Digital Investments will Help Companies Become Resilient
From sending money, booking tickets for travel to getting furniture on rent, and ordering your food, everything has gone digital. All you need is a smartphone and an internet connection. The past few years have seen significant growth in digital transformation. Companies who still work on traditional strategies may soon need to take digital initiatives to stay afloat in the highly competitive market.
The need for going digital has been ramped up by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While all of the industrial sectors had to shut down temporarily, technologically-enabled businesses were the ones to perform better among all. As such, many companies are feeling the need to adopt more digital solutions and automate their business processes. Automation may not be easily achieved in big corporates but startups are more agile in adopting them. Engaging with employees, customers, and stakeholders through digital solutions is already being tried in various companies.
Adopting digital solutions may also include upskilling the existing workforce in fields like project management, artificial intelligence, data science, cloud computing, or cyber security. E-learning is what helping these companies continue their corporate training programs for their employees during this pandemic. Training programs like online PMP certification, data science course, big data analytics course are gaining increased interest among professionals. CEOs need to create a talent road map as detailed as a technology road map to keep the right talent and upskill employees.
Business leaders who have good decision-making skills would by now know the importance of accelerating their digital transformation process and ensure business continuity. McKinsey Digital even highlighted the fact that 92 percent of companies thought that their business models would need to change due to digitization even before the pandemic started. At present, companies can accelerate their digitalization using two dimensions – at the core of the company and through the development of new businesses. Digital companies taking this twin approach are performing better.
Given the demand, we can also see advancements in the tools that companies used. For example, the demand for video conferencing tools increased drastically during the lockdown. Earlier, there were only a few reliable tools that offered to add more than ten people on a meeting. But gradually, we could see technology companies rolling out even better features in the tools and allowing seamless communication. Remote working and learning are now easier through cloud meetings and team collaboration tools. This can be well implemented in other sectors also.
We are heading towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Artificial Intelligence is a dominant technology driving it. AI and machine learning can help a great deal in bringing digital transformation faster. Companies have realized what applications can be backed by these technologies and don’t want to miss the opportunity to leverage its potential. So, time is ripe to gain some new skills and find a better career in this digital world.
In these uncertain times, going digital is the need of the hour and we can no longer ignore it. Business continuity and resilience can only be maintained through digital solutions and sooner we put in efforts to transform things the better it will be for the future.