Covid-19
COVID-19 Raises Prospects for Robotic Process Automation
COVID-19 Raises Prospects for Robotic Process Automation The “great lockdown” has had a dramatic and
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ActivEdge's Response
to COVID-19
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have rapidly rejuvenated our operations and adopted a digital-first service delivery model that ensures that we continue to delight our reputable customers and partners, while protecting our employees against all odds.
In contrast to the current restrictions imposed by the pandemic, we have recorded over 40% improvement in our service delivery, completing over 30 Health-Check programs remotely across our customer base in H12020, as we proactively audit the services and solutions supplied to our esteemed customers to ensure that we continue to meet their overall business objectives.
The World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, causing huge impact on people’s lives, families, communities and businesses.
ActivEdge is working closely with organisations and government agencies in Nigeria to help them navigate through the odds of this pandemic, as it disrupts business operations and value streams. Our believe and commitment is that organizations should not just survive but thrive in uncertain times like this. This is an amazing opportunity to digitally transform what we do, and thrive for what is certainly going to be a changed world after this crisis.
COVID-19: Ten key Areas of Focus for Organizations
....our essential guide to survive and thrive beyond the pandemic
Prepare IT to Support the Business
Inspire & Over-deliver
Make Technology Awesome!
Focus on the Customer
Protect Core IT Operations & Processes
Promote Business Process Innovations
Re-prioritize IT Project Backlog
Tighten Up Your Security
Prepare for the Economic Downturn
Manage as a Project
Prepare IT to Support the Business
Activate your team, and institute an emergency IT governance model.
An Emergency Governance Committee should govern decision making with a short-term focus on pandemic response
Governance models are effective at providing oversight during normal operating times; however, they often crumble under speed or economic pressure. The COVID-19 pandemic has focused our need to accelerate decision-making windows while maintaining risk tolerance and alignment to long-term business objectives. For the near term, you must ensure your governance model continues to support effective decision making and optimal use of resources.
What you can do now:
Keeping IT employees focused on critical services and working as a team is job #1. Failure will increase stress levels and decrease engagement.
1. The CIO, in collaboration with IT Steering Committee, should identify the current roles, purpose, and decision areas for governance bodies across the organization, then mold the existing governance system into a streamlined emergency framework to expedite decision making.
2. The team should address the concerns of the business stakeholders who have the most power and who are most impacted by the IT governance redesign.
3. Support your team, keep them safe, and build a backup plan for key roles. The stage of initial crisis management and communication has passed.
4. Establish clear roles and responsibilities across IT to help the organization respond rapidly.
5. Communication and retraining on WFH and remote-working technology is critical. Assume that everyone needs a refresher on all remote technology and any change they need to manage through. Don’t begrudge the time. The retraining investment will pay dividends.
Inspire & Over-deliver
Inspire your team to deliver extraordinary results across impossible timelines:
Continue to Inspire Dedication to Customers. This is the time for the CIO to reach out to each key executive and find a way to deliver results in half the time.
In this time of crisis, CIOs must ask their teams to overdeliver. As a CIO, you need to use your leadership skills to communicate to your team the importance of speed and impact. Your team is in a unique position to mitigate the damage the COVID-19 crisis can inflict on customers and help build customer loyalty through exceptional service during an extremely challenging time. Your team wants to help; they want to make a difference. Now is the time to ask the IT team for extraordinary effort. Find ways to rapidly solve problems. Facilitate teamwork and collaboration so that they can deliver extraordinary results across difficult timelines.
What you can do now:
Inspire your team and make sure that the extra effort and hours are recognized. Now is the time to make a difference.
1. Your team wants to help; they want to make a difference. Now is the time to ask the IT team for extraordinary effort.
2. Reach out to senior organizational and department stakeholders and open lines of communications. Establish direct channels for IT and the business to collaborate. Ensure you ask and don’t assume their priorities.
3. In this time of crisis, find new ways to exceed expectations and build your IT department’s reputation.
Make Technology Awesome!
Have your core processes and technology in place to enable business continuity:
Business continuity, disaster recovery, and work-from-home and collaboration technology should already be in place.
Most organizations are required to have business continuity plans; it’s time to put them to the test and to learn from actual implementation of the plan. Note what worked and what needs improvement. You might already have the core technology and processes already in place to handle this crisis; it’s how you manage the execution that matters. Focus on customers to assure continuity of services. There are four immediate action points we recommend for your IT department to manage that execution, and not only survive but also shine during this crisis.
