As more countries start to ease lockdown restrictions and gradually introduce phased return-to-work policies, CIOs are increasingly looking beyond the COVID-19 crisis with a view to implementing revamped business continuity plans. Whether it’s a move towards rapid expansion of VPN capacity to handle a surge in workers teleworking from home or undertaking significant transformation in procuring and deploying technology services, navigating the corona crisis requires keeping fingers on the pulse in order to foster effective digital transformation in a challenging business cycle.
To get more insight, we talked to Harryparshad of Ithala about continuity of operations planning, lessons learned from the crisis and how to implement better practices to increase business resilience and spur organisational growth in a negative global growth environment. Edited excerpts follow:
Navigating the crisis in practice
COVID-19 has disrupted operations and will have prolonged impacts on continuity of operations, modes of working and growth patterns. How are you responding to the crisis with both short- and long-term actions to increase resilience against future disruptions and prepare for rebound and growth?
IT investment and digital transformation in companies is often prioritised around the revenue generation functions and streams; however, in times of crisis it becomes a matter of survival to ensure that there is continuity in key operational functions. I refer to these functions as the Critical Value Chain (CVC) of an organisation. Our focus has been rerouted to automation of the CVCs across the organisation. It’s a thought process that challenges the traditional focus on a return on investment, but speaks to sustainability and resilience. In addition to automation of operational processes, we will see a further migration onto digital platforms around core products and customer touch points moving forward.
What alternative employment modes and digital technologies have you identified that can be utilised to empower employees and automate tasks? Are there any interim digital collaboration tools have you sourced to enable employees to work remotely, ensuring security controls and network support are in place?
The digital workplace strategy has now become a high priority at Ithala SOC. We are utilising Microsoft Teams to drive internal and external collaboration across the business. Over the next 9 months, we are aiming to deploy the Microsoft Office 365 stack with the Microsoft Power Platform and tools to support the digital workplace strategy. The strategy to move to cloud and the Microsoft Technology stack will ensure that we operate within a controlled and secure ecosystem. This will allow us to automate most daily operational tasks across the organisation and enable business resilience and agility.
How are you ensuring successful deployment of appropriate digital infrastructure to support the underlying trend of increased digital communications and what tools are your organisation using to engage customers and partners via digital channels to maintain relations?
With the move to Microsoft Teams, our external engagements (be it to service providers or clients) can now be conducted remotely. We are also enhancing our online banking platform and USSD platform with increased functionality to empower our clients. With Ithala SOC having a presence in rural Kwa-Zulu Natal, a high percentage of our clients are not technologically advanced. Their preference is face-to-face engagements at our branches. In support of this, we are looking to further re-engineer processes at a branch level to ensure that a client can be serviced in the shortest possible time. Ithala SOC has a unique client offering available at Spaza Shops and Supermarkets in rural KZN. We have deployed Self Service Devices (“SSD”) across the province in support of our clients. This growing footprint will decrease customer travel time to obtain cash.
IT & business leadership in times of crisis
How are you working with other business leaders in your organisation to conduct workforce planning to assess risk and address staffing gaps?
IT has now become the forefront for business enablement in this time of crisis. With the recent lockdown, we had to rapidly deploy our digital workplace strategy across key areas in the organisation. This entailed procurement of devices, ensuring connectivity, deployment of VPN access and deployment of Microsoft Teams to support and enhance productivity. An important aspect of remote working and workplace automation is the feedback loop back to management. The ability to monitor, track and ensure productivity in support of staff wellbeing.
My recommendation to IT leaders is to ensure that there is adequate effort applied to ensure that the relevant management tools and reports are in place for monitoring of productivity.
The lockdown has been a very successful pilot for the organisation in demonstrating that the previously centralised head office structures can in fact now evolve to become a hybrid model, where certain staff can work remotely (typically from home) without any loss of productivity. In addition, we can now consider the option to increase the recruitment pool for highly skilled staff by allowing staff to work remotely from other regions.
Are you developing a digital workplace strategy that includes collaboration applications, security controls, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs and network support?
Yes we are. Our IT strategy comprises a stream of work focussed on the employee and the workplace. This speaks to a drive to use Microsoft Teams to support collaboration, meetings, training and communication with an end-to-end integration with SharePoint for document management and Power Automate.
What’s your advice to IT business leaders developing digital product extensions, expanding to new channels and enabling new business models to increase business resilience and prepare for growth?
A well-designed and agile business-operating model will find the adoption to new digital channels and modes of engagement much easier. In my view, the design and build of technology is the easier part of the digitisation journey. The business has to be ready to undertake the journey. There needs to be effort applied to change management, training or user readiness, monitoring of users and workflow throughput. The ecosystem and all players within the ecosystem need to be ready for the evolution of the business model. A key component of deploying any solution is ensuring that there is adequate technical and channel support in place.
Furthermore, digitisation of a business is not a once off exercise and is ongoing, as such; IT leaders need to ensure that the technology architecture allows for this.
Looking beyond the crisis from an IT leader’s perspective
What are some of the lessons learned from navigating the corona crisis? What went wrong, what went right?
With the rush to deploy our remote working strategy prior to lockdown, we were faced with the procurement challenge. Being able to procure laptops, 3G cards and cellphones in time for lockdown became an almost impossible task. The entire country was buying in haste at the same time. Prices skyrocketed and stocks dwindled. These tools were critical for the continuity of the business during lockdown; however, we managed to enable every single staff member.
Another challenge we faced was enabling the servicing of equipment at our branches during lockdown. It is vital to ensure that your service providers have local presence and can travel short distances to service equipment and infrastructure.
With the rapid deployment of VPN access and collaboration tools, we did not have the time to train all users, particularly, those that were initially deskbound. This will now form part of our digital workplace strategy.
How has the crisis affected your business continuity plans?
Most businesses have evolved to have disaster Recovery sites as well as business continuity sites for “physical” disasters. Rooms of empty desks and chairs, with telephones and networking for the event that a disaster may occur. This plan unfortunately, does not cater for biological disasters (as we currently face). We now need to gear ourselves for biological disasters. The result of which could be further lockdowns or instances where staff need to work in isolated areas. As IT leaders, we truly have to start thinking for and planning for “true worst case scenarios” when it comes to ensuring business continuity. In addition, we need to ensure agility of our architecture to allow for rapid changes to products, channels and services in line with the market needs during a time of disaster.
Originally posted on CIO Online, Tech Metro, Emex Systems
