In a blog post titled Remote working: here to stay? Leslie Willcocks writes for the Business Review blog of the London School of Economics:
“So key here is the organisational capability to change skills, processes, structures, managerial mind-sets, existing technology, culture and data, and align these to optimise technology deployment.”
Leslie makes this point to answer the question “Could Covid-19 hasten the use of automation across many businesses in the tech sector?”. But Leslie’s answer also answers the larger question of whether or not an organization is capable of transforming itself for something as big as, say, digital transformation.
Not every organization is capable of this transformation. Leslie acknowledges this reality with a reference to the old “80/20 rule”:
“I think that about 20% of the organisations we have researched who lead in automation and moving to digital business will move even faster”
What should you take away from Leslie’s post:
1) Before moving forward on digitally transforming your business to adapt to the pandemic of Spring, 2020, you need to come up with an estimate of just how capable your organization is of transforming itself. You need to shift business to remote work, but you also need to adjust your estimates of business results based on your capability review.
2) Once you have the estimate, take it seriously. Don’t make the mistake of ignoring the facts. If personnel aren’t likely to quickly adapt to working remotely you need to lower productivity estimates. If customers expect to communicate with your organization operating from an office, informing them of your decision needs to be a top priority, something probably best handled with telephone calls, or online meetings, rather than email messages.
Once you have completed these two steps we encourage you to take a look at Asif Rehmani’s blog post Change management using VisualSP to gain more insight on how VisualSP can help you get the best support for the change in business you need to make.
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