Looking at the news and seeing that many economies shrank by 20% or more, because of the crisis is frightening. What we often don’t see is the Herculean task IT teams have had behind the scenes to make vast changes to home working, delivery channels, bandwidth, websites, applications and infrastructure to make things work. This massive amount of change needed for survival has meant that projects to take the business forward have been put on hold.
A lot of the organisations we have spoken to have suffered tremendously because of the crisis, but were successful at managing their costs, putting projects on hold, and adapting to the reduced market opportunities. They are optimistic about the future and can see signs of recovery. Now we need to gear up for new business and get back to growth. This next phase can be equally challenging. Business is rarely like a light switch that can be turned on just because we want it to.
As we start to recover the challenges will be to maintain control over costs and balance this against the need to fire up projects and open up services. Organisations will need flexibility as no-one has a crystal ball and recovery is fragile and fraught with the risks of further backward steps before we can finally put this crisis behind us.