When examining the impact of the pandemic’s disruption, our benchmark question to assess the true impact of COVID-19 on the organizations was to examine to what extent actual revenues exceeded or fell short of planned targets.
Unsurprisingly, slightly over 70% of organizations reported having been impacted negatively against planned revenues for 2020. As can be seen by the distribution of responses in Figure 1, only 16% reported an increase in revenue, with only a very small tail of 3.2% experiencing increases over 25% relative to plan.
Overall, organizations reported an average decrease in revenue of -14.8%, with very little variability between industries with Healthcare & Transportation at -13%, Manufacturing at -15.6% and Retail understandably coming in slightly lower at -17%.
When looking at the data within the context of comparing companies employing outsourced Managed Mobile Services (MMS) and those that did not, a rather interesting insight becomes clear: 15.2% of respondents using MMS continued to operate normally with no impact from COVID-19 on revenue, whereas only 9.8% of those not using MMS were able to do the same. That’s a rather significant 36% difference.
Figure 1: The Impact is Dramatic and Clear
The findings suggest the "new normal" is strongly rooted in mobile in the tactics that organizations most commonly report responding to the pandemic by:
How effective were those strategies? When extrapolating these results across those organizations whose revenues decreased, stayed the same or increased, what emerges is a profile of those who fared better in response to disruption; they invested more heavily and proportionately equal across all three strategies. See Figure 2.
Figure 2: The Relationship Between Tactics and Revenue
Fast forward to post-initial disruption and we find an overwhelming 79.0% of organizations report that they have aggressively, or slightly, accelerated their investment in mobile technologies for frontline workers in response to the COVID-19 disruption.
In an effort to understand the full context of “disruption readiness” we asked our respondents to indicate on a scale of 1 to 10 their organizations ability to pivot successfully (i.e. continue operations). Overall, the reported ability of organizations to pivot to the new norm was high, at an average rating of 7 out of 10, with almost 49% selecting an 8 or higher. That served as our dividing line, prompting us to ask those responding 8 and above what was most important in enabling their organization to adapt and those responding 7 and below what were the barriers to success.
We further broke the responses down by categories of respondents, and one classification emerges as being particularly predictive of organizational ability to adapt and pivot – Innovators. Unsurprisingly, there is a marked difference between Innovators and other tech maturity levels regarding their ability to adapt and successfully continue operations. See Figure 3.
Figure 3: Ranking Enterprises’ Ability to Pivot
What factors enabled organizations to adapt so well in the pandemic? Strong, flexible IT infrastructures separated the organizations that pivoted the most successfully in response to COVID-19 from those that were worse off. Among those claiming high levels of COVID-19 readiness and agility, they name a strong IT infrastructure as the most important enabling factor. Similarly, besides the unprecedented nature of COVID-19's disruption, businesses named the lack of a flexible technology infrastructure as their top barrier in responding more quickly overall.
On the same question of “barriers to response,” an interesting divergence between the Healthcare industry and all others emerges. Barriers to responsiveness in Healthcare were related to flexibility and scale of their IT teams, whereas all other industries cited poor communication and lack of technology infrastructure as the predominant challenges. This is consistent with our 2020 survey, which showed Healthcare’s preference for in-house resources. This reliance on in-house resources in the wake of a pandemic appears to have left Healthcare organizations inflexible and unable to scale.
Figure 4: What Sustains or Inhibits Adaptability?
There is an obvious danger of being caught flat-footed by disruption when organizations don’t have the capability with in-house teams and infrastructure to meet rapidly shifting needs. It is crucial to engage in partnerships that can help sustain the flexibility needed to pivot during widespread disruption.
The new reality ultimately means doing more to prepare for disruptions by prioritizing flexibility when allocating technology, organizational processes and resources. Enabling operational flexibility through effective mobile technology engagement is the difference maker in this new landscape, and businesses must adjust their spending and strategic priorities accordingly. As we established (see Figure 2), there is an ongoing and widespread shift to enabling working from home across the enterprise. This requires a different approach to managing IT infrastructure, IT resources and other factors that can easily become bottlenecks for your enterprise if not handled carefully. It’s critical to understand that your business cannot achieve this flexibility without the right technology for your frontline workers.
Why? Because your frontline workers define your customer experience – and by extension, your brand.
Healthcare:
Manufacturing, Retail and Transportation & Logistics:
