Speed is the New Normal

The covid crisis has hit many businesses hard, and many of them are stumped as to how to respond. For the financial sector, there is pain, but the show has not stopped. I had assumed that the lockdown would cause some amount of pausing to look at the emerging scenario in light of the business uncertainties. However, t he i ndust r y appears to have taken a very upbeat stance. Every financial organization I talk to is gearing up for a new kind of ‘achche din’ coming soon. Their preparations include accelerated digital transformation, core technology upgradation, product innovation, robust business continuity plans, and much more. There are several amazing things I see happening in the BFSI sector. First, it did not trip, it did not lose its balance with the lockdown. So many BFSI organizations quickly changed the working mode to work from home within days. Some anticipated it coming and started the shift even before the lockdown was announced. Many have expressed their gratitude to their IT partners for providing amazing support to keep business running non-stop. Secondly, with diminishing revenues, most businesses want to upgrade to the next digital and technological level and are asking their IT and IT Security teams to deliver results in double quick time. CIOs, CTOs and CISOs tell me that their workload has increased from 50% to 200%. Putting in a 10-12 hour work day has become the norm. These people have shown amazing agility to achieve the impossible. Technical requirements that took weeks to document were done in days. Same for legal processes. Vendor negotiations too crashed from months to days. In general, anything that was done in months, was being done in weeks, and sometimes in days. The pace at which the organization is transforming, a year’s worth of work is being done in a quarter. One can safely say that in today’s scenario, ‘quarter is the new year’.