In February, a client shared their three-year digital strategy. It was well crafted with a phased approach, careful governance and had executive alignment. By April, only three months later, they had implemented the most tansformative elements. Not because the strategy was brilliant. Because a pandemic made it non-optional.
Necessity Beats Strategy
We’ve spent years trying to convince organizations to adopt remote collaboration tools, digitize customer interactions, and move workloads to the cloud. Change management programs. Business cases. Pilot projects. Steering committees. And then, in a matter of weeks, the entire world just… did it.
The VP who insisted that his team couldn’t possibly work remotely? Remote. The operations group that swore their processes required in-person sign-offs? Digital. The executive committee that needed eighteen months to evaluate collaboration platforms? Everyone’s on Teams. Or Zoom. Or both, somehow, at the same time. It turns out the barrier to digital adoption was never technology. It was permission.
(any similarity to the actual COVID virus is purely coincidental)
What We Actually Learned
There’s a temptation to celebrate this as validation. See? We told you digital was important! But that misses something more interesting. What we’re seeing isn’t transformation. It’s triage. And there’s a difference.
Triage is fast, pragmatic, and focused on survival. It skips the architecture. It ignores the operating model. It duct-tapes solutions together because there’s no time to engineer them. And it kind of works, for now.
When you check in with tech leaders across several industries over the past few months, you recognize a consistent pattern emerge. In March and April, everyone was a hero. Teams spun up VPNs, deployed collaboration tools, built customer portals, and enabled digital channels at a pace that would have been unthinkable in January. The energy levels were wild. Now, in June, the adrenaline is wearing off. And what’s left is a patchwork.
The Duct Tape Inventory
The patchwork looks something like this:
- Security shortcuts that were “temporary” in March and are now sticky. VPN configurations that bypass normal controls. SaaS applications adopted without procurement or security review. Personal devices accessing production systems because there wasn’t time to provision corporate ones.
- Customer-facing digital channels that were built for speed, not scale. They work when volumes are low but buckle under real load. The UX was good enough for an emergency but isn’t good enough for a permanent channel.
- Data flowing through new paths that nobody mapped. Integrations built by whoever was available, documented in Slack threads or last night’s Grubhub napkin, resembling links of a conspiracy theory.
- People running on fumes. The same teams that pulled off miracles in March are now expected to maintain those miracles while also keeping the lights on, while also working from their kitchen table, while also homeschooling their kids.
Nobody’s talking about that last one in the strategy meetings, but it’s the one that’s going to hit hardest.
The Real Transformation Starts Now
Organizations now face a choice. We can treat the last three months as a temporary deviation and plan to go back to normal once this is over. Whenever that may be. Or, we can look at what just happened and ask: what did we learn about ourselves?
Seems to me that the organizations that will come out of this stronger are the ones asking different questions:
- Which of our emergency decisions should become permanent? Not all of them. But some of those shortcuts revealed that the original process was the problem in the first place. The sign-off that required three in-person meetings? Maybe it never needed three meetings. Maybe it never needed to be in person. So good riddance.
- Where did we break things that need to be fixed properly? The duct tape has to come off at some point. Not all at once, but deliberately, at least with clear tape revealing which shortcuts carry real risk and which ones are fine.
- What did we learn about our people? Many teams thrive with autonomy and remote work. Some struggle. The answer isn’t a blanket policy. It’s understanding what different teams need to do their best work.
- What do our customers actually want now? Customer expectations shifted overnight and they’re not shifting back. The question isn’t whether to invest in digital channels. Let’s figure which ones we stood up in a hurry may be good enough to keep.
The Roadmap after the Roadmap
Now that is looks like the pandemic isn’t going to be over anytime soon, there’s a new normal. So my client’s three year digital strategy that was cherry-picked and slapped together quickly? We’re rebuilding it. Many of the original goals still hold, but the starting point has changed completely. They’re actually further along in some areas than they expected to be in 2022. And they’ve uncovered technical and organizational debt they didn’t know they had.
The new roadmap is shorter, more modular, and more honest about what they don’t know. It has to be. If 2020 has taught us anything so far, it’s that the three-year roadmap is a fiction. The organizations that adapt aren’t the ones with the best plan; they’re the ones that can change the plan fastest.
The pandemic didn’t transform your organization. It stress-tested it. What you do with the results is the actual transformation.
Mea Culpa
In my previous post, I predicted that the term “digital transformation” would fade in the 2020s. Only to be shown how a cataclysmic event spurns transformation faster than ever imagined. Of the digital kind. There’s still a chance that I wasn’t completely off and the phrase becomes digital adaptation instead of transformation, but for now I’ll eat crow. Who knows, it might even prevent COVID.
