How does Digital Transformation support Business Continuity post Coronavirus Pandemic?

Digital transformation has become a major focus and challenge for organisations all over the globe. In fact, over 80% of the world's leading corporations now list it as a major part of their ongoing strategic plan and large budgets are going towards transforming their businesses and making them more digitally innovative and future proof.

Business continuity plans are under a particularly bright spotlight during the current pandemic, as companies around the world cope with the crisis. Every organization should have a plan in place to ensure operations and core business functions are not severely impacted by a disaster or unplanned incident that takes critical systems offline.

Technology continues to change the way organisations operate both internal and external, which directly increases the amount of new risks and potential disruptions that can impact the continuity of operations. To fully address and adapt to these changes, organisations are embracing technology to not only better deliver their products and services, but also digitally transform their risk management and business continuity programmes to ensure their organisations remain resilient in the face of ever-emerging threats and risks.

Key pillars of digital transformation:

1. Visibility: Having all of the information required?

2. Control: Managing the change transformation?

3. Compliance: Addressing ethical concerns?

4. Automation: How to begin with Change Management?

IT leaders' main concern is keeping the lights on throughout change. In the case of the current crisis, they must enable a remote workforce and keep IT systems and infrastructure in place amidst varied employee scheduling. To address this need, organizations must rethink business continuity. Historically, business continuity had been confused with (or equated to) disaster recovery. It focused on recovering from sudden challenges and restoring business to "normal" as soon as possible.

But disruption doesn't always arrive on schedule — change can be forced on us by unprecedented events like COVID-19 and the closest thing we have to a guidebook is information from trusted partners with proven track records. The global business environment provides an opportunity and a meaningful justification for a wholesale digital transformation. Making moves to shift to a digital environment now provides immediate benefits for workforce and customer continuity, and shores up your focus on long term productivity and profitability.

In today's world, organizations need to be responsive to continuous, ongoing change. In the COVID-19 climate, especially, it's difficult to know or anticipate what will happen next quarter, next month, or even next week. Most organizations did not factor such widespread and prolonged remote work and related disruptions into their continuity plan. Returning to normal as quickly as possible sounds great, but that normal is now constantly changing. Instead, companies must adapt and become responsive to constant change, including enabling remote work and variable scheduling, to the best of their abilities.

Shifting to Remote Workforce

Shifting to a remote workforce with new ways of communicating is challenging. Here are four key steps to supporting your people through productive continuity:

• Put people first and empower them to interact and communicate everywhere

• Choose the tools and tech to stay connected and competitive in business parlance

• Ensure secure and seamless access across security and compliance

• Deliver real value by collaborating with a proven partner. Seek their help to manage increasingly complex and specialised IT.

Achieving business continuity is much harder for organizations that have not embraced digital transformation. Unfortunately, many organizations waited to embrace digital transformation because they limited their view to simply improving customer experiences and engagement instead of envisioning how the transformation could help them become more responsive. They certainly did not realize that digital transformation directly relates to their business continuity plan.

This is why BCM executives everywhere actually have a unique opportunity. An opportunity to drive through corporate roadblocks and use BCM to leverage more budget. Because by improving your Business Continuity processes and resilience vital in today's complex digital business environment with its ever-present threats – you are also effectively putting all the building blocks in place for your organisation to digitally transform itself.