Technology capability for greater business resilience and adaptability.
A post-pandemic technology playbook to better respond to uncertainty and changes in business.
Co-authored with Priyank Gupta.
Winning is not just about the mastery of plays in a game. It is about the ability of a team to call specific plays and come together to execute them. The best teams and their coaches rely on a playbook just for this, to be ready to respond to changes in a game situation. A post-pandemic technology playbook, on similar lines, is for every technology leader to guide their company’s response to disruptive changes and recovery strategies by building greater resilience and adaptability into their technology capability.
First principles thinking for a digital-first journey.
Our adjustments to the COVID-19 pandemic in society, work, and our personal lives are shaping new consumer habits and workplace practices. From contactless delivery to remote work or home-based education, all of them point towards a digital-first or predominantly digital recovery. Unlike the organic or mostly incremental digital transformation thus far, the pandemic is pushing companies to drastically abandon traditional business models and channels in favor of digital. This makes a company’s technology capability more crucial now and going forward.
Within the same industry, we see different strategies and priorities in the immediate reactions to the pandemic and the companies that are focused now on technology-driven recovery strategies. This is strongly influenced by their liquidity and the capacity to invest in technology, and by the technological affinity or aggressiveness of a company’s leadership or board.
Now is an opportunity for companies to be more proactive about their core technology capability. With the disruption already underway and with more uncertainty ahead, it is a compelling time for every company to:
- Revisit Everything: Question all ongoing and planned (IT/technology) projects and technology spending.
- Data Availability: Strengthen data platforms and cloud infrastructure to improve data availability for operational decision-making, data-driven experiments, and new product or offering creation.
- Refactor Architecture: Refactor the architecture to improve flexibility and extensibility, and the capability to be more market responsive.
- Enhance Observability: Make systems and processes more observable and build auto scaling and auto healing capabilities to improve reliability and to reduce ongoing ops effort and costs.
- Accelerate Digital: Design a new wave of digital experiences or products to address the new consumer behaviors and workplace practices.
A navigational guide, not prescriptive recommendations.
Having a post-pandemic technology playbook based on “first principles thinking” can benefit technology companies as well as businesses enabled by technology. A technology leader can use it to strengthen the technology capability of a product, business, or an entire company and thus enable multiple recovery or growth strategies. For this, it is important that the playbook is a navigational guide to select, prioritize, and sequence plays; and not rigid or prescriptive with one-size-fits-all recommendations. It is most effective in the specific context of a product or a company.
To help get started, we have created a comprehensive list of plays for technology leaders to choose from. The plays are based on the first principles of software or system design, and can strengthen a company’s technology capability to be more adaptable and resilient.
Examples of technology-driven business resiliency and adaptability.
We’ve seen clients use their technology capability advantageously to address new or emerging needs. This highlights the value of business resilience and adaptability that can come from product and technology design. For example:
- Technology originally built to measure outdoor ad reach was adapted by a client to monitor the movement of people and become a new data product to inform public health decisions.
- The capability built into a product to scale individual test preparation for different standardized tests helped shape a new remote academic testing offering for Universities and Schools.
- A high volume data platform supporting multiple AI models could save 75% of their ongoing costs for the data infrastructure. This was possible as the data platform was designed with high observability and dynamic infrastructure scaling. This allowed the client to effortlessly scale down technology costs in response to slowing operations and heightened unpredictability during the early days of the pandemic.
Winning in post-pandemic times will come from sharpening such an ability to deal with uncertainty in ongoing operations along with a similar ability to experiment, adapt, and pivot new strategies for a product or a business.
A place to find answers to some hard questions
- Now is the right time to transform the technology capability for a product or a business, but how do you balance such long term capability building with immediate priorities or pulls when resources are constrained?
- How do you prioritize the many dimensions of technology capability to deal with business uncertainty and to support new business demands?
- How to shift the focus on a technology organization from building new technology solutions or products to strengthening the practices and competencies that create resilience and adaptability for a business?
Can the idea of a post-pandemic technology playbook help you find answers to these questions? We’d love to guide you with a list of plays related to architecture, security, infrastructure efficiency, experimentation, product evolution, remote collaboration, and more. We’ve rooted those plays in the first principles of system design, so you can easily build upon them to create your own playbook in the context of your product or company.
