* By André Cioffi, CEO of Grupo Squadra
The COVID-19 pandemic has had major short, medium or long-term impacts on our lives. The coronavirus forced us to change simple daily habits and actions and to reinvent ways of working in the face of the need for social distance.
What could we learn during the first months of the crisis? We saw some corporations with more efficient responses and getting more results than the others. Not by chance, it was precisely the companies that were best prepared for the digital scene.
That's because technology has never been more essential for organizations than it is now. With most employees working in the home office and suddenly forced to relate to customers only in the virtual environment, companies had to race against time to enable platforms, applications and solutions, in addition to having to develop ways to capture, extract and analyze data from interactions with consumers.
There are corporations that had already realized the benefits of investing in these strategies in advance and, because they implemented actions before competitors, they did not have great difficulties to continue in activity. Most companies, however, especially small and medium ones, were not prepared to act in this way and ended up losing space and great business opportunities.
The pandemic months proved to us that effective entry into the digital journey enables companies to not only withstand the weather, but also to improve their performance in the face of them. Technologies for the improvement of virtual platforms due to the home office, the use of the Cloud environment, XaaS business applications Everything as a Service), e-commerce it's the delivery provided the maintenance of relevant services and activities for customers.
The winning brands knew how to remain expressive in an increasingly dynamic and agile market and were able to observe opportunities for their business strategy without resorting to a ready recipe, but rather continuously seeking to evolve, in a structural way, to achieve a condition of “Antifragility”.
This is what we call Digital Evolution versus Digital Transformation, in which the evolved companies were already ahead because they have an organizational culture able to visualize which technology is most useful for a certain moment in a natural and continuous way, while those in transformation started a clumsy and brittle race towards digital, , in fact, they should have reflected how digital they were already when the pandemic arrived.
To reach the level of evolution, leaders need to find a path that allows to accelerate and accelerate innovation and reactions, strengthening the resilience and solidity of the organization as a whole and bringing the goals of the teams closer together. Digital Transformation Initiatives often fail without even reaching more advanced stages of implementation because organizations fail to understand the reason for digitization, nor can they manage it in a way that does not compromise the essence of business.
In addition, many mistakenly forget that evolution must involve the entire company and not just the technology area. IT and the business areas must go together to seek the best ways to improve the operation and, in this scenario, the adoption of advanced technology is a natural consequence.
After the first months of the pandemic, in which the main objective was to survive, companies are now facing a new challenge: identifying changes in customer needs, establishing ways to make the most of existing opportunities and finding ways to maintain balance financial. For this, the digital will become more evident and projects that were planned for a period between five and ten years will be put into practice in the coming months.
To overcome this moment, organizations will need strategic partners who are willing to deeply understand their history, their organizational culture and their pain, and who can help them find the most efficient means to accelerate their Digital Evolution. Only in this way, respecting the past that guided them here, but maintaining the vision for the future, will they succeed in this journey that is just beginning.
* André Cioffi, CEO of Grupo Squadra
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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