The ongoing pandemic has had a significant impact on everyone’s life across the UK. Part of that is the disruption to companies, most of whom are having to deal with a dramatic decline or even complete halt in business.
For many, that’s coincided with their ongoing digital transformation. Whether it’s migrating to the cloud, going paper free or even moving your brick-and-mortar store online, there are numerous ways in which businesses have been going digital over the past years – and they don’t happen overnight.
While we may have passed the peak of the virus, the social distancing measures and impact on the economy could drag on for months. So, what should you do about your digital transformation plans while things have slowed down? In this post, we’ll explore some steps you can take during the lockdown
The instinctive reaction for many businesses is to simply stop what they were doing and put things on hold for the time being. This made complete sense in the first days and weeks of the lockdown where everything was up in the air. However, as we’ve moved forward, we now know a lot more about the current situation and the potential route out of it.
With the need for a tried-and-tested vaccine, available to the entire population, it’s going to be a while until things are complete ‘back to normal’. Whether it’s furloughed staff, employees working from home or just slower business on the whole, the effects of the crisis could drag on for several months with a second wave even a possibility.
With that in mind, it could actually be quite tricky to put things on hold. If you were in the process of building a website to move your offline store online, for instance, it would be very difficult tracking where you’re up to and then restarting several months down the line. That’s even more complicated if you’ve outsourced work as you might not be able to pause or cancel contracts.
The other option is to continue your transformation through lockdown. While this might seem counterintuitive – trying to go faster while things are going slow – it could actually give you a head start when things get back up and running.
It could also help fill the void left by the downturn in business. After all, the lockdown has left many companies with less on their plate. Some businesses are in a tricky situation where things aren’t slow enough to furlough staff or worse make redundancies, but employees still have less to do and more spare time.
Working on your digital transformation could fill the void left by other work, giving you or your team something productive to work on that could come to fruition in the future.
Whatever steps you’re taking, a big part of digital transformation is in the planning. What do you need to do? When do you need to do it? Who will be involved, internally and third-party? Now is the time to get plans in place, get advice and get quotes if you haven’t done so already.
Whether it’s scanning physical files to go paper-free or moving already-digital files to the cloud, migration can be time consuming. A quiet period is the perfect opportunity to get things done, whether it’s just you or a team effort.
Going digital requires new training in various areas. Whether it’s coding for your ecommerce store or how to use your new digital asset management system, you can use this opportunity to upskill your team.
There are plenty of digital tools offering free trials. Normally, you sign up and forget about it as other things take priority. By signing up for a free trial while things are slow, you can give it the attention it needs and see if it’s right for you – whether it’s new accounting software or cloud hosting.
Want to continue moving forward with your digital transformation? iBase’s innovative digital asset management software can help you do exactly that. From a free trial to specialist training and support, we’ll make sure you’re fully clued up on all our software’s powerful features, so you can hit the ground running when things get back to normal.
