Business Priorities During Covid-19

Business Priorities During Covid-19

As we now realize, the effects of Covid-19 on work and home life have focused our efforts on learning to navigate a new normal. The personal and business impacts of this are evident. On the personal side, we are all learning how to be “Alone, Together” and some of us are adjusting to new WFH colleagues.

On the professional side, organizations who once thought that things like detailed business continuity planning, creating more efficient business models and ensuring good quality data in a central repository would be “nice to have” items, are now waking up to the fact that they are in fact essential. The need to accelerate objective decision making while maintaining risk tolerance and alignment to long-term business goals should be a priority. The pandemic has made it very clear that if an enterprise is to survive over a long arc of time, operating in the most efficient and agile ways is not optional but imperative.

Recent discussions I’ve had with clients, prospects and colleagues have all concentrated on the new challenges they are facing. These discussions have revealed how they are leveraging Bizzdesign Horizzon during critical business decisions in order to successfully pivot and re-prioritize their initial project plans. Some key areas of focus include:

• An IT Resilience Dashboard, which will be a useful tool used to monitor the IT services companies provide as working from home steadily becomes the new normal.
• The security and quality of critical software assets.
• Identifying business processes that need to become remote and less dependent on travel or in-person visits.
• Assessment and prioritization of digital processes that enable your organization to continue to deliver and sell where possible as a result of pandemic shifts.
• Cost containment.
• Portfolio management.
• Application modernization.
• Supply Chain assessment and improvement.
• Project prioritization – keep key projects moving forward, pause others.
• HR plans – creating efficiencies in the way work is done will lead to people decisions, both onboarding and reductions.
• Cloud migration.
• Assess and course correct digital transformation strategies – by accelerating business transformation efforts now, some organizations will be in a better position after the pandemic passes.

This is the CIO and IT executive career opportunity of a lifetime, as executives are in a prime position to mitigate the damage caused by Covid-19. In uncertain times, having your eyes on the future means figuring out a way to help your organization come out the other end in as strong a strategic position as possible. Companies that take a pro-investment approach now are bound to have a lead when the economy rebounds.

It’s critical that CIOs not let Covid-19 stop them from pursuing their IT strategies in support of digital business growth. As sharply as organizations have learned to pivot as needed, we ought to apply the same get-it-done approach to digital transformation initiatives and focus on building key long-term IT and business capabilities. Those that do, will find themselves in a better shape than those that don’t.

We’d love to learn more about what you are working on and help, so drop us a line here and let’s stay connected so that we may all come out of this stronger and more resilient than before.