Spotlights
Digital Strategy: How to prepare/respond/recover/accelerate business operations for resilience during and after COVID-19
Oct. 26, 2020, 8:04 a.m.

Rajan K Upadhyay

Digital Strategy: How to prepare/respond/recover/accelerate business operations for resilience during and after COVID-19

Oct. 26, 2020, 8:04 a.m.

With the COVID-19 still a live hazard and economies in lockdown, Resilience is top of mind and primary focus as a value for the strategist today.  

During the current pandemic, businesses have been hit hard than ever before and forced strategists to go back and redefine their business strategies for a more sustainable and resilient to respond.  Some of the immediate impacts are directly visible as 

  • Global shift in demand & just-in-time manufacturing
  • Period of uncertainty and shift in demand has brought a high degree of untrust & visibility issues into the ecosystem. 
  • The spread of misinformation brought to a lack of the ability to validate the authenticity of data.
  • Just-in-time manufacturing - not having proper traceability has brought various quality issues.
  • Lack of workforce/shortage of labor because of COVID-19 scarcity.

It seems companies’ resilience is being tested as never before with the current coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic. 

According to the Asian Development Bankd, the global economy could suffer between $5.8 trillion and $8.8 trillion in losses—equivalent to 6.4% to 9.7% of global gross domestic product (GDP). The losses are estimated as a result of the novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic. 


Key Stages for Resilience as Strategy:

To tackle the current COVID-19 situation or any future disruption companies should operate into one of many stages, each with its objectives.



When I talk about resilience, the following quote reminds me first fundamental/key element to change is to accept it.

“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something good.”
― Elizabeth Edwards

Most businesses not able to survive because either they were too late to react, or they were not prepared to accept the greater shift in the value chain.

In this stage companies should simply focus on business continuity, ensuring the interest of people and processes are safeguarded.  In this stage businesses usually incur losses.  These losses can be heavy if businesses are too late to respond.

•Infrastructure availability
•Process continuity 
•Workforce Management
•External Co-ordination
•Long term readiness
•Better Focus on Tier 1 customers


With the current ongoing situation, many businesses who survived have surpasses stage 1&2, for instance keeping people safe, safeguarding the processes, making standard and digital practices, key operational issues such as supply chain disruptions. Now focus is getting shifted to regain business control quickly to the new realities on the ground.  Businesses must cope with uncertainty in demand, workforce shortage & financial instabilities with a different perspective of being resilient.

Businesses must develop a new sustainable resilient strategy with the help of data and technologies.  This strategy should be focused to quickly adopt changes/disruptions in the ecosystem and tackle the volatility.  This can only be done with standardization, Agile operations, Intelligent automation, and effective change management & governance.



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