“We’ve seen the COVID crisis rapidly re-shape both the “what” and the “how” of companies’ digital transformation agendas, notes Mercer’s Swift.
Take employee experience for example, she suggests. “Even as employee experience has become a key theme in the HR community, in IT circles this notion had been getting a mixed reception – sometimes stereotyped as “spoiled employees expecting best-in-class consumer-grade tech on shoestring budgets,” says Swift.
“Today, with a vast portion of the workforce now remote, employee experience of digital technology has gone from “nice to have” to “the only way work gets done. Consequently, it’s getting the problem-solving focus it likely long deserved.”
Swift calls out some other areas of digital transformation efforts that COVID-19 pushed higher on CIO agendas:
- Furthering the reach of customer support via tools including chatbots
- Automation tools for resilience reasons
- Radical housecleaning of redundant or conflicting systems
In response to the pandemic, CIOs have also embraced the notion that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” Swift adds. “Nothing silences an individual’s – or an organization’s – inner perfectionist like a full-blown crisis. In response to dramatic disruption, many organizations have undergone a healthy re-negotiation of their relationship to digital technology – prioritizing “hey, it works!” over “after years of slaving over this initiative, we’ve assembled the very best bells and whistles.”
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