Among the many lessons to be learned from the COVID crisis, the one that stands out the most is the American workforce’s resilience.

One primary concern expressed by technology leaders and many stakeholders around digital transformation has been the impact these changes would have on their users’ ability to perform their tasks while adapting to new technologies. This is especially true when users are being introduced to platforms like Salesforce, Dynamics, O365, Teams, Slack, and many more.

Context Is Everything

The digital transformation approach has always been slow and steady. But while prudent, this approach can take a 3-month project and devolve it into a 3-year ordeal with frustrated stakeholders, staff, and an overworked technology team. I’ve spoken to countless CxO’s for whom the term digital transformation is a four-letter word.

The last year has shown that a narrowly scoped outcome with senior leadership’s unquestioning commitment is critical for a timely and successful digital transformation. And while everyone involved in a digital transformation project will confirm that their project has identified outcomes and complete commitment from the C suite, most of those projects have lacked the contextualization that COVID has provided; swim, or you will certainly sink.

Lessons Learned

Organizations need to start treating the lessons learned process as critical to their long-term success. Too often, this necessary process is often outright discarded to get to more “critical” work, or it is greatly declawed by not having any executive sponsor driving for actionable data. Organizations that set lessons learned from COVID as a primary objective for their organizations stand to gain a competitive advantage over those that don’t take this process seriously.

Adoption = Success

Finally, we cannot forget about the backbone of any organization, its people. On-going training programs are critical, but to drive success in any digital transformation project will require having partners and vendors with mature customer success programs that will help drive user adoption of the new tools. So when selecting a platform or a managed service provider, it is imperative that along with the tools and services, you have a good understanding of how their customer success program works and exactly how it will deliver value to your organization. And a sign of a mature program is one that continuously helps users with adoption.

On-The-Fly

After months of uncertainty and dire news reports, the American workforce has managed to deliver and exceed its productivity in many areas. I believe this is because leadership across organizations raised expectations for their staffs and their staffs answered the calls.

In 2020, for many organizations, the digital transformation happened on-the-fly, and as a result, they will be better positioned for the future. But organizations need to optimize these transformations into long-term cultural values that will allow them to build on the lessons learned and prepare them for the next unforeseen challenge. 

COVID came out of nowhere, and its disruption will be felt for years to come, but our workforce, while shaken, was not deterred, and that is an outcome that should provide us all with optimism for our future.