Companies must evolve to remain competitive and get better
Despite technology being pivotal for pre-outbreak business competitiveness and government effectiveness, the pandemic has since impacted related decision-making significantly and companies’ continuity plans did not fully address pandemic variables.
Typical operational contingency plans are intended for events such as natural disasters, cyber incidents, and power outages. They do not consider potential widespread quarantines, school closures, and travel restrictions for a global health emergency.
Consequently, most public, and private organisations had to appoint a technology leader to manage the crisis. Leveraging technology to create a data analysis and decision-making framework and run simulation exercises has proven essential for business continuity.
Companies must evolve continually to remain competitive and get better at what they do. Organisational change, enabled by technology, is a key component of this transformation process. Effective change management helps companies identify opportunities to gain a competitive advantage through reduced costs, specialisation, and innovation. Furthermore, increased service quality and change to the organisation and related practices is fundamental to this process.
Organisational change, enabled by technology, is a key component of this transformation process.
As with any form of organisational overhaul, digital transformations are typically driven by change agents who understand organisation’s purpose, the power of available technologies, and actively seek out useful new technologies to enable this transformation.
Service quality and change to the organisation and related practices is fundamental
Transforming digitally to improve company performance revolves around five factors: leadership, capability building, empowering workers, upgrading tools, and communication. Red Hat supports companies on their digital transformation journeys, recommending certain areas are considered before embarking on projects.
The first is assessing organisational readiness based on the success factors previously mentioned and paying particular attention to cross-organisational process boundaries. The second is examining the processes used by IT and other groups while looking for potential gaps that could slow progress. Thirdly, companies should consider investing in people and changing leadership when necessary to ensure workforces are comfortable with inevitable change and disruption.
Red Hat observes three key themes emerging. Firstly, the future of work will be highly virtual. Secondly, work from home is here to stay. Here, two major technology trends will accelerate in the post-Covid-19 world – touchless technologies and highly automated robots that augment human tasks, namely robotic automation, and AI. Furthermore, many touchless technologies will emerge due to robots, IoT, and 5G becoming increasingly available.
New devices and technologies will be designed with touchless-first or minimal human intervention principles. And in addition, computer simulation and biotech will also become more prominent.
A sustainable company attracts new talents, customers, and investors. Moreover, integrating climate actions in business strategy, communicating transparently, and demonstrating social and environment governance provides competitive advantages.
With a sustainable business, companies will also drastically reduce energy usage, waste production, and costs. When companies fail to assume responsibility, the opposite can happen, leading to issues like environmental degradation, inequality, and social injustice.
Effective change management helps companies identify opportunities to gain a competitive advantage through reduced costs, specialisation, and innovation.
