Khaled Mokhtar Written by Khaled Mokhtar

One of the most important strategy pillars in 2019 and early 2020 was Digital Transformation. Companies were already having rigid and actionable plans digitizing all their sectors. Projects were being in action step by step to fully transform operations & businesses into digital platforms by 2022 to 2025. Such plans tackled all business aspects from planning & design, digitization of internal processes and moving all operations into e-services and platforms.

Starting March 2020, a very un-planned outbreak took place, grounding airplanes and closing airports, forcing billions of people and millions of companies to stay home and not being able to go to their designated premises. That time, CTOs and decision makers were forced to accelerate their existing digital transformation plans, making sure their own employees can access all internal systems remotely, ensuring infrastructure capabilities being scaled to adhere with the expanded number of employees using remote services. Moreover, ensuring projects deliverables remain on time, and most importantly business operations and services to continue as usual.

Many companies and sectors were already at full power when the outbreak took place, nothing affected as they already had the appetite for digital transformation and business continue to grow accordingly. Moving to Q3 in 2020 with majority of companies transferring into digital services, rapidly upscaling their own employees and customers skills to cope with the new norm. New challenges taking places and new questions are being asked: What’s next? While the world has already experimented fully digital services, are getting back to the old normal is an option now? What will happen to all expansions took place in connectivity, infrastructure, storage and computational power to adjust with the current situation after COVID-19 situation settle down? What are the plans after the digital transformation spike took over? Are we moving back to physical transactions and rolling back what we already achieved in 3 months? Shall we continue with transformation and digitization?

The coming dilemma will be slowing down digital services and getting back to physical transactions. Allowing lots of digital services to get back to the old-style world. The good news lots of companies and enterprise were strong enough to cope with that phase, bad news is the effect of such phase will remain for a while.

One more great aspect that people around the world are more familiar with digital services than ever before. Technology achieved great advancement for the sake of humanity in 2020, bringing people closer together and contributing in saving thousands of lives, business and jobs all over the world.