*By Elisa Carlos
The greatest promotion of digital transformation in history did not come from state policies, nor from investments in startups, much less from acceleration or pitch days. The biggest driver of digital transformation was the pandemic. Big needs are the best ways to drive big transformations.
Yuri Gitahy, an old man at war in the startup ecosystem, back in the beginning of the millennium, compiled the concepts of Steve Blank and Eric Reis: “a startup is a group of people looking for a repeatable and scalable business model, working under of extreme uncertainty.” In other words, a startup needs to discover (blindly) a real problem for many people.
The pandemic opened up uncertainty, isolation generated many real and urgent problems for many people, creating ideal conditions for startups and supporting the much-desired digital transformation. According to Gartner, at the end of 2021, digital transformation is an absolute priority for 66% of the largest companies in the world, with two main focuses: consumer engagement (whose behavior has changed dramatically) and the new work format.
Digital transformation is not synonymous with digitization. Digitization is transforming technologies that were previously manual into digital. Digital transformation encompasses the cultural transformation necessary for digitization to take place. Could you imagine how long it would take (without the pandemic) for us to be able to all work from home? Laércio Cosentino, founder of Totvs, warned us about this many years ago, that before deciding which technologies to implement, it is necessary to work on the mindset digital. People need to think digitally for technology deployment to be effective.
If before, in the office, the manager was able to gather the team with an invitation out loud and the minutes with the delegated activities were in each employee's notebooks, today Google Calendar synchronizes the agendas of people spread all over the world, Tactiq does the min. While we're all on the zoom, someone puts the main points in slack, and even those who didn't participate can understand what was discussed. All delegated activities automatically go to your calendar in the calendar. And if it syncs with Asana then it easily becomes a Gantt. Don't worry about understanding what each of these apps does. What matters is that this new work culture, created by forceps by the pandemic, has generated an incredible technological adaptation. Technology has, in fact, been at the service of humanity.
In parallel with technology, last year American workers created a social phenomenon that was called great resignation or great reshuffle, loosely translated as the great renunciation. We are talking about mass resignations (10x larger than usual). Amid the chaos of the pandemic, workers would rather quit than remain exposed to working conditions they did not consider safe. The virus created a favorable environment for workers to rethink their suboptimal states of life, in their suboptimal jobs, and took the opportunity to position themselves and seek other forms of work. Raj Sisodia, professor at Babson College, had already warned us that almost 70% of the US workforce were unhappy in their jobs, before the pandemic.
in response to great reshuffle, Gartner suggests that HR's job this year is to institutionalize, what they called human centric, as opposed to what we did before: office centric. If before the office was the central point of the company, today the human being (and neither the human resource nor the employee, here we are talking about people with bodies, emotions, feelings and interdependencies) is the center of the company. In agreement with Harvard professor Tsedal Neeley, who suggests looking at the office as a tool and like any tool in the digital age, thinking about the best way to use it to support people's development. They are people who, by transforming themselves, transform the world.
* Elisa Carlos, head of operations at Softex Nacional
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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