All around the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken away lives and jobs, damaged industries and enterprises, and turned the unimaginable into the usual.
All around the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken away lives and jobs, damaged industries and enterprises, and turned the unimaginable into the usual.
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A return to normal, whenever it comes, will be a different normal. What we do right now will define the future, and yet making decisions and acting with assurance has never been more challenging.
But even though each day brings more uncertainties, there are definitive actions that can improve our resilience and strength. A framework that outlines a path forward, lending clarity amid the uncertainty, can make the difference between organizations that thrive and those that don’t.
It's time to prepare for a different normal. Focusing on seven business imperatives can help organizations build strategies to address new challenges that come in the wake of COVID-19.
This special report provides such a framework, organized around seven key imperatives that will be useful for any organization’s executive team. These seven areas are:
- Empower a remote workforce
- Engage customers virtually
- Remote access to everything
- Accelerate agility and efficiency
- Protect against new cybersecurity risks
- Reduce operational costs and enhance supply chain continuity
- Support health providers and government services.
This guide is practical and actionable, offering a set of activities that should be addressed immediately, if they haven't been already. It also suggests longer-term consequences and persistent changes that COVID-19 has brought to industries, companies and individual habits. These changes require actions now to ensure companies adapt to what will be a new, different kind of normal.
There’s much to do and it will seem daunting. The entire executive team will need to be engaged. Our different normal will include new habits—organizational, social and cultural. Each leader will have a role to play in preparing the organization for a successful future. Let’s get to it.
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- Suggested leadership assignment: Talent leaders and Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs)
Read time: 4 minutesAmong the many economic costs that COVID-19 has exacted, the workplace impacts have been among the most significant. The already-considerable challenges of human capital management in a typical work setting—leadership, workforce engagement, productivity, skills—have been moved into uncharted territory. The current global crisis is acting as an accelerant for massive, instantaneous change—the ways we work, how we communicate with each other and our teams, how we learn and innovate—all of these have been completely transformed in a matter of weeks.The work of the CHRO has never been more important—or more difficult. Sustaining communication, collaboration, capabilities and culture in a virtual operating model is now the work of HR leaders around the globe. How are they shifting to a full “work-from-home” model that keeps the workforce engaged and productive, setting up virtual agents on the fly, keeping track of essential workers in the midst of a crisis, and standing up a robust online learning platform, all while simultaneously planning for re-entry and an unknown new normal?One of the essential first steps must be addressing employee health and safety. New IBV research indicates that employees working from home are most concerned about their own and their families’ health. For many companies in crisis mode, this has meant shutting down offices and workplaces, rapidly identifying essential workers, and implementing remote work policies with the associated tools and technologies.But empowering a healthy remote workforce goes beyond providing network-access tools and group-meeting software. Equipping employees to work productively outside a traditional office is also a cultural challenge. For example, how can leaders reflect the values of the company to employees working in their homes? How can teams be equipped to work together when physically separated? How are organizations communicating with the workforce globally and locally?
- Suggested leadership assignment: Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs)
Read time: 3 minutesIn this pandemic, with its extreme social distancing requirements, customers have questions—many unique to this situation that haven’t been asked before.Service centers, government call-in lines, and healthcare providers have been swamped with massive call volumes.Though many of the questions have motivations in common, they invariably can’t be found in a typical FAQ on the website.And training a large group of service representatives to deliver accurate answers in a rapidly changing environment uncovers stresses in the current contact center model.Exponential demand can be met by the exponential power of digital tools.Conversational AI needs to become pervasive, whether chatbots, virtual agents and other automated processes, which have been gradually making their way into business and government operations in recent years.Back in 2018, Vodafone deployed a virtual agent called TOBi to supplement its human customer-service agents.Now, that same approach is being used to address COVID-19-fueled outreach to hospitals, health agencies, government services lines, and more.
