By April 2020, organisations that had been talking about digital transformation for years had done more in six weeks than in the preceding decade. Video conferencing adoption had jumped by orders of magnitude. Paper-based processes had been digitised overnight. Services that could only be delivered in person were being delivered remotely. The transformation that consultants had been billing for happened fast when there was no alternative.
I worked closely with organisations in the health sector during this period and what I saw was revealing. Processes that everyone had said could not be digitised, because of regulatory requirements, security concerns, or clinical necessity, turned out to be digitisable when the only other option was to stop providing the service entirely. The constraints were real but they had also served as convenient barriers to change that required effort.
The remote work transition exposed technical debt that had been hidden by the fact that everyone was in the same building. Systems that assumed you were on the corporate network struggled when everyone was on home broadband. Collaboration tools that had never been seriously used were suddenly critical infrastructure. Security postures designed for perimeter-based models were inappropriate for a fully remote workforce.
The organisations that coped best had two characteristics. First, they had invested in cloud infrastructure before 2020. Scaling up remote access capacity for an on-premises infrastructure is slow and expensive. Cloud infrastructure scales in minutes. The correlation between cloud adoption and ability to cope with the 2020 disruption was clear.
Second, they had good IT teams who were trusted by leadership. The organisations where IT was seen as a cost centre and decisions were made by non-technical executives stumbled. The organisations where technology leadership had a seat at the table moved faster.
There were real costs too. The quality of many hastily digitised processes was poor. Security incidents increased as organisations moved fast without sufficient consideration of risks. Employees experienced digital fatigue that was not well understood until later in the pandemic. And the gap between organisations with digital capability and those without widened.
The lasting legacy of 2020's forced transformation is a question more than an answer: now that we know these changes are possible, why would we go back to the slower, more expensive, more rigid ways of doing things? Some organisations are learning that lesson. Others are reverting to what they know. The ones that have taken the transformation seriously have a real advantage going into the years that follow.