Businesses are at a pivotal moment in time. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that global GDP shrank by 4.4% in 2020, and contraction in the most advanced economies is estimated to be 5.8%. Today, however, vaccine availability and distribution brings us the brightest glimmer of hope yet that slowing the devastation of the virus may be a reality. More effectively addressing the health crisis also means economic recovery is becoming a stronger possibility – if businesses can lean into change and embrace new ways of working.

To enable this recovery, organisations across every industry are accelerating their shift to digital solutions. Turning to cloud technology promises to solve their most challenging problems and enable opportunities amidst changing customer demands and regulatory frameworks. In fact, McKinsey estimates the pandemic has fueled a three- to four-year acceleration of companies adopting digital technologies to support their customer and supply chain interactions. The most innovative companies need to rethink how employees collaborate and how they can digitise customer experiences.

Here are three key ways in which companies can use technology to their advantage and fuel their own recovery.

Businesses need to lower their costs and replatform for the future
Macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties create unknowns for every business. As a result, CEOs and CFOs are naturally seeking to optimise areas of their organisations.

Buying, maintaining and upgrading the technology infrastructure needed to run a business is not only difficult, but increasingly it is prohibitively expensive. Fixed IT systems require users to accurately predict their future needs, which now seem out-of-touch with our ever-changing business landscape. By contrast, a cloud server ensures that you only invest in the right amount, enabling users to flexibly adjust their consumption to meet fluctuating demands. This allows businesses to reinvest the remaining capital in creating customer experiences that will drive value creation. Gartner estimates that infrastructure-as-a-service is expected to grow 27.6% in 2021, precisely because of these cost savings and operational efficiencies – two of the greatest benefits of moving to the cloud.

Additionally, companies are realising the potential of a multicloud strategy. This set-up allows businesses to achieve an open, secure and agile infrastructure that can run in any environment, on any cloud. To grow and innovate within a company may mean moving entire on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud, to transform digital operations.

Every business needs a digital front door
The remote nature of our lives—which is a permanent shift—is compelling businesses to use data and analytics to understand their customers better, overall enriching the customer experience.

Lockdowns have accelerated customer preferences for digital alternatives. Face-to-face customer service – a physical front door- is no longer enough to sustain a growing business. Today, customers also demand a ‘digital entrance’, and it’s transcending virtually every industry. In retail, companies are using AI and machine learning to deliver a better, more accurate online experience. Healthcare providers need secure, scalable platforms that support digital patient visits known as telemedicine.

Digital front doors are also changing the way governments work, like leveraging the cloud to distribute unemployment insurance online. With digitisation comes the opportunity for businesses to use data and analytics to make smarter decisions and get closer to their customers by creating more useful and productive experiences. By investing in innovative digital front doors now, companies will remain agile throughout the pandemic, whilst pivoting with changing customer expectations. Companies should celebrate the ease of digital experiences, which are personalisable and in no way mean a sacrifice on quality.

Companies need to embrace new ways of working
The future of work—and, for that matter, the definition of “workplace” itself—has transformed. While the pandemic as we know it will one day subside, our new way of working is here to stay, and it’s heightened the need to rethink how people get things done. We see the need for a new hybrid work environment, where companies and employees can use a digital workspace that allows them to collaborate on a flexible, cloud-native platform to generate new ideas and connect with each other. A successful transition into this new era of work is contingent on how successfully companies keep their people engaged, productive, and connected while reevaluating existing communication and collaboration tools.

No one can predict what the coming years will bring, but companies can control how they respond to uncertainty by investing in agile infrastructure that keeps people and connection at the heart of their operations. At this inflection point in the story of work, the ways in which each company responds to the challenges and opportunities it brings will define their relevance in the future. Those who lean into change, no matter how uncomfortable, and embrace the opportunity to fundamentally transform, will be stronger than before.

The future happens all the time. Technology is fuelling a fourth industrial revolution that is exponentially increasing the rate of change and threatening the relevance of all businesses, regardless of size and complexity. This is placing digital transformation — a term that is often misused — on the strategic agenda of every business.

Digital transformation helps CEOs diversify revenue streams, sustain profitability and increase agility. It is a crucial requirement for companies wishing to remain competitive amid accelerating change and disruption.

