IT's role in staying adaptable amidst disruption
By Roland Chan, Practice Partner, Cloud Advisory - Digital Technology Consulting
It’s obvious to everyone that we live in interesting times. In Australia and New Zealand, the last 8 or 9 months have thrown up massive challenges to the existing operating environment for all organisations, and there is every sign that these challenges will continue into the future. The impacts of this year are clear to see – although perhaps less clear to predict – and late last year, Australia for example, experienced severe bushfires which tested the ability of many organisations to conduct emergency responses and raised pressing questions about the impact of climate change.
We can’t attempt to deal with all those topics here, but what we can do is look at some of the common themes arising from these challenges and how organisations can face them effectively.
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There is a common mantra that floats around the pundit-sphere that “change is the only constant”. Whilst this is broadly true, it understates that magnitude of change that we have experienced recently. It would be better to describe the current environment as ‘volatile’, a word that captures the rapidity and potential impact of change more evocatively.
Throughout 2020 we have seen this volatility impact almost all organisations in several ways:
- Existing work environments are no longer fit for purpose.
- Demand for services is changing radically and quickly, as the movement of people is curtailed or restored.
As a result, organisations need to become far more flexible:
- Decentralising operations to minimise in-person contact to comply with regulations on social distancing and other safety needs.
- Adapting products and services to align with these same distance and safety requirements.
- Altering internal business processes to support the new products and services.
- Scaling organisational capability up and down to meet the changes in demand.
As significant as these changes are, it is also clear that this volatility will not abate any time soon. According to the Beyond Disruption 2020 Business Pulse, half of all Australian and New Zealand organisations expect significant changes to their operating environments for the next one to three years. What to do?
Strategic Impact
While it’s clear that we are not actually beyond disruption, it’s also clear that for any organisation to succeed it must able to adapt to the impact of severe disruption as economically and nimbly as possible.
The study highlighted some interesting points:
- Technology spending is on this rise
- Business modernisation is being fast tracked
- Organisations are open to new and emerging technology
- Organisations are shifting their focus from customers to employees
These first three should not come as any surprise.
A key feature of modern technology solutions is that they are heavily reliant on software. Since software solutions are not based on a fixed physical form, they tend to be more flexible. The state of the art in technology is for solutions that are almost entirely software defined, and this can provide a great deal of flexibility when dealing with challenges, like social distancing, that originate in the physical world. We use the term “cloud” technologies as a shorthand for these software defined solutions.
For example: secure remote access to corporate resources would once have required specialised hardware at both the corporate office and the remote site. Now not only is there no need for specialised hardware, the concept of corporate resources residing at a centralised office is no longer necessary. Technology enables an organisation to decouple many of its business functions from physical locations. Little wonder then, that technology investment and adoption are on the rise as physical locations become more difficult to manage.