Businesses of all sizes and types have felt the heat of the pandemic in different ways. While some have seen their sales plummet, others have witnessed shrinking margins, fickle customers, poor productivity, and more. It seems clear that something has changed. What used to be called a VUCA world, is just another day at work. These days, it’s all about how you deal with uncertainty.
One thing every organization has come to acknowledge is how technology has helped (and is helping) them find clarity in uncertain economic and market conditions.
Market Volatility Is at an All-Time High
When the pandemic first struck, most tech-averse organizations across the globe were pushed to the brink of disaster. The sudden and widespread shift to a remote working model, owing to global lockdowns and contact restrictions, was not easy to manage.
The absence of remote collaboration tools, compliance headaches, and inadequate security controls made it impossible for many to keep the lights on, let alone run the business for growth.
While the pandemic caused such ambiguity and disruption in the business world, the post-pandemic period seems as stressful as ever. The ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia has put many organizations’ strategic plans on hold. Before that, it was the supply chain crisis. Inflation is rearing its ugly head in concert with geopolitical events. According to an IMF report, global uncertainty has surged and could be enough to reduce full-year global growth by up to 0.35% points.
Rising fuel prices, unstable inflation, growing cyber risk, acute labor shortage, and intermittent periods of recession — the list of business challenges seems endless.
Business leaders looking to build sustainable long-term growth strategies amidst back-to-back global shocks are often faced with several pressing questions:
- What steps do I take to rebound business operations and performance?
- How do I predict (and prevent) economic uncertainties from impacting the status quo of my business?
- How do I enable my workforce to stay connected and secure?
- How do I cater to the evolving needs of my customers?
- How do I respond to growing cybersecurity risks and challenges?
- How do I deal with the labor shortage and the widening skills gap?
- How do I cope with growing compliance requirements and government regulations?
- How do I power a competitive advantage in today’s era of extreme competition?
Modern Technology Offers a Way to Deal with Uncertainties
Although there are many questions, technology seems to have valid answers to all these problems and more. Modern technology implementation can enable data-driven digital transformation across the business, allowing leaders to not just deal with unforeseen circumstances but also increase profits and reduce costs in these dynamic times.
In an era where every day brings uncertainty, technology helps solve problems at an accelerated pace – with agility and clarity. It helps organizations get a better view of their business, uncover opportunities for enhanced employee and customer experiences, and respond to evolving trends (and ambiguities) in a nimble manner.
That said, let’s more look at three ways in which technology helps address growing uncertainty:
1. Agility
Modern technology such as BI and analytics can help businesses unlock tangible value from growing volumes of data and fulfill the demand for real-time data accessibility.
By unearthing meaningful and relevant insights at the speed of business, such technology can help impart the agility needed to respond to market changes and capitalize on opportunities.
Through continuous analysis of day-to-day performance metrics and historical data across business units, technology can help present actionable information to assist executives, managers, and other corporate end-users to:
- Streamline operations
- Make informed business decisions
- Keep market trends and business disruptions in mind
2. Resilience
Technology approaches like the cloud can enable organizations to buffer against unexpected tremors while ensuring business continuity – regardless of economic uncertainty, a natural calamity, or an IT outage.
Seamless data storage in cloud environments with robust backup mechanisms can help maintain business operations while ensuring the workforce always has access to the data they need to do their jobs.
Besides, leading-edge cloud technologies can redefine IT operations and add power and resilience to the business – helping gain new capabilities, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.
3. Safety and Security
Technology can also help make it easier for organizations to comply with regulatory and reporting standards and reduce the probability and impact of non-compliance. Through automation, organizations can more easily develop quarterly and annual financial performance reports, track overall financial position and get a better idea of risks.
Visually rich dashboards and scorecards can provide a holistic view of business performance in real-time while allowing users to monitor key metrics against strategic objectives, enabling trend forecasting and what-if scenarios. Such insights can help decision-makers in taking steps to strengthen cybersecurity and safeguard business and customer data from attacks and breaches.
Summing Up
As businesses cope with mercurial economic and market conditions, being able to make decisions on the go has become extremely important. Modern technology innovations across analytics, BI, automation, and the cloud can enable a holistic view of business performance, risks, and opportunities in real-time. Such insights can set the stage for superior decision-making, boosting superior performance, employee productivity, and customer experience.
As a leading provider of technology solutions and services, Trinus can help you gain a competitive advantage and superior business outcomes through cutting-edge, data-driven, analytical digital transformation solutions.
Contact us today and learn how you can leverage the power of technology to weather the storm.