The first three quarters of the year 2020 have been marked by the continuous struggle of businesses to grapple with means to address the unprecedented disruption posed by the pandemic. One integral factor that has created a clear divide amongst companies is digital transformation.  Companies with existing digital models and platforms have been able to mitigate the crisis significantly better than their counterparts.

The transition to contactless and remote working along with network and security challenges needed an emergency intervention. The fact that a relatively mature digital company fared better in such circumstances comes as no surprise. However, an immutable truth is that the pandemic has served as a digital accelerator against the gradual incremental digital adaptation in the pre-COVID era.

Transformations in the New Normal

Although the transformation is continuous and will adapt to the raging circumstances of the pandemic, there are a few areas that have witnessed significant transformations in the past three quarters:

Digital & Reskilling: The pandemic has provided a dual opportunity for the organization to focus on building a digitally skilled workforce and the workforce to leverage this downtime for upskilling. This digitally relevant workforce will serve as a competitive edge for businesses to sustain and grow in the market.

Hybrid Workspaces: There is an ongoing debate on the effectiveness of remote working and working from office. One thing that can be stated with certainty is the pre-COVID era model will no longer be sustainable. Several flexible working models exist that blend elements of both remote and in-office working. Businesses, per their requirements and construct, can align to different ratios of this hybrid workspace model.

Digital Platforms and Processes: This forms the foundation of any digital decision. Whether it’s skilling or remote working, the experience, round-the-clock availability with consistency and zero errors can only be achieved through digital platforms. The pandemic has sparked these trends of extensive migration to the cloud, digital collaborative platforms, and intelligent processes.

Automation and BOTs: The existence of automation and BOTs isn’t something new. However, the pandemic has clearly highlighted the limited dependency that the business can have on personnel. This has certainly nudged businesses to revisit existing processes and implement cost-effective, scalable automated solutions as a replacement for manual processes.

Wipro’s take on Digital Transformation

Wipro’s robust digital footprint enabled it to seamlessly transition to over 98% of its workforce working from home without any significant effect on customer experience. As a trusted partner, Wipro has played an instrumental role in enabling its customers’ seamless transition to a remote working model without any concerns of security and risks. As a forward-looking company, Wipro has taken definitive steps to emerge stronger from this crisis. This requires Wipro Delivery to revisit and revamp their functions with digital capabilities to drive the transformation from the core.

Wipro has come up with a scalable, structured skilling approach consisting of micro learning, gamified trainings with credit points, hands-on assignments, SMEs’ mentor sessions and online-proctored assessments to produce an able and skilled workforce. The number of learning hours on its revamped learning platform has shown a consistent spike in the last three quarters and the organization has an unwavering focus to sustain this learning cycle.

Wipro had enabled consistent tracking of its Work Done by BOT (WDB) even during the pre-COVID era. However, post the pandemic, there has been extended rigor on implementing automated solutions and minimizing manual intervention to the maximum possible extent. With less dependency on personnel, Wipro has continued to maintain a seamless customer experience.

In terms of its own internal processes and portals, Wipro has moved on to revamp its digital platforms and make it easily accessible to both its internal and external customers. One such example is a new-age experience platform to hire team members and partners. It has a panoply of features, including the careers site to simplify processes, augment results, and deliver a hassle-free digital experience. This platform has streamlined the Talent Acquisition function and its processes to an effective and user-friendly interface.

On the analytics and insights front, Wipro has developed an analytical and visualization tool for demand and supply essentials. It is bundled with various statistics based on demand to present the user with different dimensions and segregations to aid complete and conclusive information. The tool helps the user with a comprehensive picture of demand volume and volatility analysis across the organization and enables demand forecast based on current trends.

Wipro has also developed a tool to assure improved search and coverage for skills. This is a self-service analytical tool with details about individual employee skillsets and talent availability within the organization. It has an inherent ability to quickly transform data from various sources into actionable insights for more informed business decisions.

The above tools are a testament to strengthening of the Workforce Management function and speaks to the ease and visibility into the existing demand and supply of skills in the organization. This digital integration will pave the way for an accurate and precise demand projection along with a proactive supply management of niche skills through various levers of people supply.

Transformation for readiness and future proofing

It is quite evident that digital transformation maturity is imperative to determine the readiness of an organization to withstand uncertainties. Businesses may have varied approaches and degrees of implementation, which will determine the degree of relevance and position the business enjoys in the future market.

The earlier notion of consistent and slow efforts has been wiped off. What this pandemic has brought onto businesses is a stress test and some very quick and calculated decision-making from a thoughtful and transformative leadership. There have been great learnings for organizations in these three quarters. Now the onus lies with business as to how they leverage it to emerge as a successful entity post pandemic.

Anuj Bhalla

Senior Vice President & Global Delivery Head, Global Delivery Enablement, Wipro

Anuj is a customer-centric leader with a passion for excellence and an unrelenting focus on rapid execution. He has over two decades of experience across Business Development, Practice Development, IT Strategy, Transformation, and Pre-Sales & Delivery for verticals such as Hybrid Cloud, Open Source/OpenStack and IoT.