The good news about the coronavirus pandemic is that it has arrived in the 21st century. It is hard to imagine what the response to this crisis would have been, for example, two centuries ago. Home lockdown in March and April served to lower hospital pressure levels, but how would it have been possible to work from home in a world without the internet?
Luckily, we live in a digitalised society, and the next step is to address the economic recovery from the same place that has allowed us to mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic: the Internet. Businesses must undertake a structural process of digitalisation. How? Five areas must be the focus of investment in digitalisation in the face of economic recovery.
Everything to the cloud
The first of these areas is the Cloud, a platform that has become essential for joint access to documents, enabling collaborative work. This tool reduces the space occupied by documents on computers, and allows the entire workforce to have access to all relevant documents. This trend is set to grow, with 17% of companies planning to move customer relationship management (CRM) and human resources to the cloud by next year.
It is also necessary to invest in the area of presence and reinforcement online sales channels. Due to confinement, online consumption is here to stay,digital shopping in Spain has increased by 23% this year compared to the previous year.
To cope with this technological change, a digital culture and training in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will be essential. The company’s employees must experience a change in business culture towards digital. For this, techniques such as storytelling and endomarketing will be useful. It is important that employees develop new digital skills and change their behaviour.
The importance of avoiding risks
In this context of uncertainty, companies must reduce risks by investing in cyber security. The rise of the online channel and online work has been accompanied by an increase in cyber-attacks. In the first quarter of 2020, there has been a 40% increase in cyber attacks worldwide. As a result, 55% of executives plan to increase their cybersecurity budgets.
Last but not least, companies must increase their investment in digital administration, such as electronic invoices, digital signatures, etc. These are terms that already exist, but have become more present in the Spanish collective imagination as a result of the pandemic and the need to carry out many procedures over the internet.
The Spanish business fabric must look to the digital world for the necessary impetus to face an economic recovery that will be more difficult than those that took place after other crises. It will not be alone in this task. A few months ago, the government presented the Plan for the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience of the Spanish Economy, on which the 72 billion euros of European funds will be spent. Of these, some 23 billion will be earmarked for the digitalisation of the Spanish economy. The public and private sectors agree that the future lies in “going digital or dying”.
Source: Dir&Ge
