COVID19 AND THE NEED FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

The image below has been traversing the web for a few months now, and it is pointing towards the need of an almost cataclysmic event in order for change to be enacted.

Most businesses have had a digital transformation roadmap in place for a couple of years, but only a few of them have actually completed it. With business becoming almost wholly reliant on the internet in order to continue operations, issues have started popping up that weren’t known before the onset of COVID-19.

It’s kind of like programming – wherein you design and build a piece of software and test it to the best of your abilities. But when the day comes to present your work, it gets a severe bout of stage fright and just embarrasses you in front of what seems like the whole world! That’s exactly the phase businesses are going through with this accelerated growth in digital transformation, especially with regards to working from home.

The waters might be choppy at the moment but just like the programmer above, businesses will calm down, acclimatize and find the best path moving forward. Others however, will not be so lucky.

There have been numerous writings on how COVID-19 will impact digital transformation in the long run, I will be concentrating on three entities I believe that will be impacted greatly by this issue.

Digital Transformation and Government

Let us now cast our eyes towards the bastion of ancient and archaic ways, the Government. In today’s world especially when it comes to ICT, the government paves the way for and drives national digital policies, but most times it is also the last entity to enact such changes fully. Achieving digital transformation within a government is an entirely separate venture compared to enacting it within a private company, no matter how large that company is.

Government is like an ever-changing rubik’s cube of uncertainty, especially in democracies where most countries do not have a set path towards achieving a certain goal. Every new leader that is elected wants to do things their way. This chopping and changing of ideas and shift in general direction makes for quite the muddled national policy; especially if the heads of the institutions responsible for such undertakings also suffer from short employment.

Digital Transformation and Human Resources

I believe that this pandemic should push businesses to upskill their Human Resources (HR) personnel. Their role is much more pronounced in times like these. Not only must they deal with the majority of the staff working from home, they must also be able to communicate effectively in an online environment. Keeping tabs on employee relationships and mental health in person is one thing, doing that online is completely different and I believe new guidelines must be created to address issues like these. Another aspect of HR that is seriously frowned upon the whole world over is the tendency of non-communication between the HR department and prospective employees. With the ridiculously high levels of unemployment around the world and the severe mental strain it puts on people, HR needs to evolve into an emphatic process that actually treats people as humans. If the status quo is still in place after the pandemic slows down, a lot of people are going to be driven into doing something that will have an unfortunate outcome. When it comes to HR and digital transformation, the lines can be a bit blurred as efficiency can override the need for a more personalized touch. An example could be the use of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), which has dramatically increased the amount of resumes an HR department can sort through, but has also taken the human element out of a process that has ‘human’ in its name.

Digital Transformation and Cybersecurity

While allowing the workforce to be flexible is only a small part of digital transformation, it carries with it the need to ensure that services are implemented securely. Securing a sprawling corporate network with thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of nodes across multiple geographical locations is not an easy task. Now imagine taking most of these nodes (composed mostly of end user devices) and having them tunnel into your corporate network from woefully unsecured home networks with the potential risk of having your corporate network compromised with each subsequent connection. Not having full control of devices allowed to connect to your network is a nightmare for any ICT and Information Security department.

Devices need to be protected from many types of risks, including theft and interference; using full disk encryption, enabling strong multi-factor authentication, and using VPN technology to access data are just bare minimum considerations. On the issue of remote work, applications and tools to enable remote productivity need to be vetted and configured to protect customer data and sensitive company material. On the human front, we are always held up as the weakest link, but this is where businesses really need to educate their staff that work from home about various cybersecurity pitfalls (which they should have been aware of regardless). Employees need to be more aware of scams such as phishing and business email compromise, as these may be more exploitable by staff away from the workplace.

This pandemic will of course act as an accelerant towards the full utilization of digital technologies across different facets of many industries. It will also help us find new ways to modernize the HR process and how it relates to the mental wellbeing of workers. I think that there should be an abundance of caution moving forward. Many entities might use this brouhaha as an excuse to bring in and adopt even more invasive techniques and rules that will threaten the very foundations of personal privacy and its meaning and standing within the law and the whole world at large.

Dorian Collier

May 21st 2020

1) Cited: https://www.welivesecurity.com/2020/05/07/digital-transformation-could-be-accelerated-covid-19/