Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

According to the consulting firm McKinsey, we have seen a 5-year worth of digital adoption that happened in just eight weeks because of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, industries were compelled to maintain their operations by deploying their workforce and scaling their IT infrastructure remotely. This shift, however, requires the adoption of technology or platforms that can help organisations fully adapt to this new normal, keeping in mind the flexibility, sustainability and security of their employees and infrastructure.

Although forward-thinking organisations were already prepared for this shift before the pandemic happened, many were forced to react to the situation and wander outside their digital comfort zones. Nevertheless, very few can afford to remain stagnant and unchanged as digital transformation is now imperative for business resiliency.

As the majority of industries are shifting their transactions online and more customers, as well as competitors, are picking up new digital activities, businesses that hope to survive and thrive should be quick on adapting to these changes.

A proof of this change can be seen in Indonesia, where around 40% of businesses have already started or intensified their utilisation of remote services such as online streaming, video conferencing and remote learning since COVID-19 started, based on a study by McKinsey.

The 5Rs Towards Business Recovery and Resiliency

Such changes to “business as usual” forces organisations in every industry to ask difficult questions in light of this new reality. For instance, how should they respond to protect their employees, customers and the business as a whole? Business leaders need to think about this kind of question and act accordingly in these times of crisis. For this, McKinsey cited 5 horizons on which leaders need to think and act during these times.

In this pandemic, the first vital step in the business continuity plan should be addressing the immediate social and mental challenges that COVID-19 represents to the institution’s workforce, customers and business partners and take basic steps to protect liquidity.

This is the “resolve” horizon, wherein companies are compelled to make decisions on immediate challenges. At this stage, businesses should be looking to resolve employee, customer, supply chain, immediate liquidity and technology concerns by improving its structure, people, processes and technology.

To anticipate unexpected changes in the digital environment, businesses need to employ a combination of reactive and proactive stances. Most importantly, they need to be flexible – able to act fast whenever the need arises.

This is where the second horizon should be applied – the “resiliency” of companies to the sea of changes due to the pandemic. Teams seeking to boost resilience during COVID-19 need to learn lessons from organisations that survived and thrived in the last recession, which had speed and discipline as their key to success.

After this, companies need to have a plan for their “return”, which is the third horizon. Business leaders need to create a detailed plan to return the business to scale quickly. The last horizons are “re-imagination” and “reform”.

A proactive stance should be implemented to fully adapt to this digital transformation, ensuring business resiliency to the current crisis and others to come. Companies need to ask – what areas of the business that should be adapted, evolved and changed to enable this?

They need to re-imagine the next “normal”— what a discontinuous shift looks like and implications for how the institution should reinvent and be clear about how the regulatory and competitive environment in your industry may shift in the future. Then, they can advance their operations to cope with such demands. This new reality requires investments in technology to protect business operations and fuel innovation.

How VMware Provides the Underlying Architecture for Success

With its phased-approach guide, VMware is able to support every organisation through specific steps and actions they can undertake to move as quickly and deliberately as possible from responding to current and future challenges.

In building a more robust, secure and resilient business, every necessary step should be undertaken in business continuity and resiliency, from responding to immediate changes, adapting to the new normal and further accelerating businesses to ensure they can overcome any unexpected adversity.

How can businesses use technology to build for the future? VMware helps with strengthening and modernising IT foundations, allowing innovation and transformation to industries. With VMware, access to cloud services from any provider, app modernisation and the development of new apps and services for customers and employees is possible, driving differentiation and growth and matching expenditures to operational needs with intrinsic flexibility.

Join our upcoming webinar where experts from VMware will explain further how they can help provide Indonesian businesses with the building blocks of business modernisation and steps to make in overcoming unexpected disruptions.

To find out more and to register for the webinar, click here.

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