Many enterprises and educational institutes suddenly have to support an entirely remote workforce due to Coronavirus forcing people to stay at home.The impact is going to be minimal if it is a short term and everything will go back to normal but if it continues beyond summer, then a different plan is needed, Jay Srage, CEO of technology advisory services company Centrigent and head of operations and lecturer at Michigan Ross Business School, told TheIndianSubcontinent Middle East.If things start to take a different turn, then it can become a part of a new digital lifestyle.
This means that the infrastructure has to adapt to the lifestyle and people will do everything, studying, shopping and working from home and it will have a severe impact on the economy, he said.Education, on the other hand, he said had online teaching as a backup, as a contingency plan.Now, we are seeing an integration of online learning into the school campus, which means that there will be some form of online teaching to start to penetrate the sector, he said.However, he said the most concerning issue is that people have to get used to social distancing.So, we are going to go from social and community behaviour to individual behaviour.
It is going to strengthen the nationalism that is going on and lower the collaboration, digital transformation and digital life which mean that every country will have its structure or ways of doing things and people are going to be distanced.So, once you have people going to work for six months from home, initially, maybe two weeks, is going to be difficult.
People may say that they dont know how to work from home but eventually, they will get used to it.
In the third phase, they will think why am I going to the office and why I need to commute to the office, and companies may say why am I renting the office space if things are working out, he said.There was a trend for people to work from home, he said but that trend started to subside because physical interaction was very important.Physical interaction will fadeIf it [remote work] becomes part of the routine and things get established, there is a problem of physical interaction.
If employees are as productive at home as they are in the office, then there will be a serious question asked why do we need to be in the office? If things dont work, it will go back to the usual, Srage said.Right now, he said that it is unpredictable.In the UAE, he said that one company has tested video calling instead of audio calling because if they do the audio calling, visual interaction will be lost.They have mandated video calling.
If it becomes productive, it will change the way businesses are conducted and will change their plan for digital transformation, he said.Healthcare and education are the sectors that will benefit the most and accelerate the digital transformation, he said and added that online retail will gain but it depends on the supply chain.In the healthcare sector, he said that telehealth or telemedicine will gain traction and will become a must-have rather than going to the hospital.In the enterprise sector, he said that digital transformation will slow down and take a different approach.Digital transformation may go from how to change the business process and how to change the product management to how we change the business environment and how to improve the working from home environment, educational environment and medical environment, he said.If things start to take a longer approach, he said that digital transformation has to change according to that.Shift in digital strategiesIn the long run, it is going to slow down digital transformation and take a different approach as the initial target was consumer experience and business processes.
The purpose of digital transformation was to digitise the supply chain, digitise the product management, digitise all the processes within the company, use AI and machine learning for an individualised customer experience, he said.Now there is confusion and if things do slow down, we go into a recession on a global level and the question is how will be that investment is used.
Then, that investment will be used for setting up the right tools to improve the working environment of the staff from home and improve the infrastructure.
Then, digitalisation will be digitalisation of the home working environment rather than processes and customer experience.