How IT priorities are shifting during the COVID-19 crisis

COVID-19 Special Edition: How IT Sectors Are Repositioning Themselves To Handle The Unprecedented Times?

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world topsy-turvy. From people’s daily living to sustain the future, everyone is having a rough time sailing through to maintain their sane.

On the business front, the pandemic has taken the entire world by storm. It has caused mayhem in almost every industry globally – including technology, which claimed earlier that they are equipped enough to embrace any situation. Little did they foresee that COVID was going to affect them more. IT professionals, especially, are in immense stress to deal with the pandemic. From maintaining a large team to supervising the IT of the company while not letting the sales to sink, it is a lot to take in in this new normal. And not being able to visit the offices frequently during the pandemic added to the stress quotient and forced every IT professional to connect remotely and gauge the condition inside the office.

On the flip side, this outburst led to accelerating the digital transformation initiatives for the company. It includes staying connected all the time and discovering new methods to extract real-time data for making smarter and intuitive decisions for the business.

On a positive note, the turmoil has brought about an unprecedented increase in remote working, cloud migration, and a vast focus on assessing and refuging the end-to-end supply and value chain. Besides, for nature, latent carbon emission depletion could result in creating a renewable focus on sustainability implementations.

New technical challenges are sprouting due to the shift in IT priorities.

In the COVID-19 outburst, the need for more number of IT professionals and technologists to step up the ladder has not increased or changed. But what is required is the urgency to look into the matter.

Businesses need IT professionals to meet their demands, drive digital transformation, foster innovation, and function at the top level — today, tomorrow, and the day after. Being proactive and foreseeing new scenarios is how businesses and innovation can react most effectively and swiftly to the present pandemic – and divulge new ways to rebound our economies and boost growth for the future.

The technologists are the warriors of IT departments globally. Velan is devoted to helping businesses during this pandemic by supplying the latest technology, technical support, remote IT support, cloud migration services, training, and financial services.

IT departments are facing diverse challenges, unlike before. From encouraging remote working to overseeing applications and networks (IT Management).

The latest discovery from AppDynamics, a part of Cisco, unearthed that “Technology priorities have changed within 95% of organizations surveyed during the pandemic, and 88% of technologists report that digital customer experience is now the priority.”

Digital projects are gaining momentum in development and deployment.

Businesses are desperately acclimatizing to their not-so-completely finished go-to-digital-strategies. The pressing situation is demanding the technologists to embark on novel digital services and applications that would fit the present reality. And all this has to be completed in an unimaginable lesser timeframe to survive in the market. Not to forget the seamless customer service.

Digital Transformation is at a momentum like never before.

[Reports from AppDynamics, a part of Cisco]

66% say the pandemic has exposed weaknesses in their digital strategy, driving an urgent need to push through initiatives that were once a part of multi-year digital transformation programs.

74% of technologists report that digital transformation projects, which would typically take more than a year to be approved, have been signed off in a matter of weeks.

71% point to digital transformation projects that have been implemented within weeks rather than the months or years it would have taken before the pandemic.

65% of technologists report they have already implemented digital transformation projects during the pandemic that were previously dismissed as unnecessary.

“We saw two years of digital transformation in two months,” says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Website glitches are increasing and so are the challenges to fix it.

Managing frequent website glitches is the biggest difficulty faced by IT professionals during COVID-19. The website glitches are accompanied by a lack of visibility and its repercussions on the customers, keeping check of mean time to resolution (MTTR) with remote IT support.

Pre-COVID, maintaining a pleasant customer experience was one of the important factors for businesses, however, during COVID, customer experience eclipsed other differentiators including – price, brand value, benefits, products, quality, etc. and is on the top.

Some substantiating numbers are:

67% of customers claim unpleasant experiences as a reason for churn.

And not just that, 91% of non-complainers just leave, and 13% of them tell 15 more people about their bad experience.

Owing to these unpleasant downfalls, IT professionals are in need of accurate data to make informed decisions. And without one, they claim to be making blind-folded decisions that could prove them guilty later. With access to IT infrastructure and the digital stack, technologists will be able to drive innovation while businesses regain their composure from the pandemic.

Digital transformation is making the customers happy but at the cost of the employee’s incredible workload.

Several digital techniques show emphasis on building new working ways. It has become a necessity to survive the present pandemic times as staff needs to handle incredibly immense workloads. IT professionals claim that COVID-19 has put crucial technology tightness in their business, and

At an individual level, 61% of technologists feel under more pressure at work than ever before.

It is in addition to the IT professionals doing tasks that were never a part of their job description.

The major setback in accelerating their digital approaches is the lack of resources and support systems. As most of them are involved in working on things which they have never done before, the situation has made them throw blind-folded decision darts to assess the performance of IT systems, network, software applications, etc. It has led them to compromise on providing seamless customer service. Besides, other components like accessing the information on the cloud, IoT systems, mobility, and other technologies are adding to the complexities of the IT infrastructure. The chaotic disposition of distributed systems, cloud-native is making troubleshooting difficult.

Only established and recognized vendors are preferred leaving zero room for new vendors.

If not for COVID-19, IT professionals would have welcomed new vendors. But due to this pressing situation, the IT sector is preferring to deal only with the established and recognized vendors to remove the unwanted stress that would otherwise come with a new vendor.

Dealing with well-known vendors has given the technologists and IT staff to work on free or discounted software, support, services, and training.

The reliance on free software will mean that IT professionals must concentrate more on disaster recovery, app security, and work on solutions to provide flawless digital customer service.

IT Industry: Nevermore relevant

On a bigger picture, IT professionals reckon that the pandemic is a canny call for their business – both pleasant and unpleasant. It has led to fastening the digital transformation, long-term resilience, cloud migration, remote IT support, and real-time data access and has redefined its priorities.

Technology companies are seizing every moment to understand how to react to this unprecedented changed market. Not to forget the inevitable surprises that are most likely to spring in the upcoming months.

Nevertheless, amidst all the turbulence and commotion, it is within the realms of IT sectors to discern new preferences, adapt to the changing priorities, and buying systems. The Tech companies that look at capitalizing on these trends will indeed be balanced more than ever to pioneer in the rebound.