Erica Spinoni
Erica Spinoni (Research Analyst, European Customer Insights & Analysis)
Giulia Carosella
Giulia Carosella (European Digital Transformation Practice Lead)

Resiliency is top of mind for executives today, and it will prove to be a key factor for winning in the 2020s.

The holiday season is usually a time to pause and reflect on the year gone by. This year has been one of the toughest for more than a century, and there has been no rulebook on how we can best handle it, so we will have a lot to reflect on this year.

What is important, however, is how we react to the crisis — how we can use what we have learned from this experience to pivot and move forward. As the saying goes, “The show must go on!”

Where Are Organizations on the Road to Recovery?

In a digital world where volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) is becoming the norm, it’s clear that resilience is essential for organizations not only to survive but also to thrive.

Organizations are moving fast from crisis mode to resilient adaptation. IDC’s European IT Buyer Sentiment Survey highlights this rapid transformation, showing that from June to October the number of organizations in “full crisis mode” decreased significantly with a focus on financial and then business resilience.

Figure 1: Five Stages of Recovery

IDC-Five Stages of Recovery

Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are here to stay, so building a resilient enterprise will become even more crucial for European organizations’ long-term success.

Business resilience vs IT resilience

Before COVID-19 there were two perspectives on resilience. From a line-of-business perspective, business resilience means being able to respond to business disruptions, restore business operations quickly, and maintain the organization’s core sense of purpose. From an IT perspective, IT resilience means maintaining acceptable service levels through, and beyond, severe disruptions to IT systems.

The pandemic made it clear, however, that these perspectives are two sides of the same coin, and that they should be merged into a single, more comprehensive resilience definition. IDC defines this as digital resiliency.

Figure 2: The Journey to Digital Resiliency

The Journey to Digital Resiliency IDC

What is Digital Resiliency?

IDC defines a digitally resilient organization as one that rapidly adapts to business disruptions, leverages digital capabilities to maintain continuous business operations, and quickly adjusts to take advantage of changed conditions and capture new opportunities.

What does IDC’s new Digital Resiliency Index provide?

IDC’s new Digital Resiliency Index enables enterprises to track the extent to which their technology investments and those of their business customers, competitors, and partners are shifting toward building this notion of digital resiliency.

The index aims to provide a composite view of digital resiliency among organizations worldwide and monitor investment changes to predict future tech investment rates and priorities. It covers two areas — digital core investments and digital innovation investments — and together they create the Digital Resiliency Investment Index.

Figure 3: Elements of the IDC Digital Investment Resiliency Index

IDC Digital Investment Resiliency Index

The index also seeks to track how investments vary over time based on changing conditions. These investments fall into three categories:

  1. Core investments: focusing on maintaining business operations in the face of a VUCA market
  2. Adaptation investments: moving quickly to take advantage of changing conditions
  3. Acceleration investments: investing to build new capabilities to capture new market opportunities to drive growth

Investments in these areas aren’t simply “good ideas” for future plans. Major enterprises are already making investments across all these categories:

  • Core investments. Barilla, a leading Italian food producer, developed and launched in less than two weeks an app dedicated to its workforce.

Amid the return-to-work chaos, especially with tracking presence and the use of common spaces and offices, the MyBarillaSpace app helped to restart business and office activities in compliance with new health and safety rules. The app, available on any  device, enables workers to book desks, canteen tables, and the dressing room — ensuring social distancing and minimizing contact with co-workers.

  • Adapting. Norwegian elearning platform Kahoot is capitalizing on the surge in usage in the past nine months. The platform was already used for education purposes by schools and businesses, and Kahoot has extended and strengthened the business-centric offering to attract even more business customers.
  • Accelerating. B. Braun, a leading German medical and pharmaceutical device manufacturer, is working on a unified cloud platform to streamline hospital workflows and process management, aiming to reduce costs and improve patient safety.

The initiative is led by Aesculap, the B. Braun division that brings innovation to surgical instruments and optimizes sterile goods management. By tracking every instrument and its usage and leveraging data from multiple sources and tools, the platform will free hospitals and clinics of troubleshooting in surgery equipment, enabling them to focus more on their critical mission — patients’ health.

Steps to Build a Digital Resilient Organisation

As we said earlier, “The show must go on!”, and now is the time to act decisively by focusing on two simple things:

  1. Begin your journey to digital resiliency — see IDC’s October 2020 Digital Resiliency Investment Index
  2. Think about how to move forward — join IDC’s Tom Meyer and Phil Carter, with an esteemed panel of IDC analysts and external guests, on December 10, 2020, at 2:00 GMT to discuss the IDC FutureScape 2021 — IDC Europe’s 10 Prediction to Create a Sustainable Digital Economy in 2021 and Beyond.
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