DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION REQUIRES TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN INGENUITY

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted people’s lives, businesses, and economies across the world. In less than a year, the global health crisis has changed the way businesses do things. Rapidly evolving challenges to business continuity as a result of the pandemic are testing the resiliency and recovery plans of companies across industries.

- LIONELL GO MACAHILIG

Based on Gartner’s recent Business Continuity Survey, only 12% of organizations globally were highly prepared for the impact of the coronavirus. In the Philippines, the Department of Trade and Industry said 26% of businesses have folded since the start of the crisis back in March. Thus, business leaders must focus their efforts on stabilizing operations while at the same time protecting their people and serving their customers.

In its Continuity in Crisis research, Accenture identified five pillars that can guide business leaders toward achieving operational resiliency during this crisis. These include establishing a resilient culture, where organizations continue to execute work in a collaborative manner; creating broader ecosystems based on social collaboration as the company moves beyond employee workspaces; employing the best combination of agile and elastic workplace models; building a human+machine workforce to automate transactional processes to reduce stress on operations; and adopting a distributed global services model that is driven by customer needs and the availability of the right talent that can cater to those needs.