As Covid-19 originating from Wuhan China now spreads across the world, causing a pandemic worldwide. China has mitigated the spread to a significant extent and profiled people at risk by mustering resources at its disposal and deploying the latest technology. Countries are beginning to implement measures to reduce social contact with stay at home measures for office workers.
Technology as an Enabler
Technology becomes a key enabler for the world to stay connected particularly at work. Holding meetings via Zoom is becoming a norm and social distancing is well practised in many countries. Technology even play a bigger role in chatbots, robots, telemedicine and big data to help to help gather information, reassure the population, treat patients, make a diagnosis or even prepare future vaccines.
While the first instance of Covid-19 may sound morbid from the news of death, economies derailed and factories shunted, it presented an opportunity for us to relook into our current practises to do better in many aspects. It helps us rethink how we can make use of technology to present real time data of the impact of coronavirus from a country, to make use of data to see how doctors can see patients from telemedicine service, to create app to monitor high risk areas to avoid coming into contact with covid suspects.
Chinese government partnered with tech giants Alibaba and Tencent to develop a color-coded health rating system that is tracking millions of people on daily basis. The smartphone app assigns three colors to people — green, yellow or red — on the basis of their travel and medical histories. Only those people who have been given a green color code are allowed in public spheres after using the designated QR code at metro stations, offices, stations. This allows the mitigation of spread of the virus from people who are higher at risk.
Winston Churchhill once said to never waste a crisis, and if any good can come from the current disease outbreak, it could be that it served as a critical warning that leads to be better prepared in the future. While the focus today is to provide short-term measures to mitigate the outbreak and contain the impact on the global economy, it provides an opportunity to think how we can become stronger to withstand future outbreaks.
Digital Technology
We need to rethink the way we work with the availability of digital technologies. For example EuroAccident which is one of the key players on the Swedish insurance market performed a digital transformation with a comprehensive mobile solution. Or even patient web portal that allows patients to receive vital and up-to-the-minute health advice. Remote monitoring systems can reduce unnecessary hospitalisations and make preventive care more effective. For countries with overstretched healthcare systems, such technologies will be a boon to deal with future health emergencies.
In Israel, 12 quarantined patients were screened via telemedicine by Sheba Medical Center. Remote monitoring of treatment protocols, medical examinations without the presence of medical staff and a robot remotely controlled by doctors (with screen, camera and medical equipment) were deployed on site. While in Copenhagen, the Health Tech Hub uses the broadcast and sharing power of digital. It has just launched a worldwide call for solutions. The idea is to make use of crowdsourcing to identify the best available solutions and to share them online after validation.
Flexible Working
For companies, there is an increasing trend of flexible employment such that the need for custom software development becomes more important to help a mobile team stay on track of business objective and progress to achieve operational success. Having an outsourcing team to build a customised software helps to save cash flows on potentially the huge capex investments on internal hiring and investing in training as well as additional office space and supplies.
Considering all organizational aspects, planning stages, and development, with outsourcing one can save up more than half of the necessary time on average compared to in-house development. In addition, outsourcing offers access to global professionals and latest technology without spending the incremental efforts to source for them and build from scratch. This in turn free up time to focus on core business to ensure that strategic goals are well taken care of. This is especially true to have a nimble team to stay afloat in a pandemic situation like Covid-19.
Interconnected Supply Chains
It may be a good time to rethink how interconnected our economy as the coronavirus has exposed the vulnerability of supply chains. Companies are now shifting from offering products to services and retaining control of key natural resources.
Philips Lighting’s shift from selling light bulbs to offering lighting-as-a-service. In so doing, customers save money by paying only for the light they use, while ditching the hassle of burnt-out bulb replacement and disposal as well as navigating system upgrades. More important, Philips retains control of its products, making it easier to reclaim valuable materials, while maintaining an ongoing customer relationship. Such performance economy would require precise software development to measure the hours of light Philips sell to all customers at large and outsourcing the development to the right digital transformation consultancy to generate impactful solutions with the right talent is crucial for Philips success.
New Strategies to Ride out the Crisis
For many companies, this can be a fundamental shift. Companies are starting to see value in providing products-as-a-service through rental, leasing, pay-per-use and pay-per-service (such as Philips) models for items instead of the old consumeristic way of purchase and disposed. To build such a circular economy is not difficult with the right model and digital technology and software available to track the usage of rental, leasing, pay-per-use and pay-per-service becomes the key to success. While the current Covid-19 crisis can be frightening, it will eventually pass. To prepare companies for a better and more resilience business future would be to start with the right model and taking advantage of the downtime to invest in software development would be key to success during epidemic in 2020.
Are you ready to ride out this pandemic and take on the new wave of digital transformation in the circular economy?