Wow! We’ve come to the end of the year. Can you believe it? 2021 is almost over. What a year it has been! From the original COVID virus, we’ve been through the variants Beta, Gamma, Delta, and now Omicron. Just as the virus has adapted, we have also had to adapt our businesses, products, and services to cope with the various circumstances that came along with our fight to overcome the virus.
Lessons from a Virulent Year
1. Strategy development is not a one and done exercise, but rather an ongoing process.
If there’s one thing that this year has taught us, it’s that your business strategy must be fluid in order to survive. Certainly, the strategies we all started the year with are no longer the strategies that we are operating on now. In order to cope with the lockdowns and health risks, we had to identify our critical staff and primary processes so that business could keep going even when restricted by health concerns.
2. Leaders must recognize that the old normal is gone forever, and chart a new future.
This pandemic is the greatest crisis the world has seen in nearly a century and it has accelerated the pace of technological change amongst other things. Now, working from home (or anywhere) has become a normal thing. Remote and distributed teams are no longer strictly the purview of large and/or tech companies. Everybody is on Zoom or Microsoft Teams or Slack or one online collaboration platform or another. So it’s time to start thinking about how to remain effective in such a world.
3. As technology and business become increasingly intertwined, business strategy drives technology strategy & vice-versa
With the acceleration of technology comes a greater interdependence of business on technology and technology on business. How each company navigates this relationship may determine how successful they can become. Because now, the sophistication of a company’s technology can more directly influence their capacity to perform and respond to trends.
4. The time came to consider modernizing your Legacy systems
If you ran your business throughout 2021, the time must have come (possibly on more than one occasion) where you had to consider revamping a core process. Maybe changing how you sell things, moving your software to the cloud, or simply reconsidering your safety protocols. In doing these things, the opportunity presented itself to modernize (possibly outdated) systems of work.
5. The digital workplace has arrived, and with it, the potential for data-driven everything
If it’s true that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, then the digital workplace is eminently manageable.
Delloite Insights – Rebooting the Digital Workspace
With the move to remote work, came the need for a digital workplace. Tools for sharing documents like Dropbox, tools for office communications like Slack, tele and videoconferencing tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams… and so on and so forth. Each of these tools along with their benefits made our usage measurable. Now we generate tons of data with every click and upload and share. If analyzed ethically, this mountain of data can reveal patterns and insights that can then be used to improve our work experience and productivity. The workplace of the future is here – and with our data, it could be even better.
Conclusion
These insights and more, are some of what the year taught us. Did 2021 teach you any lessons? What were they? Now is the time to reflect on them and plan for the new year.
Inspired by Deloitte Insights: Tech Trends 2021