Comprehensive digital transformation can be complicated. Complex legacy systems with a myriad components make system-wide transformation extremely challenging. And getting it wrong can be consequential. The International Data Corporation estimates that spending on digital transformation technology will have increased to $2-trillion in 2020. And for every $1bn invested in new technology, according to a 2018 study by the Project Management Institute, $112m is lost to projects that fail. By 2020, companies across the globe had thus wasted a collective $224bn on failed technology transformations.

As globalisation takes hold and digitisation of industries and e-commerce expands, the world’s biggest software developers — such as Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon — have had an effect on the business models of companies of all scales globally. We need to be able to interact with them, leverage their capabilities, and compete with them. Every company thus needs to become a software company. For us to compete globally in a digital era, we should be able to build software as well as they do, while ensuring that ethical design and development considerations are top of mind.

All competitive modern organisations need to place far more strategic emphasis on software development, which is at the heart of digital transformation and competitive advantage. There is very little in the modern world that can’t be automated or enabled with software. We speak of “DevAnything”, because anything is possible with modern technology, software, data, analytics and integration. Software is no longer about a business requirement spec that is handed to an IT team. It has become an integrated, continuous process that enables business to develop creative and innovative solutions.

So what does it take to build a world-class posture on software to support digital transformation in your business? Forward-thinking CEOs need assurance that their organisation is able to deliver on the following crucial components:

Design. Software used to be built around how a company could best deliver products and processes. Consumers in the digital age have become far more demanding in pursuit of the frictionless experiences and instant gratification digital can offer. Technology offers a huge opportunity to differentiate customer experiences, but the stakes are much higher given the pace at which the world is moving. Design of the experiences powered by software has become the essential ingredient of differentiation and competitiveness.

Companies should place customers at the epicentre, gaining insight into their needs and problems and deploying human-centred problem-solving and design techniques to solve their biggest business opportunities and challenges. This “design thinking” approach redefines how we build products and customer experiences. Software designed to solve real problems, and for the customer, is a critical success factor.

Agility. Technology has exponentially accelerated the pace at which business is required to change, and this is happening faster than we can realistically anticipate: we will not know what is coming until it is upon us. The only strategic response for modern business is to build radical agility into software development processes. Agility is increasingly the only meaningful currency when building resilient, antifragile organisations that can adapt to change. To compete in a digital age, all companies should be able to develop with the speed and agility of the best in the world.
Organisations should thus move on from old “waterfall” IT approaches, implement agile enablement methodologies, and put tooling in place that ensures the continuous delivery of quality software. CEOs should have the assurance that they are developing software in ways that will allow their business to deliver products, features and processes, from design through to development and testing, at a predictable cost and at the scale and pace expected in the digital era.

Forming strategic partnerships with software development companies that can understand and translate end-user requirements, and that can scale up or down in response to immediate needs while delivering exceptional software, allows companies to quickly pivot and respond to strategic digital opportunities.

Interconnection. We live in a modern world of networked economies in which trading and making connections, which previously required years of manual negotiation and integration, can now happen in the blink of an eye. The new world of business is fuelled by the ability to rapidly connect internally, with partners, and with other third-party networks to offer new products, services and business processes. New products are unlocked through digital connections with third parties, and new customer experiences are delivered and enhanced by accessing specific data and services (location-based services and operations, for example) available from third parties.
At the heart of modern connectivity is the application programming interface (API), a protocol that allows secure and seamless connection to services provided internally to organisations and through third parties. To truly lead in a digital age, the chief information officer should be creating an API-first organisation that builds software based on its ability to connect. Adopting an API-first philosophy, and having the platforms to facilitate smooth exchange of APIs with other businesses, can revolutionise the quality of products and innovation, and rapidly accelerate time to market.

Digital transformation has become an existential concern for businesses nowadays, and has earned its place on the board agenda. A big part of a digital advantage starts with software. CEOs need to know they have a range of critical capabilities in place to ensure they are able to develop world-class experiences for their customers, and automation and enablement for their businesses that will allow them to remain relevant and competitive. Strategic focus on design, agility and interconnection will ensure they are building platform businesses fit to compete in a modern digital world.