Legacy approaches to collaboration can slow a company down during a crisis.
by John McEleney for Industry Week
photo: © Funtap P | Dreamstime.com
Concepts like digital transformation and cloud-based collaboration have been top of mind for the last several years. And while there has been plenty of discussion around digital transformation, many businesses still lag in terms of readiness.
When a major external crisis like COVID-19 comes along and changes our world, this lag exposes reliance on cumbersome, error-prone legacy processes. In good times, a cautious or “late majority” embrace of digital may get you by, but when a major externality hits, the weaknesses become glaring. As Warren Buffet once said, only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.
According to a Gartner survey, 40% of CIOs said they have reached scale for their digital initiatives. Yes, that’s decent progress, but that still leaves 60% whose companies are not up to scale. When a crisis like COVID-19 occurs, the organizations who have not gone digital will struggle to adapt because they’re hampered by older systems and inefficient, file-based collaboration.
Legacy approaches to collaboration are a vulnerability in industry’s ability to adapt in times of crisis. When an external shift takes place, it is about being able to quickly pivot along many fronts, including product innovation, changing your supply base, or producing new products at scale.
Here are a few ways to correct these weaknesses:
1. Embrace digital transformation to boost speed and fidelity in your collaborative processes. The nature of being digital is that the communication links between each step in a process—and interactions with partners—are faster, higher fidelity, and much less error-prone. File-based legacy approaches that have people wasting time by looking for the right version (or working on the wrong version) are sinkholes for productivity. What is needed is a single source of truth in the cloud, with data and workflows that can be accessed by any authorized party in real time. This digital, cloud-based approach to collaboration recently helped MasksOn, a non-profit organization, to rapidly design safe, reusable medical protective personal equipment (PPE) for hospitals. The group’s first focus was on turning snorkel masks into PPE masks using medical-grade filters and 3D printed parts. That’s just one example of how digital collaboration can help partners pivot.
