
Another challenge remote workspaces present to the IT operations’ teams is sustaining the performance of numerous critical applications and networks while ensuring zero disruptions. Adopting artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) is increasingly vital for proactively ensuring distributed data centers and cloud infrastructure services stay current with networks and applications.
The pandemic has created what the World Health Organization calls an infodemic, where netizens are bombarded with information on the internet making it easy for hackers to initiate phishing and other malware attacks. Organizations should take a proactive approach, ensuring continuous, real-time risk assessments, and deploying stringent access management policies, disaster recovery, vulnerability testing, and other intuitive AI-enabled cybersecurity measures.
Organizations can accelerate their digital transformation by building on these insights. We’ve selected some interesting blogs to help you with your journey.
1. How to Harness the Digital Transformation of the Covid Era
In the past few years, automation and technology have been addressed in the context of digital transformation as a threat to employment. But this crisis has taught us that technology can create new jobs as well. Increases in efficiency brought about by digital technology can help organizations expand. Digital platforms can create entirely new jobs by expanding operations into new markets, and increasing efficiency. This pandemic can steer digital transformation in the right direction if organizations and governments prepare and adapt.
2. How COVID-19 has Accelerated Digital Transformation of Businesses
COVID-19 has forced organizations across the globe to either ask their labor pools to work from home or go on an indefinite leave to contain the virus. With the length of this crisis remaining indefinite, digital transformation, with its focus on growth at an accelerated pace, has become imperative. Moving towards a cloud-based ecosystem, and restructuring supply-chain and omnichannel marketing strategies based on digital transformation leverages insights and analytics for operational growth.
3. COVID-19 has sped up digital transformation by 5.3 years, says study
This study explores how the new normal has forced the roadmap for digital transformation to suddenly shrink to a few weeks. While different industries have resorted to different means to stay afloat, the pandemic has modernized everything in a span of a few months from how businesses talk to their customers, to how their workplaces function. We’re seeing how digital technologies are used to completely reimagine the business landscape. By breaking down previous inhibitors to rapid transformation, organizations today understand the importance of a wholesome, flexible remote working model, and a seamless, digital customer experience.
4. Digital Disruption & Remote Working in the Post Covid World
Necessity is the mother of invention, and adversity drives change. The year 2020 is as real as it gets with respect to the stress organizations have endured to unlearn, learn, embrace, and adapt. The explosion of a broad spectrum of digital platforms has led to a world of remote work from anywhere as a commonly accepted corporate practice. This opportunity to transform, if used to their advantage, can help organizations emerge as the leaders in their respective domains.
5. Accelerating digital transformation through remote work
With the sudden surge in remote work, interest in AI adoption has accelerated as one way to increase operational efficiency. While digital transformation moves towards delivering a better customer and employee experience, intuitive technologies are vital for making the remote workforce operate more effectively.AI tools, when used skillfully, can help organizations determine who is working on, and how long it will take to complete a remote work project. AI can also determine which platforms and tools used to complete the project involve the most risk of cyberattacks.
An organization’s digitization efforts are successful only when the people driving the movement are ready to embrace continuous change to achieve growth and innovation. The ability to grasp trends and technological opportunities at transitional times inspires innovation, enabling organizations to adapt to changing market demands. With AI-powered security procedures, controls, and solutions in place, organizations have a better chance to prevent an attack proactively. The key focus for decision-makers should be to create and foster a collaborative work culture utilizing intuitive technologies to bolster productivity, agility, and cohesiveness for remote working.
