The positive side-effects of COVID-19 for businesses

A critical part of the ‘great reset’ by the COVID-19 pandemic was the importance of robust digital infrastructure, something that helped businesses to rethink how technology can serve several needs. As a result, business leaders expect more from transforming investments and initiatives, with speed and flexibility to pivot and improve, as and when required. COVID’s side effect was not sudden discovery and implementation of technologies, but rather deployment of the tools, which are already in hand for fuller potential and impact.

At the same time, with lesser time to prepare, IT departments also faced a brand-new set of priorities and challenges, from immense pressure to deliver applications, infrastructure, and security, to ensuring safety and security for remote working experiences for the workforces. Most had to navigate uncharted waters, including the increased demands of application support, expanding capabilities for self-service and digital sales, maintaining MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution) levels, all while operating IT departments remotely.

In this blog, I would like to draw some lessons from the pandemic as an agent of transformation, wherein we understand the challenges as well as the opportunities presented to businesses.

A lynchpin of accelerated transformation

The pandemic has been a stark reminder of how important speed and agility are, for any business to succeed with technology. The race during COVID-19 was towards ensuring a smooth (despite sudden) shift to remote working models, preparing for an onslaught customer demands, and adjusting business models to drive revenues through new pathways. While the pressure of IT teams was high, the stakes were too, such as giving customer loyalty, business continuity, sustained revenue and more, hung in the balance.

For instance, let’s take the African Coalition for Epidemic Research and Training (ALERRT). Operating in more than 8 countries across  Africa and India, the life sciences manufacturer was looking to enhance their SAP capabilities, expecting a big basket of >250 applications. While the deployment team from YASH had plans, the pandemic threw a wrench into it, forcing them to execute the SAP transformation 10 days ahead of the previously scheduled launch date, instead of what was going to be an abundance of 40 days (read the full story here). In fact, the pandemic highlighted how intertwined an array of business needs applications span across consumers and workforces, given the new precedents set of ‘contactless’ interactions. Telemedicine in healthcare for instance, saw huge surge in the number of users, in turn requires modernization of legacy infrastructure of healthcare apps. Similarly, take ‘finance from home’ initiatives wherein consumers are able to open complete bank accounts with video KYC (Know Your Customer) processes. For all of these, rapid delivery of quality code is required to meet the evolving customer preferences and business needs.

As a result, how Application Management Services (AMS) was delivered, also needed a fundamental overhaul.

Spurring innovations in AMS models

The outsourcing delivery model of providing AMS evolved greatly during the pandemic. With strained IT resources and reduced budgets, shared services model from YASH ended up benefiting businesses more than the traditional ways of delivery. Not only did we introduce new collaborative tools and infrastructure to support customers remotely, but we also deployed accelerators to increase operational efficiency while we were at it. With ‘pay-as-you-use’ shared services in AMS, businesses were able to reach out to YASH for any support as and when needed. Every effort spent with frequent conversations and collaboration with our customers not only accelerated purposeful actions, we also found common grounds of success through resolute responsibility, adaptability, and planning for resiliency. As a result, IT teams were able to free themselves from the frustrating tasks of application management in-house and focus on business growth and innovation. With new remote models of deployment, McKinney’s’ research shows companies were able to move 40 times more quickly than they thought was possible before the pandemic[1].   

Continued transformation for future-proofed enterprises

We believe that even in disruptive times to come, one fact that will remain unchanged will be ‘our success lies in our customer’s success’. Gone are the days, when meeting the traditional, bare minimum Service Level Agreements (SLAs) did the trick. Today’s highly accelerated transformation requires engagements that are built on trust and transparency so that whatever may come, we continue to innovate purposefully. This is where YASH takes end-to-end responsibility for enterprise application management and ensures that they see year-on-year cost reduction, productivity gains, and value-add elements beyond cost savings being factored into the model.

If you would like to know how YASH AMS offerings can help your business pivot with purpose, be sure to check out our services here.

• AMS
• COVID-19
• NextGen AMS