Understanding, Assessing and Responding to the New Normal in Three Phases
With Cloud, Edge Computing, IoT, Blockchain, AI, Automation and Robotics seeing accelerated use cases across all major sectors of the global economy, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is truly upon us! The global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus has only helped to accelerate adoption of these technologies that promise to transform entire industries in a matter of a few months or quarters as against years or decades.
This advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has brought business enterprises, public utilities, government organisations and educational institutions face-to-face with four major challenges –
- Disrupted and Overstretched Supply Chains for Industrial, Commercial, Institutional and Consumer Products and Services
- Remote Workforce and Extended Enterprise Management Challenges
- Scaled up Adoption of Contactless Commerce/e-Commerce/Digital Commerce
- Heightened Concerns about the Environmental Impact of Everything
In the post-pandemic ‘New Normal’, four interventions may help managements and institutional leaders improve the effectiveness of their responses –
- Disrupted Supply Chains … Will need to be redrawn and recalibrated for restoring and/or augmenting manufacturing capacity and delivery capabilities, often with significant trade-offs between cost and availability/reliability
- Remote Workforce and Extended Enterprise … Needs to be well-managed through agile business processes, increased hiring of non-permanent (‘gig’) workers, ensuring seamless collaboration through improved training protocols and regular, well-directed communication
- Contactless Commerce/e-Commerce/Digital Commerce … Needs to be reinvented and reimagined for physical settings (malls and retail stores, movie theatres and gyms, hotels and restaurants, railways and air travel); online-to-offline value chains (express cargo and courier services, digital banking and insurance, food delivery services, taxi services, personal grooming services, tele-health and telemedicine consulting etc.), as well as for pure-play digital products (online gaming and movies, video streaming services, e-learning and so on), to cater to increased focus on health and hygiene, and changes in consumer lifestyles.
- Heightened Concerns about Environmental Impact of Everything … Corporations, utilities, governments and communities need to re-evaluate and re-direct investments planned for creating new facilities, new infrastructure and large-scale in-person interventions. The aim should be to optimise costs and improve productivity/utility, while at the same time minimising the carbon footprint of business activities and contributing to the improved sustainability of ecosystems.
In this environment of rapid, worldwide change and accelerated adoption of new business processes and managerial techniques, how can modern IT infrastructure and data-driven solutions help businesses, governments, institutions and individual leaders deal better with uncertainty?
We at StrategINK and our technology partner IBM believe that investments in the right mix of flexible, responsive, secure and optimally available digital technologies can help organisations navigate successfully through the current uncertainty and emerge stronger in significant ways –
- Scalable, high power IT systems can cater to sudden spikes or a sustained surge in demand, for example, due to the telecast of a major online sporting event or, a seasonal surge of more consumers shopping online or, the longer term trend of diversification of sources of supply of raw material and intermediate goods. The ultra-modern IBM Power9TM range of servers running on AIX or IBMi environments can facilitate the seamless functioning of enterprisewide applications such as SAP HANA and SAS. This would allow for smooth, real-time flow of information allowing users to ‘talk’ to each other and respond to requests from their customers, suppliers, employees and citizens rapidly and efficiently.
- Access to 24×7 business information can be enabled using trustworthy IBM Storage solutions that allow for access to data residing across hybrid cloud / multi-cloud storage environments. Remote employees, suppliers, business partners and customers can all be connected seamlessly through digital pipes that secure customer data end-to-end, for example, through IBM LinuxONE enabled data privacy passports.
- In-depth data analytics enabled through powerful AI tools can help to accurately forecast demand. Product and service innovations can be modelled using state-of-the-art ML algorithms and smart BI tools can help to minimise business risks – supply chain risk, financial risk, environmental risks, reputational risk and risk of litigation. Physical and Online channels can be designed to complement each other and provide customers with a seamless O2O experience.
- Our partner IBM have been active in advocating the importance and benefits of increased energy efficiency for both the global climate as well as for businesses and the world economy. IBM R&D and product innovation teams continue to develop and offer products, services and solutions for IBM, IBM clients, governments and society at-large that can enable significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions. IBM is offering cognitive AI based solutions to enable clients (in the real estate, energy and utilities, travel and transportation and government sectors) to ingest and extract the best value from their data in all its forms. These solutions are designed, built, tested and deployed on the IBM Cloud platform. IBM teams continue to work to make IBM products and processes more efficient for both the environment and for businesses, by developing new innovations to help drive economic and operational improvements, increase accountability and lessen environmental impact.
I invite you to register for the Systems Virtual Symposium that is being hosted jointly by StrategINK and IBM on June 24, 2020. The half day event features keynotes and business dialogues about resilient IT solutions from the IBM stable that can help enterprises mitigate unforeseen disruptions, prevent security breaches and easily handle massive data growth.
You will get to hear from and network with industry leaders and be a part of insightful discussions to help you in ‘Creating a resilient and intelligent enterprise’. Register NOW at https://strategink-systemssymposium.kestoneglobal.com/register/.
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