The Harvard Business Review have released a new report finding the digital transformation accelerated by the pandemic and remote working is here to stay with organisations seeing digital acceleration as a permanent part of their future plans.
As corporate and work environments continue to evolve, digital acceleration spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic has only heightened expectations about the speed and effectiveness of that evolution. That pandemic-related digital acceleration was necessary to secure immediate economic survival, but it ended up doing something more—setting a new normal in terms of organizational speed. So, while the original intention was to quickly enable remote work, organizations now see digital acceleration as a more permanent part of the effort to realize business outcomes.
Eighty-six percent of the 326 business executives across different functions surveyed by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services in April 2021 say their organization had accelerated its digital transformation during the pandemic. Of those 279 executives who responded that way, 91% plan to maintain the heightened pace of digital transformation post–Covid-19—or to move even faster—speaking to just how permanent they view this shift in speed to be.