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An unprecedented crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought devastating losses like few crises before. It has claimed a huge toll of lives worldwide and led to unprecedented disruption. Over the past several months, the pandemic has had wide-ranging impact on every aspect of our personal lives and work. Recovery may take years, but the steps we take now will shape our lives long into the future.

The implications are profound.

Students all over the world were out of school. The largest number of bankruptcies have been filed since the great recession in 2009. Unemployment rates hit an all-time high. Healthcare costs increased by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Decades of progress in social, academic and economic development is possibly reversed. A few long-run effects reached a tipping point:

• Nearly 93% of US households reported distance learning for school-age children
• 42% of the US labor force is now working from home full-time
• E-commerce has surged this year, accounting for 16.1% of all U.S. sales
• 50 to 175 times more patients were treated via telehealth than prior to the pandemic

The past several months of our fight against the pandemic have taught us new ways to cope. For better or for worse, the way we live, work, learn, earn, spend, care and heal has changed considerably. 

Time to reset, rethink and rebuild.

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” – Helen Keller

The silver lining in this crisis, if any, is that the pandemic gave us a wake-up call to rethink our collective future. It gave us an opportunity to reimagine our ways of living and working, and presented a clear need to build back together and better.

People are our top priority. The health and safety of our families, teams and community matter most. The health and safety of every individual is tied to that of every other individual, making it a collective global cause.

The work-from-home (WFH) economy must include everyone. The ability to effectively function remotely is critical to the containment of the virus and for continuity of work. This requires elimination of internet inequalities and providing access to affordable connectivity and computing facilities to all.

Re-skilling is crucial for re-deployment. Businesses demand workers specialized in digital skills tailored to the industrial sector. There is a mismatch between the supply of skilled workforce and the demand triggered by digital transformation. The solution lies in re-skilling resources with digital skills consistent with the technological developments and pandemic recovery initiatives in industries.

Resilience is a key imperative!

The goal of all organizations in the pandemic era is to bounce back faster and bring back growth, but we also need to develop long-term sustainable strategies to address the challenges facing our lives and livelihoods. We must build our future ecosystems on a strong foundation of resilience.

The traditional definition of “Resilience” in terms of robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, responsiveness and recovery does not effectively represent the rebound needed from the current pandemic or the speed of advancement needed in the post-pandemic era.

The new frame of reference for Resilience must include two additional dimensions:

1. Instinctive – Automated systems that function ubiquitously and enable touchless work
2. Adaptive – Processes that sense and learn on the fly and adapt continuously

A Digital framework for Resilience in the pandemic era.

Digital has already penetrated the transformation initiatives of business environments across several industry sectors. Most businesses look at digital as a means to achieving better experiences, higher productivity and greater agility. COVID-19 brought a new sense of urgency for the digital revolution.

Developing resilient ecosystems is now the new meaning, purpose and agenda for digital. The digital framework for resilience consists of six key building blocks:

1. Digital workplace that enables WFH and effective virtual communication and collaboration
2. Digital process twins that provide full visibility into work and support real-time decision making
3. Digitized processes that increase the clock speed of work and function pervasively
4. Digital workforce assisting, augmenting and adding value to make human life easier
5. Digital process telemetry that monitors, predicts and prevents risks and failures
6. Digital human capital equipped with core and applied technology skills

What does this mean for you as a Leader?

• Consider digital as a long-term investment in providing the infrastructure, data and solutions needed to navigate your organization and teams out of the crisis.
• While “robotic process automation”, “intelligent automation”, “hyperautomation” are all relevant for businesses, Resilient Process Automation is the one that matters most for your organization in the pandemic and post-pandemic era.
• Move beyond one-off experiments and embrace digital holistically towards a resilient future.