Mid Tier Companies have not started their transformation yet

Sunny Sharma , CEO & CTO – Foetron explains where mid-tier companies are still lacking and advises how they should set themselves up in the post COVID scenario

How would you recommend the mid-tier companies go for a change in process management following a change in business model? Will COVID19 accelerate this process of digital transformation for these companies?

There are two parts to it. One part is the digital transformation that has happened before this prior to COVID and what will happen from now. So when I look at the previous transformation thing that has happened, it has been slow, especially in the mid-tier companies. Beside audio-video communication and moving certain bit of their workloads to cloud, there has not been a lot of transformation that they have done in-house. They do have the talent to go through the transformation, but they do not have the mindset to go through the transformation.

My advice to mid-tier companies is that they have to look at the triangle of people, process and technology. Buying technology is the easiest part, but what they have to do is they have to re–skill and up skill their employees and set up processes in ways that they can work and enable people to work.
Let us look at this example. What will happen post COVID? First, people were in the mode of denial, like whatever that has happened is over and it will soon open up. Now, that the second phase of lock down has come now they are thinking, big time but still in denial mode. They still think that a lot of transformation might not happen a lot of things might not change. They are just worried but they are not taking actions. So my advice to them is that they have to start planning, and need not just look at the COVID19, but there are some other business continuity planning that they must make because these types of things can come back in the future. COVID can get extended for a longer amount of time. That can be partial or otherwise and there can be rules and regulations for everyone to operate. The planning has to happen now. I do not still see mid-tier companies in the planning and execution mode. They are still in the thinking mode, which is very, very dangerous.

On the other side of it, when they are going through all these challenges, what they are looking at is shedding weight, which means possibly removing the senior people and lot of other things than they= are thinking of. My advice is not to look at moving the senior people especially because these are the people who can only lead the digital transformation within their organizations. They should rather look at letting them go to certain courses online, re-skill them, up-skill them. Otherwise they will be in a big mess if they let their important people go at this point of time.

So There will be leaders and laggards, and you will continue to see this in the post COVID world, there will be companies who will transform themselves, change their business models, move fast and then there will be laggards who will not move fast and they will possibly see the downturn in revenue and outcomes over a period of next five years is where the real change would come because we all go through this. Time would pass and as the time goes in, there will be platforms set for people who have transformed themselves to scale up and the others will not be able to do that.

What are the new technologies which mid-tier companies can adopt in times like COVID19 to avoid business disruption?

Again, there are two parts to this entire change that they will see from application development and product side.  What they have invested in products, there will be more focus within their teams to adopt it better.
The second part is a lot of people will have something called RPA Robotic Process Automation. So a lot of these automation things with come into play that will be zero touch. But what will happen is you have to set the base right. At this point of time, the mid-tier companies do not have the right platform to build lot of such automation things in place.

First and foremost they will start with moving their ERP or finance system on cloud. They will focus on work from home environment with the project tracking and task management tools to improve the productivity and even track the outcome of their employees in the organization. As this would happen, then people would look at setting up security right which is beyond the network that they have. This is about mobile application management or device management coming into play.

We do audio communication that you would have noticed has seen a big jump in any case. Once they start getting this platform right, the automation would start from e-mail alerts to business analytics and even new ways of implementing the plan. Imagine, the organization releases certain compliance guidelines to manage that office work in a COVID environment. How do you even audit and adhere to those compliance? How do you even track it? For those compliances, there has to be agile development that has to happen and the platform has to be set. So it’= is more of adoption to setting up the base platform right to build something new is where the focus of organizations would be.

Just for an example, in Foetron Academy that we run, we used to get about 100,000 or 200,000 people a month. Now in the last 40-45 days we have got two million people consuming our content on Foetron academy. So, imagine the rate of adoption got higher because people are now trying to learn these things that they did not know before and they did not value that much before. Now the focus is from employee side and as well as the organization side on all fronts.