How COVID-19 has accelerated innovation
Scrambling to meet 'business unusual' demands has escalated plans for SaaS transition
We talk with business and technology leaders across a wide range of industries about their strategies and plans all the time. The first half of 2020 saw some very interesting changes in attitude, as IT teams struggled to meet the demands of remote access and maintain customer support.
Here are some of the overall themes we’ve witnessed, as organisations of all kinds have been forced to adapt to massive change and protect themselves against tough operational and economic times.
Flight to the cloud
One of the most significant effects we’ve observed is a massive SaaS adoption rate in a very short period. Around 40% of our on-premise ERP customers are engaged with us in SaaS-readiness conversations, with many more already embarked on the process of transition.
Our observations are backed by independent research. In April 2020, ADAPT conducted an in-depth study with 217 Australian and New Zealand C-level executives to gauge COVID-19 responses. It found the most significant technology change had been the move to cloud – with half of respondents saying their organisation had increased cloud workloads by over 50% to enable their remote workforce.
This is unsurprising as, by early March 2020, businesses were faced with the need for at least half – if not all – of their employees to work from home. The challenge was how to provide access to core operational systems and data securely and at a level of performance that would not affect productivity. Migration from on-premise systems to SaaS was a proven and ready-to-go solution.
The need for digital transformation in order to survive has become an imperative no organisation can avoid any longer.
Three stages of cost control
When the crisis loomed, we noticed that IT teams were initially focused on applying cost control. Business was being dramatically affected with no early end in sight. Budgets would inevitably become tighter, so there was thought put into what costs could be reduced. At the same time, they were juggling as fast as they could to support business continuity.
After that, attention was turned to cost optimisation. Accepting that the economy was undergoing a time of great uncertainty, how could the most value be extracted from existing investments in staff, existing resources and infrastructure?
The next stage of thinking has been how to fund innovation. The need for digital transformation in order to survive has become an imperative no organisation can avoid any longer. So how could technological change deliver growth out of recession and provide new ways of delivery to the business and its customers?
At this point, many technical and business leaders are realising that they need to save money through technology, not on technology in order to survive COVID-19 – and that SaaS is the way to do this.
The cost benefits come from shifting their core business systems off premise, where they are onerous to manage and maintain. A secure, streamlined SaaS solution offers security and performance with less effort and overhead – leaving internal resources to focus on true innovation and business enablement. Adopting SaaS as a strategy contributes towards both cost optimisation and funding for innovation.
Driving innovation post-pandemic
Part of this response to challenged resources has seen businesses look at leveraging technology to reduce capital expenditure. IT teams have been charged with identifying the best projects in terms of delivering return on investment. In other words, asking: what will be the most important initiatives over the next 12–18 months, those on which we should be spending our limited funds?
The work from home story is still being written. We do not yet know whether all employees will be returning to the workplace. What we do know is that employees will be expecting a more agile approach in the future – and working from home for at least some of the time will probably become business as usual.
Another change is that organisations are looking to digitise more processes and eliminate paperwork. Automated workflows and other technologies have long been available, but those yet to adopt them were clearly at a disadvantage when COVID-19 hit, offices deserted en masse, and operations went online by necessity.
Surviving 'business unusual'
Whatever the short or longer-term future holds, to survive in a competitive world calls for resilience and mobility. That is why SaaS is now the way to go. Fears about security have been seen to be irrational; just as you can secure corporate systems delivered to your branches, you can now deliver them safely to remote users on any device.
Perhaps the principal advantage of SaaS transition is the ability to free up internal resources to focus on truly strategic business innovation. With SaaS, your systems are managed for you by experts. You have no hardware to maintain, and no operating system or application software to patch and update. At any given time, you have the latest versions of a suite of fully integrated solutions to run your business, along with the confidence that any advances will be yours for the using as soon as they are launched. This frees up time to focus on accelerating out into the new normal, verifying the old adage that to progress your business, leaders need to ‘work on their business, not in their business.
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