- Suggested leadership assignment: Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs)
Read time: 3 minutesWhen shelter-in-place orders were issued, uncomfortable questions arose for many businesses: Can we get everything we need, and do everything we need to do, from out-of-office locations?How do we transition—practically overnight— from our existing model to a virtualized one?Fortunately, IBM, as a tech-at-its-core business, was already configured to operate in this way.But for many organizations it has been a “can-we-do-this?” situation.Business continuity plans have been put to the test, with often undesirable results.What’s needed is a technical architecture and operational resiliency that offers maximum flexibility, and supports a virtual delivery model, which is highlighted in Imperative 4: Accelerate agility and efficiency.As CTOs and CIOs press to adjust to the current reality, here’s what should be in place, at the most basic level:- An inventory of high-value assets, including application platforms, services, and datastores organized by availability and criticality
- Updated roster of crisis roles and responsibilities, to enable rapid, iterative decisions
- An effective 24/7 support capability for the IT operation, to facilitate remote workforce and partner operations
- Distribution of mission-critical tools to varied locations and access points, including independent cloud instances
- Robust platforms for remote work, including virtual private networks (VPNs) and cloud-based productivity apps
- Back-up capabilities for critical services and tools, including remote work support for clients and customers
- An ongoing process to assess and address logistical support gaps with customers, employees, partners, and community stakeholders
CTOs and CIOs need detailed business continuity plans that make the most of digital technologies to create operational resilience and flexibility.
- Suggested leadership assignment: Chief Operating Officers (COOs)
Read time: 4 minutesUp through 2019, the standard operating model for businesses, governments and other organizations was location-based: people would go to work, rather than work coming to them. Customers or clients would physically transport themselves to a specific site to get something done—access government benefits, visit a doctor, buy groceries, or attend events, for example.COVID-19 changed all that. Now, work has to come to us, wherever we happen to be. And we engage with employees, customers, and suppliers virtually. A few organizations have handled this forced “digital transformation” smoothly, others more fitfully.The key to continuing a successful virtual-to-physical transformation, to taking advantage of new-found agility and innovation, lies in the cloud. Going forward, organizations will need to continue modernizing operations to realize the immense benefits of cloud-native capabilities: location independence, talent flexibility, scalability, resilience, interoperability, and seamless transition to a virtualized engagement and delivery model—what we callcloudified delivery.Wherever an organization is on the digital transformation path, COOs can find several operational lessons from what we have learned so far. First, where cloud was once a desired future end state, it is now an indispensable, immediate environment. Second, organizations can move faster than they realized and be nimbler than they believed possible. Third, earlier rationalizations that prevented successful—and speedy—digital transformation can no longer be tolerated. Becoming an agile digital enterprise is essential, and it needs to happen now.This is being borne out by changing attitudes of CEOs and others. Seventy-nine percent of executives say they will prioritize enterprise agility as a central business competency over the next two years.This shift is especially important in healthcare, where there have been numerous recent advances. One provider, for instance, swiftly deployed a COVID-19 app for home-based patients, helping more than 3,000 people self-monitor symptoms and connect to doctors remotely. In another example, a large European government agency scaled-up its online social services benefits application, to meet surging user demand. Meanwhile, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is being rapidly deployed to help overcome the impact of social distancing.
- Suggested leadership assignment: Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs)
Read time: 3½ minutesAs the world struggles with the impacts of COVID-19, cybercriminals have mobilized. Capitalizing on the pandemic, they are launching novel attacks, using tactics from phishing campaigns and malicious domains to targeted malware and ransomware. Since February, IBM X-Force has observed a 4,300 percent increase in coronavirus-themed spam. Cybercriminals are using the coronavirus outbreak to drive their business, with virus-themed sales of malware assets on the dark web and even virus-related discount codes. They are also rapidly creating domains: COVID-19-related domains are 50 percent more likely to be malicious than other domains registered during the same time period.Organizations insufficiently prepared have been caught completely off guard. In fact, 76 percent of organizations don’t have an incident response plan applied consistently across the business. Strikingly, one in four organizations don’t have a plan at all. But even those with resilient operations are being stretched to their limit by this pandemic’s unprecedented scope.Everyone should be reassessing their own cyber-resilience, in light of current conditions. And again, we see this being borne out in the data with nearly 30 percent more executives telling us they now prioritize cybersecurity as a business competency compared to before COVID-19.The rapid shift to remote work has opened new loopholes for cybercriminals. Many displaced workers lack the secure equipment or protocols to maximize digital safety. With employees accessing corporate networks via personal devices, hackers are probing Wi-Fi configurations and VPN connections for vulnerabilities. As people congregate on cloud-based productivity platforms, malicious actors are exploiting the situation, including hacking into and disrupting live meetings. In a recent online poll by Threatpost, 40 percent of respondents reported increased cyberattacks as they enable remote working.CISOs must lead the effort to upgrade their organizations’ planning and response mechanisms. Here’s what should already be in place:- A crisis command center, with cross-functional members, to proactively track operational health and risk metrics, including employee, client, partner, and third-party-supplier risks
- An incident response playbook based on live-simulation exercises that test organizational preparedness
- Virtual cyber-incident reporting and response, including a preferred set of forensic tools that are remotely deployable, with clear chain-of-custody rules for digital evidence
- Security for their growing remote workforce, including unified endpoint management for mobile devices and laptops, as well as identity and access management to safeguard users, applications, and data
- Access to remote and virtual security experts and analysts who can rapidly extend security team capacity, or make specialized skills and subject matter expertise available on demand
- Specific controls, sharing privileges, tools, and storage for specially designated “sensitive” materials and information
- Proactive communication of new threats and phishing risks across the organization and with external partners
- Deployment of increased VPN capacity, Endpoint Detection capabilities, and other secure connectivity and inspection technologies
- Clear guidelines for approved collaboration apps and training on how to use them securely.
