Post COVID-19: CIO’s response - survive, revive, revitalize.

World encountered a black swan event - COVID-19 in 2020, CIOs respond to the crisis right away with remote working set ups, access to information and mission-critical systems as well as enabling business continuity protocols. But a fast decision making, and robust technology foundation differentiated the market leaders from those with an inefficient core (e.g. paper based, manual processes, insufficient investment in technology infrastructure).

While the crisis is far from over across the world, business and IT leadership need to also start planning for a post Covid-19 phase as the uncertainties increase even further.

The big challenge remains on how to anticipate and plan for post COVID-19 phase

We believe that a CIO’s response needs to be a multi-horizon-based approach addressing the short- and long-term challenges (3-9-12 months). In the short term, CIO needs to manage discretionary and non-discretionary spend to drive costs low in order to create investment capacity for building system resilience for a long-term business growth.

While now, businesses are struggling to manage extreme cost pressure while trying to preserve their revenue streams and protecting their employees, in long-term impact we should expect to see some fundamental shift in how businesses will operate based on the following four factors. Hence it is important that the IT strategy and investment is tightly aligned with the potential business changes.