Embracing digital transformation is no longer a concept to be touted around board rooms, but instead, a solution businesses must adopt immediately if they want to stay afloat in this COVID-19 era. The coronavirus pandemic has reinforced the urgency of digitisation. Organisations everywhere are under enormous pressure to accelerate digital transformation, expand cloud services, and do whatever else it takes to stay connected with customers and workers.

Some organisations were prepared to shift to an entirely remote workforce. What’s striking, however, is the volume of businesses that are still struggling to manage their digital interactions with their customers and employees, exposing the fragility of enterprise IT infrastructures and IT processes.

A new global study from LogicMonitor found that 65% of Australia and New Zealand-based IT leaders experienced initial disruptions or outages with their software, productivity or collaboration tools as a result of shifting to remote work in the first half of 2020. This is well above the global average (54%) of responses from the study, which surveyed 500 IT decision-makers across North America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

Australia and New Zealand-based IT leaders are not alone in their fight to strengthen their digital environments. Overall, 70% of IT professionals are finding it challenging to adapt to their new responsibilities of supporting a remote workforce. Respondents report significant concerns relating to security and stability; specific challenges experienced include the struggle to deal with outages remotely, and the network strain from the increase in remote employees using IT systems. These concerns represent a serious threat to the ability to deliver seamless digital experiences that consumers increasingly demand.

The reality is that there are millions of companies that have not yet transitioned to digital and are still mired in manual processes that hamper the customer experience and put the entire business at risk. Here are three things every business can do to digitise operations and ultimately stay relevant in the market.

#1: Create a strategic plan for digitising the customer and employee experience

Business continuity plans are integral to companies’ ability to withstand an unanticipated crisis. To pull this off, companies need to identify the processes within their business that can be digitised. For example, if you’re a real estate agent, how can you digitise the process of buying or selling a house? If you're a medical office, how can you deliver better remote care? If you’re a government office, instead of relying on in-person services and paper forms, how can you deliver information and services to the public quickly from the comfort of their homes?

Basically, any service you offer that can be digitised and moved to the cloud should be digitised and moved to the cloud. Especially these days, when in-office staff is scarce and on-premises technologies are essentially collecting dust.

The good news is that many businesses are now getting the message and making the appropriate adjustments. LogicMonitor’s survey found that organisations are increasingly embracing the cloud, with 87% of IT leaders stating that the pandemic and the need to work remotely has accelerated their migration to the cloud.

Prior to COVID-19, Australia and New Zealand IT professionals said 68% of their workload was in the cloud, compared to 65% globally. Now that COVID-19 has reimagined the concept of working in-office, Australia andNew Zealand IT leaders expect that number to increase to 76% by 2025.

#2: Look before you leap

Creating new and exciting digital experiences is a necessity for every modern business. The hard part is deploying those experiences with confidence and with certainty that they won’t be disrupted.

One of our customers is a prominent university that, in response to COVID-19, quickly decided to move all of their classes online via the cloud-based conferencing tool, Zoom. However, to make that experience as seamless as possible, the school knew it needed to gain better visibility into Zoom to ensure that its network infrastructure could withstand a surge in usage.

The school’s IT team needed to demonstrate to leadership that everything would work smoothly. After all, digital services have to appear seamless to customers on the front-end, even when so much of what is happening on the back-end can easily go wrong and compromise the entire experience.

Using our built-in dashboards, the school was able to assemble key metrics such as the number of active and inactive users, the amount of storage in use, and the overall status of the Zoom application and its components. These statistics were critical because they gave the school’s administration confidence that the transition to remote learning would go well and ultimately deliver high-quality education to students.

#3: Embrace intelligent automation

Let’s be realistic -- issues with digital experiences are bound to occur. When they do, companies need to have the visibility and capability to quickly identify the root of the problem and fix it. Companies today are aggressively investing in artificial intelligence (AI) and other next-generation technologies to resolve IT issues effectively and automatically, with minimal human intervention.

That’s probably why IT leaders progressively believe that greater automation is the key to maintaining business continuity in the face of a crisis. According to our survey, 74% of IT leaders employ intelligent systems like AI and machine learning to provide insight into their IT infrastructure. Additionally, 93% say automation is essential because it allows their IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives and operate more effectively -- all of which are critical in a time of crisis.

Despite the fact that automation frees up valuable time and resources, IT leaders in Australia and New Zealand are at least somewhat worried about job loss due to automation. Compared to other regions, 13% of Australia and New Zealand IT leaders are most likely to be worried about losing their own jobs due to IT automation, compared to 8% in the US and Canada, and 4% in the UK. However, a large majority of IT professionals view automation as a saving grace when faced with the spectre of pandemic-related layoffs or budget cuts.

AI is key to automatically piecing together patterns and trends to detect red flags and nip any emerging issues in the bud. A monitoring system powered by AI can help prevent outages, save time and money, provide greater insight into user behaviour, and deliver the digital experiences customers want.

The bottom line is that no business today is complete without a digitisation strategy. Every business must learn to ride the wave of digital change or risk being swept away by it.

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WhaTech Staff Writers