The World COVID-19 Is Bringing Us Is Never Going Away

Disoriented by coronavirus updates? We are too.

But while we’re here, we’d like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the future. It got here faster than we expected.

The future was going to bring us a largely virtual and distributed workforce. Telehealth was coming. A recession was coming… at some point, maybe. There was more unpredictability over the horizon in the form of natural disasters, fragmented government regulation, and flocks of black swans. Data operations were going to provide you with the engine to navigate it all.

In February, funds and corporations were mulling investments needed to modernize technology, and in part provide recession resilience. They were asking how to operate with a smaller and more nimble team. They asked how do we move beyond superficial management productivity solutions to develop a spine of digital operational productivity.

Well hey, next year is suddenly today for many of us.

As we settle into social distancing, and the last CEO and customer success emails roll out to clients, business leaders are trying to figure out what will break first in the next two weeks.

The problem is what do we do in the third week and after? This also represents the opportunity we didn’t ask for. After your team has settled into place, are your systems ready to keep up the level of performance you have promised your investors? Are investors surveying their portfolio and taking note of who is performing well under pressure? They also know that they’re getting a preview of the future, and based on what they can see, they are going to make more decisions.

The window is open to do more than get to April, but that window may be closing. COVID-19 will cease to be a part of our lives on its own timeline. But the world we see today will not recede entirely, and organizations that embrace that reality will be in a better position to serve their customers, employees and investors.