What you can do now:
Don’t just make technology work, make it awesome!
1. Celebrate individuals and teams that have made extraordinary contributions. Acknowledging these individuals on your team will highlight their efforts to the rest of the organization.
2. Proactively reach out to business leaders; monitor critical infrastructure and key functions for unexpected issues.
3. Overstaff the help desk function temporarily; perform proactive outreach to ensure everything works as people adjust to working from home.
4. CIOs should lead consistent communication across their team and the broader organization where possible.
Focus on the Customer
Understand services that are of greatest importance to meet customer needs
Focusing on both revenue generation and the end customer during this crisis helps both the IT department and the organization.
Depending on your industry and your position on our crisis quadrant, most organizations are facing an impact on revenue. Unless you’re lucky enough to have large reserve funds, most organizations will need to mitigate a drop in revenue with a corresponding drop in costs. Helping your organization find ways to survive the revenue reduction will be the executive leadership’s top priority. CIOs need to identify and focus on initiatives that help the executive leadership as they work to restore services in record time and to post pandemic operating levels. CIOs can innovatively leverage technology to expedite the restoration of services.
What you can do now:
CIOs need to optimize IT spend to mitigate strained revenue
1. Most organizations expect a drop in revenue and demand. CIOs should focus on understanding how the CEO and Chief Revenue Officer need support. Understand the corporate strategy: attack, thrive, or just survive.
2. CIOs should focus on supporting existing customers and constituents as a top priority.
3. Support business processes that need to become remote and less dependent on travel or in-person visits. Prioritize new digital processes that enable the company to continue to deliver and sell where possible.
4. Technology innovation delivered quickly will absolutely impact market winners and losers across all industries. Now is the time to consider technology-enabled innovation.
Protect Core IT Operations & Processes
Expect strain on IT infrastructure, systems, and processes
As much as possible, don’t skirt current processes.
The first necessity is to provide basic infrastructure. It is imperative that basic infrastructure functions. We’ve outlined four action items CIOs should consider to ensure that core IT operations continue to run smoothly. CIOs need to set expectations that IT has a role to play beyond providing a dial tone and basic infrastructure. Once core infrastructure is in place, CIOs should move on to high-value IT functions. ActivEdge recommends asking senior executives if they have the need for any new reporting and analytics capabilities to assist in monitoring the organization’s core health metrics or reporting that can help with the transition to a work-from-home.
What you can do now:
Focus on remote delivery capabilities. This shift may be more permanent than we think.
1. Manage a short-term surge in demand for key systems and processes needed across the crisis:
– Help desk and remote work capabilities.
– Customer- and business-facing websites and call centers.
– End-user security training.
2. Some IT staff will need to be redeployed; be aware of who on your team is experiencing a drop in demand or cannot perform their job at home; redeploy them.
3. Keep existing projects and priorities moving forward and delivering on pre-crisis projects wherever possible. Don’t let panic derail critical projects.
4. Don’t just survive, build key long-term IT capabilities; Let the lessons learned guide the future operating model for IT.
Promote Business Process Innovations
Capitalize on Emergency Business Process Innovations
With social distancing disrupting most organizations, technology and emergency business process innovations will catapult a responsive organization into leadership position, with competitive edge
While the world face unprecedented and widely understood disruption, many organizations still use paper documents for key processes. Customer meetings are still in-person/in-branch events. For regular services to continue, alternatives are needed and IT Leadership must help drive such business process innovations by seeking to understand how technology can be used to alter and disrupt processes inside of their industry. Capitalize on the disruption to offer solutions that would have seemed impossible to implement or manage the change in the past. Never let a good crisis go to waste.
What you can do now:
Observe as employees adapt existing processes with new innovations and capitalize on their creativity. Adopt any longer-term efficiencies.
1. Understand how technology can and will be used to innovate. New habits will be formed, and attitudes around technology use will change.
2. This is an opportunity for CIOs to lead digital transformation initiatives that have long-term value. Move forward with well-researched and understood digital transformation projects.
3. Fast track any innovation initiatives in your portfolio that enable work-from-home strategies, online service provision, and customer engagement.
4. Understand that fast tracking transformational change without sufficient testing, experiments, and data is extremely risky but occasionally warranted in some industries. Go in with eyes wide open.
