Embrace digitalisation to be future-ready

The pandemic has set off alarm bells for businesses to deploy technology if they wish to remain relevant and resilient in the ‘new normal’ environment

- Nishant Rathi

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown to curtail it is not something the world is going to forget anytime soon. The health crisis has been unlike any other witnessed in recent history, which subsequently triggered an unprecedented economic crisis.

Naturally, in the wake of such a fatal pandemic, businesses all over were driven to implement equally extraordinary measures to safeguard their operations and people. Now with the vaccines slowly rolling out, businesses have begun efforts to resume and restart. For most enterprises and industry sectors, the dawning and ongoing Industry 4.0 (also known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution) is playing a vital role in keeping them afloat. The companies that had already adopted the digital transformation found themselves betterequipped to be resilient. For the companies that had not started scaling, 2020 served as a stark wake-up call.

With the global economies restarting, we are already seeing companies and organisations heeding the said wake-up call, beginning their journey to a digital recovery. Experts agree on four critical areas that need to be addressed immediately if companies want to be better prepared for establishing the ‘new normal’in the postpandemic times.

#1 REIMAGINING THE ORGANISATION

We saw a true adaptation of the power of humanity – which extended to even businesses. We saw apparel brands taking up manufacturing masks and stepping up to fulfil public-health needs. Perfume manufacturers, breweries, and distilleries adapted to manufacture sanitisers. We saw local retailers and vendors setting up a store online to meet their customers who had migrated there. And the unprecedented shift to remote working developed the ‘work-from-anywhere’ culture where productivity does not seem to get affected.