The fifth installment of the Weekly with JC series, held last March 2, 2023, focused on one of the industries that had been beaten black and blue, especially during the pandemic—technology. With the entire world recovering slowly from the pandemic, what’s now next, indeed, for the technology sector?
Resource speaker Aileen Judan Jiao, President and Country General Manager of IBM Philippines, began her presentation by comparing pre-pandemic with post-pandemic performances of industries that used technology. Research shows that tech-savvy organizations across 12 countries have outperformed their peers by an average of 6 percentage points. It was cited, however, that the technology mix for performance varies significantly between industries—it is not for all. As evidenced by results, the retail industry took the top spot, performing 16% more than their peers, and unexpectedly, the energy and utilities sector closely followed at 12%.
While the retail industry taking the top spot came as no surprise, energy and utilities did, considering that this industry was least likely to have such drastic technology transformation. However, it should have been expected when we had gone into lockdown. With people working from home, they had to come up with ways to do repairs contactless. Now, it’s all about contactless service delivery, and they have to do it fast.
There are currently five key trends that are seen to influence the business landscape in 2023. And these trends presented challenges that need to be addressed immediately. First and foremost would be the current issues that cripple growth—talent shortages and salary changes. Flexibility is now the top priority for employees, and 35% say that they would not apply for a job that doesn’t offer the ability to work remotely, at least part-time. Companies would need to be way more creative and smart when looking for the skills they need, offering work-from-home arrangements, and making it more exciting to work in the office.
Second would be the privacy and personalization that’s complicating customer relationships. More than one in three younger consumers shop using both physical and digital channels, making it a lot more difficult to build relationships with them. And since their choices have already expanded, personalization has become a challenge as well. Some organizations are addressing this by creating digital channels. They now have a way to gather data through their websites. The more the consumer responds to these sites, the more they can personalize it for them. Now sharing data is going to be a challenge, but there are ways to anonymize data to follow the data privacy act, which is especially strict in the Philippines.
Joining these trends in the third spot would be the confluence of supply chain threats, which demand continued resilience. Supply chain is one integral part of business that was badly hit during the pandemic. Fortunately, the situation seems to be improving now, compared to how it was six months ago since organizations learned to partner instead of competing with each other. “This is the way the economy will be,” Aileen said, “We need to be comfortable with the world, partnering with each other rather than being in competition. We need to learn to use data to our advantage. Every single day of delay in delivery, for example, due to weather conditions and not knowing which warehouse to send it to will be detrimental.”
With the world now being more aware of sustainability, the fourth trend dictates that sustainability strategies should be impactful. Strategies are good, but we need to act on these strategies. Sustainability is not only about using less paper after all. The opportunity here, according to Aileen, would be to use data to our advantage. Check which part of the business needs improvement on sustainability, chart the scorecards, and apply the UN’s policies on sustainability. This is really more about making an impact and showing how you can ride it into a business outcome.
The fifth and last influencer would be centering on the cyberattack surface, which is now less about the business protecting its data center and more about having to expand on protecting a broader area. This area became wider because almost every single one of us has gone digital. The heavy use of mobile gadgets ranked number one on critical technology and had grown exponentially during the lockdown. To address this, we need to go back to talent—talent that will be working with technology in order to augment this.
Abid Zaidi, Chief Marketing and Operations Officer of Microsoft Philippines, agreed and added some of his thoughts to Aileen’s heavy points. Nowadays, it is how you use technology to transform. “Digital transformation still means the same, though. It did not mean any differently,” he pointed out. This digital transformation, which was supposed to happen in the next two years became condensed in two months just because of the sheer use of technology that happened because of the hybrid setup.
In this post-pandemic world, we transitioned from digital acceleration to digital perseverance. This is where we will see how organizations are thriving in the face of the risks and how they use technology to get to where they want to be. However, there are a few points of concern here.
There is some concern over the hybrid work setup creating a paradox of sorts–73% of employees mentioned that they prefer hybrid and remote work, while 67% want face-to-face collaboration. What is it then that employees expect? They found out that some employees prioritize well-being and health over other things. What are the employers doing to address these priorities then?
Another would be that 12% of leaders say that their employees are productive at home, while 88% of employees say that they are more productive working from home. What does productivity mean to a leader then? Working 55 hours a week, sending a hundred emails, clocking in thousands of hours of meetings in a week or a month?
Abid mentioned that “We need to start looking at accountabilities and the empowerment needs to be balanced with it. It would require to have a clear outcome, and set of goals for the employees. Let them do how they want to do it. Empower them for them to be able to do more. This is where technology will come in.”
Overall, technology is here to stay. The only question is, how we’ll use it to survive this post-pandemic era.
Please visit our events page to learn more about our upcoming events.