Re-prioritize IT Project Backlog
Re-prioritize the IT Project Backlog: Keep Key Projects Moving Forward:
You need to make room for pandemic-related projects, but don’t destroy forward momentum in the process
The current crisis will undoubtably affect the prioritization and rollout of your existing IT projects. We recommend a full reprioritization of your existing projects. Make sure to work with executive sponsors to understand their new priorities and changes to projects in flight. Some projects should be halted, some scaled back, some pushed forward, and others started. Determine which is which!
What you can do now:
Take advantage of the lull to purge low-value, questionable projects from your portfolio backlog.
1. Work with senior-most stakeholders to help the organization through the eye of the storm.
2. Don’t just assume that all projects’ priority remains the same. Assign someone on your team to reset priorities across the portfolio.
3. Continue to move forward; don’t delay projects unless you have clear buy-in from the executive team.
4. Renewed funding allocations and risk thresholds will guide prioritization.
Tighten Up Your Security
Be prepared to continue to secure your new environments in the face of new threat:
Criminals love a crisis. The last thing you need in the middle of a pandemic is a brand-new security crisis
We must be proactive about closing new security gaps that are the result of rapid process changes. Nature abhors a vacuum and so do hackers. They will sweep into the space exposed by remote workers, empty buildings, and vacant streets and take any advantage they can find. Let’s also get prepared to address the vulnerabilities brought on by a remote workforce. Many home offices are not secure, with antiquated internet routers configured with default admin privileges and passwords. Make sure that remote staff have a clear communication process to validate any change in process. Teach all end users to err on the side of caution. Focus considerable energy on end-user security awareness in this new reality.
What you can do now:
The top modes of attack during the pandemic have been increased phishing, malicious applications, home users, fake websites, and ransomware. Security awareness for end users is a must.
1. Focus on end-user security training. Hackers will attempt to victimize new work-from-home employees. Begin here.
2. Videoconferencing will also be a target as it is rapidly deployed
3. Physical office security is an increased risk. With everyone aware of work-from-home policies, take extra precautions with physical security.
4. Revisit and review your security strategy. Your security posture may have changed when the world pivoted under the virus. Be sure your risk tolerance is still what it was before COVID-19.
Prepare for the Economic Downturn
Manage IT Budget Cutbacks To Preserve IT Capabilities
Cutbacks are on their way. You will be asked to do more with less and keep throughput high.
Customers and business will be impacted by this economic downturn. This will impact our revenues and will likely increase our risk and potentially lead to declining profits, with CFOs asking that we start looking into cost-cutting measures that can be enacted quickly.
There are chances that you will be in reactive mode initially and then, as the pandemic continues, move to proactive and strategic cost-cutting tactics. Start planning now.
What you can do now:
Most of your cost-cutting objectives can be accomplished without job loss in your IT department
1. The plan you build, and strategy we would recommend depends on the budget cutbacks you need to achieve.
2. Focus more on cost optimization and invest in capabilities that will allow you to do more with less, as against non-strategic cost reduction that eventually undermines your business bottomline.
3. Explore cost optimization strategies in the following four categories:
a) Asset Optimization
b) Vendor Optimization
c) Workforce Optimization
d) Project Prioritization
4. Adopt our boardroom-ready cost-cutting strategy to help you communicate upwards and within your organization
Manage as a Project
The project management triangle of scope, resources, and time still apply
Treat “Surviving the Pandemic” like any critical project. Project management due diligence will be the key to success
This is not unfamiliar territory. As you draft your COVID-19 pandemic strategy for IT, be sure you design and execute the tactic in an orderly, controlled fashion. That means run it like a typical IT project. Capture and communicate your high-level strategic plans and incorporate a longer-term view of possible future post-pandemic initiatives. CIOs should run this pandemic strategy as a project with tasks, resources, and timelines. Assign ownership for resultant initiatives to key IT personnel and ensure they have identified backup personnel in case of illness. None of these initiatives can afford to fail.
What you can do now:
It’s time to turn strategy into tactics. Establish a timeline for your pandemic initiatives and have a more future-oriented look at where you will go in the months to come
1. The IT Pandemic Response Team Leader should assign IT leaders to each initiative resulting from this strategy and ask for regular updates.
2. Run each initiative as an independent project but be aware of dependencies between them. Assign an overall project owner and project manager. Track resources like any critical project.
3. Keep a central version of the plan in your knowledge-base and ensure key personnel keep it updated.
4. As events unfold over the coming months, revise these initiatives and update the plan
5. Be prepared for a long planning horizon. Who knows how long this crisis will last?
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