COVID-19 and the Digital Transformation

In times of COVID-19 and all the accompanying restrictions, many companies have increased remote working for its employees, not because they wanted to, but because they had to: it's a survival issue. In the wake of the pandemic, an organisation's ability to adapt quickly to supply chain disruptions, time to market pressures and rapidly changing customer expectations has become critical.

Initially this process only required some strengthened cyber security to enable users to remotely log on to the company network safely. Since then, however, many companies have realised that homeworking, is not only as productive as working from the office, it also provides a number of additional benefits to the company. This means, that while you are already working on making remote access safe, you can also look further at the Digital Transformation.

Digital Transformation is not just about using digital technologies, it is the combination of using your existing technologies, tools and processes and improving them. This involves, for example, automating previously manual steps, upgrading to newer technologies, adding additional integrations to improve turnaround times, gaining efficiencies in terms of time, revenue and profitability. This allows you to make improvements to the way you do business, while still continuing to maintain and follow your existing processes and workflows. According to Extended Monaco, "businesses which embark on a digital transition increase turnover by 10% and margins by 25%." and "95% of OECD countries are focusing on digital as a priority for growth and recovery. France recently announced that €7 billion of its recovery plan will be devoted to digital technology, and has developed a digital investment loan programme for businesses and training cheques for small and medium-sized enterprises."

The Digital Transformation process requires you to not only have a strategy for how to improve your processes but also technical expertise to allow you to implement those changes; your IT team needs to know how to make your environment safe and keep it that way and your users need to know how to deal with the new situation. This is done easiest through clear, concise and accurate documentation that is always available to both groups.

• Your IT team has now probably worked its way through all the necessary steps to make access and your network safe but, most probably, they haven't written any documentation about it, because engineers don't like writing documentation! But at sometime changes will need to be made and the team will need to work through the process again in order to figure out how they did it. New team members might be coming on board and need to learn about how your environment set up and all your related procedures. Of course, they can be talked through it and take notes, but in both these situations clear, concise and accurate documentation about your environment and how to maintain it will save much time and hassle to all parties involved.
• Staff who have been working remotely for a while might have become used to the new procedures, but there are probably still support calls when something doesn't work as expected or connections fail. This is especially true for tasks that are performed infrequently, where the procedures aren't necessarily quickly committed to memory. Clear and accurate documentation that is always available and regularly updated will help your staff deal with the new procedures for accessing the network, its resources and performing their tasks remotely, such as attending online meetings.
• Members of different departments are likely to need different tools and processes to perform their tasks and not everyone wants to work through the entire remote working documentation, they probably want only the bits which are relevant to them. Using the modern documentation tools and a master document, I can produce individual guides for different employee groups with only the bits they need.

Depending on your business sector I am finding that regulators are increasingly focussing on the way companies are providing remote access for their staff. As discussed above this is a great opportunity for companies, but it brings with it increased cyber security challenges and regulators need to be confident that firms are not putting their business at risk because of it. Documentation of your processes will be extremely helpful in this regard.

I am a technical writing specialist and I can accompany you in this process and provide you with all the required documentation.

Find out more about my technical documentation offer