Many organizations are stepping up their actions. One European insurer has, in recent weeks, quickly established a new, central, virtual hub for cybersecurity incident response to monitor threats across entities and launch local and group-level responses.As more workloads and users move to cloud operations, accelerated by the current work-from-home requirements, cybersecurity resilience will evolve from a baseline performance requirement into a driver of a competitive advantage. What began as extraordinary will become systemic.Among the steps CISOs should take toward building a more mature cybersecurity operation:- Implement security telemetry and analytics. Early detection and response require automated data collection. With modern telemetry and log file capture, attack vectors can be modeled, signatures created, and breaches re-created.
- Develop security automation capabilities. According to Ponemon, investments in automation can pay for themselves: organizations that had not deployed security automation experienced breach costs that were 95 percent higher than breaches at organizations with fully deployed automation.
- Consume and contribute to threat intelligence. Cloud-based security services monitor traffic over an operational footprint far larger than any single organization, contributing threat intelligence data that enhances cyber-resilience for all organizations; tapping into such threat intelligence expedites detection and response.
- Prioritize collaboration and continuous learning. Cyber-resilient organizations operate in a continuous cycle of discover, learn, adapt and iterate. In times of crisis, effective threat remediation comes down to the ability of individuals to work together on complex problems.
- Raise security awareness. Security is a strategic capability. One study revealed that 51 percent of cyber-resilient organizations communicate the effectiveness of cyberthreat prevention, detection, containment, and response efforts to the C-suite and board of directors.
- Accelerate advanced threat mitigation efforts. CISOs need to be proficient in forensics analysis and threat hunting, considering the benefits of multicloud administration for enabling specialized services that can help deter and remediate advanced threats.
- Build digital trust. Consider how the cloud ecosystem is evolving into a trust network. In a world of interdependent partners, security is a shared responsibility and resilience is a collective business benefit. Leaders should work with partners to establish common governance around users, identities, endpoint devices, and operational assets.
- Suggested leadership assignment: Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and Chief Supply Chain Officers (CSCOs)
Read time: 3 minutesCompanies create supply chains expecting that materials and other inputs will be available when, where, and how they are needed. The COVID-19 crisis has shattered this premise, driving home the need to make supply chains more dynamic, responsive, and interconnected to an organization’s ecosystem and processes.Organizations also face significant challenges when it comes to liquidity. Some scenarios suggest that more than 20 percent of global public companies will run out of cash in the next six months without some form of intervention. While the impact of the COVID-19 crisis vary significantly by industry, thriving will require re-balancing and aligning for the new normal.Today’s supply chains are incredibly complex, with myriad partners spread across multiple geographies as part of an intertwined global trade ecosystem. Understanding supply chain risks requires gaining visibility far beyond the top tier into tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers that, despite their relatively small sizes, can quickly and significantly disrupt production. The knock-on impacts of shutdowns early in 2020 sparked strong interest in geographical diversification of supply chains. Recent reports show that over 90 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies have tier 2 suppliers in the regions of China most affected in the initial phase of the global COVID-19 pandemic.The ability to generate granular, real-time supply chain data has gone from nice-to-have to necessity. Volatility has become hyperlocal, with excess inventory in one city and dire need in another. Meanwhile, macro data about COVID-19’s spread and patterns are being layered onto supply and inventories data to predict flow and demand. For many businesses, saving a few days can make a huge difference in both preparing for, and recovering from impact.
