How digitization can be catalyst for transforming covid vaccination

Like two sides of every coin, is the pandemic with its own merit and demerit side. The unprecedented amount of destruction caused and followed by the pandemic is known and is more than evident everywhere. However, it’s now time that flip the coin and shift our focus on the approach being more holistic and optimistic. The pandemic must be looked as the most unfortunately fortunate stroke of serendipity for digitization of the country. There are no two ways about the fact that India has come a long way, for instance, 30 years ago we had only 794 institutions offering technical but today the number has exceeded 10,000. Anyhow, the bigger fact is that we still have a long, very long way to go.
We have been talking about digital transformation since many years now but of course, there have been gaps in the plan of action and execution, which were never a priority to be considered and filled. Now, the digital transformation has to happen in the name of urgency, there’s no other go.
Now, the industries must be able to assess and appraise their down digital maturity and to be able to serve customers like they genuinely care and make it customer oriented.

Let us now understand the paradigm of digitization.
It shall start with training all the employees on how to deal with what we have today instead of being pessimist about it and expecting magic to happen on its own.

1. Digitization of business process –
   Right from warehousing, logistics, delivery etc. All has to come online. Companies can probably have an inbuilt app of system with inventory reports, ERP, etc. It’s high time that investment is done in these arenas. Here, is the real growth.
2. Digitization of business model –
   Strategies vary from sector to sector, segment to segment. One must design a strategy that suits their need the best, always keeping in mind the fear of another lockdown and be prepared with a plan to deal with it.
3. Digitization of domain –
   It is lesser to do with technology and more to with the company’s approach.
4. Digitization of the organization – The people, infrastructure, future goals, prospects etc, all have to go hand in hand for a win-win situation.

The above would be possible by
1. Overhaul of operations
2. Overhaul of relationships with customers.

Anyhow, the challenge is to start from the base as post covid outbreak, a study revealed that 74% of the people prefer working from home until we are all vaccinated. This isn’t as simple as just addressing a preference, the world’s population is so unevenly distributed, here’s a shocking result of a survey conducted in the end of 2020 : 41% of the world, still does not have any access to internet. Internet stands as a building block for digitization. Then will come the investment in training, infrastructure and more. There is still so much research and development pending in some areas where we are still not aware if there is an alternative way to substitute the manual labour.

However, we may conclude that, the world looks at a hybrid model of a business, which includes more flexibility in where and when to work as a solution as of now and the covid breakout is has definitely proved to be a catalyst in the process of digital transformation!