Flexibility, adaptability are key in the age of mass digitalisation

THE year 2020 marked a significant, lasting transformation that redefined how we do everything from administering healthcare and providing education, to conducting e-trades.

These changes were enabled by digitalisation and the increasingly significant role that data plays across countries and industries - and Singapore was no exception. The country's innovative use of technology for managing the spread of Covid-19 was also recognised by Gartner, and its TraceTogether app was awarded the 2020 Government Eye on Innovation award.

While 2020 is behind us, the "digitalisation of everything" will continue to shape the business and technology landscape, playing out in four core ways over the next 12 months.

• Hybrid and hyper-converged: Organisations will increasingly rely on hybrid and hyper-converged technologies that enable them to operate more efficiently and dedicate more resources to being resilient and serving their customers in new ways as the environment changes.
• Disintermediation and decentralisation: Last year taught us the importance of self-reliance, as we witnessed the global stalling and, in some cases failure, of supply chains, medical and educational systems.

In 2021, we cannot be complacent even as we look to emerge from our collective "quarantine" expecting a return to normalcy. What we may step into is freedom of movement with a healthy dose of optionality, mass personalisation and 24x7 availability. With less reliance on travel and more immediate connection to local communities, people will expect to be known, accommodated, and treated as essential to the businesses with which they transact. For larger institutions, this will only be possible through an increasing reliance on machine learning and artificial intelligence delivered at and to the edge.

• Sanctuary and safety: Some of us may want shorter commutes, more flexible work hours and less business travel in general. We will continue to spend more time with children and pets, discovering new hobbies, as well as resting and finding ways to vacation, even if in our home cities.

When we do go into offices or schools in person, we will need more personal space, and more time for individual breaks than before. Helping people to be comfortable as they leave the relative sanctuary of their homes will require unprecedented access to validated health and safety data from our employers, local and regional governments, and educational institutions.

• Agility and adaptability: As Singapore and the rest of the Asia-Pacific region begin to look beyond the Covid-19 pandemic, we will start to see a slow and staggered return to physical workspaces. But it will be an uneven recovery. Across the APJ region and further afield, our countries and economies are so interconnected. Even if one country's recovery is going well, until the major international players return to an even keel, the global uncertainty will continue.

While Singapore's economic recovery has been moderate, we still have a long way to go. The economy shrank 3.8 per cent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2020, an improvement from the 5.6 per cent decline seen in the previous quarter. Further recovery will be dependent on the country's coronavirus infection rates and the ability of its businesses and workers to pivot and adapt to the Covid-19 world.

Naturally, this will create a scattered return to growth. To deal with this, organisations will need the agility to shift their strategies and spending on a quarter-by-quarter basis to ensure they can react to the macro situation. The appetite for traditional, large capitalised IT spend will be replaced with just-in-time agility.

A traditional approach to technology does not allow this agility. Instead, enterprises and governments will look to subscription models over longer-term contracts or lock-ins, to ensure they have the ability to shift and innovate in the face of uncertainty. A pay-as-you-grow model which encourages "fail fast" strategies will balance the imperatives to innovate with the need to reduce exposure.

If there is one thing organisations should take from 2020 and apply to their strategies this year, it is this: Disruptive change is inevitable. Flexibility and adaptability need to be core to business thinking as we enter the age of mass digitalisation.

• The writer is Singapore Country Manager of Nutanix