For the last two weeks, many of us have been in shock. After first ensuring the safety of those that count on us and working to establish WFH strategies with kids. We may now have finally acknowledged and accepted the situation we are in.
But next, it’s time for us in IT to fight back and help defeat COVID-19.
I’ve been in awe watching great companies step up and start redirecting capabilities to fighting the pandemic:
- 3M CEO on COVID-19 response: We have a unique and critical responsibility
- Ecolab seeing a sharp rise in sales of disinfectants that can neutralize coronavirus
- Medtronic: How we’re helping during the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Cargill’s Response to the COVID-19 Global Pandemic
- Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center
But we all know, behind every big business transformation is a technology transformation that IT must make happen, and happen fast.
In IT, we are one of the lucky groups that have fully embraced remote work. We’ve been building global, resilient workforces for decades. We’ve been embracing agile methodologies that are perfectly designed for the situation we are in. And we’ve been early adopters of incredible tools like Zoom, Jira, Slack, GitHub, etc. that are empowering us to go fast and go big.
Here is what we can and must do now in IT to help:
- Become even more agile. A one-year project to configure a new plant isn’t going to cut it. Scale agile intelligently with SAFe, implement DevOps, optimize communication, connect directly to the business, and demonstrate results quickly and often.
- Get the best minds on the biggest changes. Identify your core systems and do everything you can to rapidly embrace the best talent, whether you employ them now, hire them or contract them. This isn’t the time for procurement to try to negotiate longer payment terms or to try to save a few bucks on the cheapest resources. Everyone will be fighting for the best people now to mitigate risks and move fast.
- Work together, across the globe. Now is also the time for collaboration, for sharing and learning from others. Join in message boards, share your strategies, contribute to open projects and help.
- Embrace the best technology, and put it to work. For example, maybe you’ve upgraded to SAP S/4HANA with real-time analytics? Now is the time to look at your supply chain analytics live, and respond immediately to changing demand. Now is the time to utilize mobile technologies like Fiori, and now is the time to use rapid design thinking with video conferencing to ideate and implement big ideas.
At Mindset, as a small business, we can certainly empathize with the fear out there. But also as a small business, we are nimble, we care about our customers and our community, and we’re going to do our part in enabling the technology not just for the moment, but also for the future.
View our LinkedIn, here.