- Suggested leadership assignment: Chief Medical Officers and Public sector leaders
Read time: 3½ minutesJust days before most non-essential US businesses were ordered to shutter, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's COVID-19 Response Plan declared: “For the majority of people, the immediate risk of being exposed to the virus that causes COVID-19 is thought to be low.” Soon after, the data changed, and so did the plan.The radical shifts engendered by the coronavirus have fallen particularly hard on health providers and agencies, as well as many government services.If any area of society requires the added agility that technology provides right now—to deliver the assistance that so many citizens need—it is these.Watson™ Assistant: Delivering fast, accurate answersWhen COVID-19 struck, citizens went looking for answers—about symptoms and testing sites, about the status of schools and transportation, about a whole range of public services.It caused an immediate strain on government agencies, hospitals, schools, non-profits and other businesses.Wait times for answers stretched into hours.All of which hampered efforts to keep citizens, customers and employees as safe as possible.IBM stepped in, bringing together its existing Watson Assistant’s natural-language processing capabilities from IBM Research and Watson Discovery’s state-of-art enterprise AI search.The goal was to train Watson Assistant to understand and respond to common questions about COVID-19, available on the IBM public cloud."Helping government agencies and healthcare institutions use AI to get critical information out to their citizens remains a high priority right now,” explained Rob Thomas, general manager, IBM Data & AI. “The current environment has made it clear that every business in every industry should find ways to digitally engage with their clients and employees. IBM is taking years of experience with advanced AI technologies and applying it to the COVID-19 crisis."Leveraging currently available data from external sources, including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Watson Assistant has been deployed to help government and healthcare agencies around the US and across the world, from the city of Lancaster, California, in Los Angeles County, to New York’s Otsego county, the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Health to Greece’s Hellenic Ministry of Digital Governance.For the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences Center, IBM deployed a virtual agent in nine days which quickly answers questions about testing, symptoms or resources, routing relevant inquiries to a mobile COVID-19 triage clinic electronically to help speed response.Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta built a “COVID-19 Pediatric Assessment Tool” using the Watson virtual agent that walks parents through a series of questions and suggested next steps they should take following the healthcare system’s established protocols.In Spain the Andalusian government’s virtual agent responds to citizen queries about COVID-19 via both the app “Salud Responde” and the Public Agency for Health Emergencies website.In the United Kingdom, an English and Welsh speaking virtual assistant called CERi will soon go live to support healthcare workers and the general public in Wales.One key element is expanding and building on the potential of the human-centered technology interface , to meet changing needs.This begins with helping those racing to find the right treatments, vaccines and cures: scientists, researchers, and health experts, inside and outside government.But it also includes the providers helping to manage the physical, mental, and economic health of citizens today.
Preparing for a different normal
Fortunately, the world rarely experiences a global public health crisis like COVID-19, with mass deaths impacting populations and disrupting economies. We have never been forced to hide in our homes, from coast to coast and country to country, to avoid infecting others and being infected ourselves. The protocols of protection are in themselves exacting an enormous toll: jobs lost, plans disrupted, futures put on hold. We don’t know what the final impact will be, or when the situation will resolve, when we will get ahead of the curve, or how the world will look once we do.
But one fortunate aspect of the era we live in is the sophistication of our digital world. We have a network of virtual connections. A broad array of devices and software and technologies allows us to operate, plan and respond to this crisis in a way that past eras never could. The changes we are experiencing are, in this way, preparation for the future.
Distributed work, virtual engagement environments, enhanced data and analytics, AI and machine learning: all of these were available, already in use in various ways and to varying degrees. Now we have the opportunity to employ them more fully, to help us deal with the strangeness of these days. In the process, we not only continue to meet immediate needs, we enable our collective human ingenuity to transform possibilities into realities.
The emotional challenges are as profound as the practical ones, providing insight and wisdom that will help us adapt. We have been re-learning the value of creativity, fluidity and adaptability. We are finding our way past unimaginable challenges, relying on both our resourcefulness and that of our teams. When so much is still unknown, there is no one “right way”—only a mix of ever-evolving possibilities and our conviction to create a better future. The goal is to propel those possibilities toward a vision of tomorrow. This crisis will pass. What comes next is up to us.
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