This is a guest blog post by Dr. Chris Marshall, Associate Vice President, IDC Asia Pacific. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
The last 18 months has been blighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. With countries hesitantly coming out of lockdowns, perhaps it’s a good time to ask what we have learned and what it means for enterprise technology and, more importantly, for the people who use technology in our enterprises.
If I had to summarize what IDC has learned from our clients from COVID-19, it might best be captured in two words — DIGITAL RESILIENCY. With digital transformation (DX), digital underpins every aspect of the modern enterprise. This is often ignored in traditional approaches to business resiliency, which typically focus on safeguarding distinct enterprise functions or businesses on a piecemeal basis. It is also often ignored by standard IT risk management and disaster recovery practices that safeguard specific IT assets and resources. Both perspectives typically downplay the critical business capabilities supported by DX that cut cross organizational boundaries. Both are often purely defensive.
By contrast, digital resiliency can be defined as the ability of the enterprise to not only restore essential business capabilities but also capitalize on the changed conditions to bounce back even better than before.
IDC predicts that by 2022, 70 percent of all organizations will have accelerated their use of digital technologies, transforming existing business processes to drive customer engagement, employee productivity, and business resiliency.
But what does resiliency mean in practice? IDC’s research of thousands of companies globally over the last year yields a few lessons: yes, it’s about external threats and opportunities. It’s about technology, too. But mainly, it’s about our people and our attitudes to change. What sorts of changes are needed for resilient enterprises? There are several lessons we have learned on how to make digital resiliency real.
Resiliency means people. It’s not just about work from home — it’s about work from anywhere. Hybrid must be the default work approach, and it calls for investments in technologies that can rapidly scale to support the new distributed work environment. A hybrid workspace is materializing, with some employees reporting to the office, others working from home, and a significant complement working both at home and at the office. Work from anywhere will also mean that talent is available wherever the business wants to get it, so it becomes less about the physical boundaries that historically constrained organizations. A digitally resilient organization will be able to tap into new and diverse pools of talent, using technology to create more borderless talent acquisition. Enterprises will also seek to keep this talent by delivering exceptional employee experiences as well as leveraging human experience technologies and methodologies. Building a resilient workforce is also about engaging employees in a manner that makes them more productive, efficient, adaptable to change, and, ultimately, more valuable.
Resiliency means enterprise security. Trust in an enterprise’s brand and its reputation is won slowly but easily lost. At the highest level, customers must feel safe and secure using an organization’s products and services. COVID-19 unleashed a new wave of security threats for all enterprises. Perhaps the biggest single risk to a company’s brand and reputation relates to how customer data is handled. A digitally resilient organization must have advanced approaches for data privacy and security or put its reputation at risk. If customers lose trust in the organization because of data breach, we are talking about a huge impact on the company’s ability to conduct business digitally. During the pandemic, an increasing volume of business — both consumer and business to business (B2B) — has occurred over digital channels, and it is critical that customers, partners, and suppliers feel a high level of confidence in the organization’s safeguards for privacy and security, as well as its business ethics.
Resiliency means cloud. Cloud first will become the default for many enterprise applications. Migrating to cloud-centric models can reduce the burden of fixed costs associated with technology, staffing, and real estate. But perhaps more importantly, it can improve enterprise agility by supporting the initiation and scaling of business activities using innovative cloud technologies anywhere and everywhere.
About 40 percent of respondents in a 2021 IDC COVID-19 survey believed “digital resiliency is important to support new operational requirements brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic,” and half believed that “having a digitally resilient organization will help them introduce new business.”
Resiliency means innovation and opportunities. During the pandemic, some digitally advanced companies not only continued to operate effectively but were also able to pivot their businesses either to new customer segments or to the delivery of new digital services to support growth. Consistent innovation is the only path to long-term sustainability and such innovation comes from human beings, not from technology. Firms must provide an environment that nurtures employees and ideas that can allow it to opportunistically take advantage of changes in markets and technologies. Innovation also comes from the broader ecosystem of the enterprise, from partners, customers, and suppliers, and how they work together and learn from each other to deliver creative opportunities for value creation.
So what is the punchline?
Resiliency is a necessity in today’s uncertain and interconnected environment. New and different crises will inevitably arise. Your company will be impacted in hard-to-predict ways. Business as usual is an oxymoron. Investments in resiliency cannot be discretionary if survival is part of your agenda.
