COVID-19 LOCKDOWN AND BEYOND

By Pankaj Sharma

As I start writing this, well over 650k people around the world have suffered from COVID19. Only certainty is that it will impact many more. Clearly, we the humans, have not experienced this kind of threat in a long time – may be none after 2nd World War.

This is only direct and immediate impact of COVID 19, we have not even had a chance to assess the indirect, and medium to long term impact . With over 40 countries and 2 billion people under lock down, the economy has come to a standstill. This is a huge blow to businesses around the world, especially small and medium size business with limited financial cushion. IMF declared that global economy has entered a recession amid corona virus pandemic.

WILL IT CHANGE THE BUSINESS PROCESS SERVICES WORLD?

I know the answer is a resounding YES! Industry leaders learn from disasters and find opportunities. We have learned from past disasters and improved our disaster recovery methods. This time also, there will be new lessons and we will change the way we think, plan and work. As we still fight it, and find survival methods, some of my key reflections are:

Disaster recovery planning needs to be revisited

Almost the entire world is hit at the same time. This never happened! Not even during two world wars humanity fought. This made globalization meaningless and, in some aspects, increased the challenge. There are chances, that this virus is here to stay - and that makes it absolutely critical to improve and update business and operating models based on new learning

• People and not Buildings or Systemsare at risk. Most of disaster recovery plans are centered around geographies and systems e.g. building, city, state or country level, or applications / systems downtime. Location specific plans involved moving critical people to alternate locations. It is proving to be in-effective in this case. In fact Travelbecame part of the disaster and was largely blamed for initial spread of the virus across the world.
• Coordination with governmentsis proving to be an important disaster recovery step. Due to much higher private sector involvement these days, in India and several other countries, this was critical to enable essential services. To deal with current situation, Governments are taking agile decisions that are enabled by industry. Enabling employees to work from home, e.g. sending computers to employee's residences, as more and more countries and regions went into lock down became very important part of disaster recovery. Therefore, Government coordination for specific aspects should be included in all disaster recovery manuals.
• Availability of safe network and connected computer forenabling hundreds of thousands of people around the world to work from home, by large companies and their partners, in a short time is a big challenge. What went well, and what did not should be re-evaluated at the right time.
• Disaster recovery offerings as almost every organization is experiencing unprecedented situation demanding agile ways of working and adopting change. Mass movement to remote working models, supply chain breakdowns, demand slump, and above all – a humanitarian crisis. And everyone is trying to respond to this. Some of the key enablers that BPS providers can bring into play to support industries can be:

1. Interim help-desk helping employees, vendors and customers with information and avoid limited resources and workforce getting swamped with queries. Help desks quickly enabled with technology like chat bots can be of great use.
2. Working capital offerings to get through these uncertain times and liquidity crunch. There are banking and industry products / offerings to help e.g. Supply Chain financing for companies that are trying to keep supply chain intact, managing their cash situation and dynamic discounts for few cash rich who can get some discount and also support their vendors by paying early. Some analytics capability with Procure to Pay data converted into right information can really help

Changes in Business Model and Operating Model

Short term / immediate:

• Agile Ways of working and change adoption. All large Business Process Service providers have massive infrastructure to deliver operations. Operations are designed assuming co-location of employees at fixed hours. However, current situation is forcing large organizations to re-evaluate. They are forced to CHANGE, at least for the interim or STOP operations. This is likely to have lasting impact on these operations in future. Several transformation ideas will bring new ways of working including more sustainable/ system based security, and ease of working for workforce.
• One of the biggest challenges is to make ‘Work from Home (WFH)’work. Most of the BPS industry uses desktop virtualization through secured accesses. This requires working from fixed workstations. Remote accesses are restricted for reasons ranging from managing hardware and software cost, data security, and fraud prevention. In future, we will have to find better ways to enable remote working without compromising on security, to make data-based businesses sustainable. This will have even more focus in data sensitive industries like banking, insurance, health, public services, etc.
• Centralization vs. decentralizationmodel will be fine tuned to include remote working. Centralization of operations has very strong value proposition in driving efficiency and effectiveness. Industry will find ways of centralizing while enabling remote working, and still ensuring better efficiency and effectiveness.
• Workforce mixwill be revisited from every aspect. Everyone wishes they had digitized more. Another important aspect experience and maturity of workforce. We will need ‘Entrepreneurship’in our workforce at all levels to ensure agility.
• Process vs. Productstrend. Industry is moving away from being ‘people based to outcome based’. Some of the new trends are productizing mass people processes and the trend will get stronger. In my view, this will change the industry. Gradually, we are moving towards products like bots and application-based business. Platforms, block-chain and Artificial Intelligence are fast becoming a reality. These asset designs will have to include right security and democracy to ensure, they DON’T become victims of disasters instead of enablers. Innovators have to ensure that these application designs enable remote working, address both attended and unattended environments.

This list will keep getting bigger and will challenge lot of fundamental assumptions of current operating models. It will bring new transformation, and new operating models.

We will come out as winners.I hope this situation comes to an end soon with people, governments and industry coming out stronger than before.

Please stay safe