Information management strategies should be at the centre of efforts to move organisations beyond the COVID-19 crisis, to thrive once more. This is according to Julie Tregurtha, regional VP of sales for Africa at OpenText, who was speaking at the OpenText Thrive Once More webinar hosted in partnership with ITWeb this week.
“The true pioneers of the next normal are those moving beyond reactive measures and starting to use this opportunity to build out strategies to emerge as a stronger organisation in future,” Tregurtha said. “It’s not the time to sit and do nothing, it is definitely time to act.”
Tregurtha said global analysts were recommending four priorities to enable businesses to move beyond the crisis and position themselves for growth. These, she said, were:
- Containing costs while maximising productivity, by consolidating key technologies, reviewing assets, and prioritising digital investments that reduce costs and risks.
- Accelerating key transformation initiatives in areas that would deliver measurable impact, such as simplifying customer experience and strengthening security, to capitalise on new business models and opportunities with greater agility.
- Engaging and protecting the customer base, moving to accelerate digital initiatives that simplify and strengthen relationships; and then leveraging those deeper relationships to improve results from sales, procurement and the partner ecosystem.
- Enabling an effective work environment by prioritising IT initiatives that maximise workforce productivity under all conditions.
However, an integrated information management strategy had to span these efforts, she said.
“My top advice to businesses now is to have an information management strategy – it’s an end to end discipline to treat information as the valuable asset that it should be,” she said. “A solid information management strategy is what will give organisations a competitive advantage going forward.”
It’s not the time to sit and do nothing, it is definitely time to act.
Julie Tregurtha, OpenText
Corlia van Zyl, group manager of ICT at Distell, said her organisation was aligned with these priorities, and had moved to accelerate certain IT projects and delay others when the pandemic struck. The company had focused on systems to enable customers and stakeholders; as well as to improve the work from anywhere environment, she said.
“We reprioritised our initiatives to focus on what would add the most value, and I’m glad we didn’t take our foot off the pedal during lockdown.” Enhanced information management systems had been one of the organisation’s focus areas, Van Zyl said: “Working from home revealed how paper based we were.”
She added that forward looking approaches also needed more than just technology: “We as IT leaders shouldn’t just focus on the technology, but also on the people. We need to equip IT in terms of their culture and behaviour to enable agility, foresight, resilience, learning and adaptability.”
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